Jordan’s king: Israel sabotaged our civilian nuclear program
In AFP interview, Abdullah II says Israeli delegations pressured potential partners to withhold support for peaceful energy project
Israel has sabotaged Jordan’s peaceful nuclear energy program, appealing to international powers to stall the project, Jordan’s King Abdullah II charged in an interview with AFP published Wednesday. The program, he stressed, was aimed at addressing the country’s growing energy needs, and especially its power-hungry water desalination plants.
“When we started going down the road of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, we approached some highly responsible countries to work with us. And pretty soon we realized that Israel was putting pressure on those countries to disrupt any cooperation with us,” Abdullah said.
The king described a situation in which Israeli delegations persuaded potential partners for Jordan’s nuclear program to withhold their support.
Jordan and Israel signed a peace treaty in 1994.
“Nuclear energy will be the cheapest reliable way to desalinate water,” the king lamented. “Jordan will go only for the most secure, latest-generation reactor.”
Energy experts in Jordan demanded that the country abandon its plans to generate atomic energy in the wake of the nuclear disaster in Japan in 2011, AFP said.
The kingdom imports nearly all of its energy, largely from Egypt.
Since its supply of natural gas from Egypt has become unstable — the pipeline leading gas to both Israel and Jordan has been attacked more than a dozen times since 2011 — Jordan has struggled to find new alternatives for its energy requirements.