Hours before border lands go back to Jordan, Israeli farmers await final word
Local leader says tenants haven’t been updated on what will happen after sites are returned to Hashemite kingdom on Sunday; hundreds of tourists visit Naharayim for farewell tours
A deal dating from Israel’s historic 1994 peace treaty with Jordan which allows Israeli farmers to lease two sites along their common border runs out Sunday, but the land’s tenants say that nobody has told them what happens next.
With the deal’s expiration only hours away, Idan Greenbaum, head of the Israeli regional council for the Jordan Valley, said Jordanian officials have informed him that as of Sunday the Naharayim site will be out of bounds. Israeli authorities, he told Army Radio on Friday, have told him nothing.
“As of this time, no Israeli official has chosen to update us,” he said.
Asked by AFP for details, the Israeli foreign ministry said “the agreement will expire on November 10th,” without elaborating.
Hundreds of Israelis visited Naharayim on Saturday for “farewell tours,” with demand so great that a new tour group was setting out every hour.
A special clause in the 1994 peace treaty between Israel and Jordan allowed Israel to retain use of Naharayim in the Jordan Valley, along with the Tzofar enclave in the southern Arava desert, for 25 years, with the understanding that the lease would be renewed as a matter of routine.
However, in October last year, Jordan’s King Abdullah said his country had notified Israel that it wants to take them back.
Last month, Israeli Foreign Ministry sources said that Jordan had agreed to an extension covering another farming season at Tzofar, lasting between five and seven months. However, Amman quickly denied the claim, saying there would be no extension of the lease on either site.
Channel 13 reported Thursday that Netanyahu’s National Security Advisor, Meir Ben-Shabbat, had met Monday in Amman with Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi who told him there would be no extension to the Naharayim and Tzofar leases.
Citing “senior sources” in Jordan, it said Safadi instead suggested that compensation be paid to the Israeli farmers for crops remaining at the sites after the handover.
Since the heady days of the 1994 treaty, which made Jordan only the second country after Egypt to make peace with Israel, relations with Amman have been strained.
Opinion polls have repeatedly found that the peace treaty with Israel is overwhelmingly opposed by Jordanians, more than half of whom are of Palestinian origin.
Naharayim, also known as the Isle of Peace, is the site of a deadly March 1997 attack in which a group of schoolgirls from Beit Shemesh were fired upon during an outing to the area. The girls and their unarmed teachers were standing on a hill above an abandoned lake in the enclave when a Jordanian soldier opened fire on them and killed seven of the schoolchildren.
Following the killings, the late King Hussein of Jordan made an unprecedented trip to each of the victims’ homes in Israel to express his personal sorrow and the grief of his nation.
In 2017, an Israeli embassy security guard in Amman killed two Jordanians. Three years earlier, an Israeli soldier at a border crossing killed a Jordanian judge he deemed a threat.
Just last month, Amman recalled its ambassador from Israel over the prolonged detention without trial in the Jewish state of two Jordanians. Israel has not commented on the reasons for their imprisonment, though Israeli media have said they were detained on suspicion of security-related offenses.
They were freed and returned to Jordan on Wednesday and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said the Jordanian ambassador would return shortly.
Officials in Israel have expressed concerns that the ending of the lease signaled a desire on Jordan’s part to effectively downgrade diplomatic ties, and many see it as a reflection of intense domestic pressure from a Jordanian public that still largely views Israel as an enemy.
But Jordan has said it was exercising its legal right in deciding not to renew the agreement and denied the move would affect the decades-old peace treaty, seeking to assuage fears in Jerusalem that ties could be downgraded.
