Jordan Valley essential for a viable Palestinian state
US Secretary of State John Kerry should work to ensure that full sovereignty of the Jordan Valley is given to the Palestinians to ensure a future state is economically viable.
Over the past 20 years, US and international peace efforts have not yielded tangible outcomes in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As some observers put it, the peace process has only produced a “process without peace.” Yet, international intervention has caused new terms to be added to the discourse, such as the creation of a “viable Palestinian state.” Of course, the parties could spend years determining what really constitutes “viability.”
No matter how confusing the terminology of the conflict, one thing that should never confuse anyone is the centrality of the Jordan Valley to the envisioned Palestinian state. Full control of the Jordan Valley is essential not only to the survival of a Palestinian state but also to relieving the United States and other donor countries from financially supporting the “viable state” forever. The Jordan Valley, in simple words, is the mechanism that would ensure the economic independence of the future viable Palestinian state.
Controlled by Israel since the 1967 war, the Jordan Valley accounts for more than a quarter of the total area of the West Bank—nearly 1,500 square miles. Currently, there are 57,000 Palestinians living there. Israel intensified its settlement activities in the Jordan Valley during the beginning of the peace process in the early 1990s. The number of settlements in the Jordan Valley and the northern Dead Sea area has risen to 39, housing more than 10,000 settlers. In 2003, then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon announced that the Jordan Valley would be separated from the West Bank by the construction of a 186-mile wall. In previous peace negotiations, Israel has referenced security concerns to justify its control of the Jordan Valley. This past December, again using security justifications, Israel for the first time revealed a plan for permanently keeping the territory when the Ministerial Committee for Legislation passed “a bill to annex the Jewish settlements in the Jordan Valley to Israel and apply Israeli law to them.”
While preparing his Framework Agreement for Palestinian and Israeli negotiators, US Secretary of State John Kerry should be very careful to not fall into the security trap that Israeli governments have constantly used to justify further grabbing of Palestinian land, thus undermining the prospects of a fair settlement of this conflict. No one knows the security value of the Jordan Valley more than the former chief of Mossad, Meir Daghan, who last month acknowledged publicly that control over the Jordan Valley is not essential for Israel’s security. He called the demand by Israeli leaders to maintain control of the Jordan Valley to defend its eastern frontier a “manipulative use of security issues” for political ends. “There is no longer an Iraqi army,” he said. “There is no eastern front. There is peace with Jordan. I don’t like the talk that the Jordan Valley is critical for Israel’s security.”
