Israel pays price for refusing peace talks
On the backdrop of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's refusal to launch negotiations with the Palestinians, it is no wonder that Jordan decided not to renew Israel’s lease on lands near the border.
The day after Israel signed the Oslo Accord with the Palestinians, the Jordanians rushed to sign in Washington the Israeli-Jordanian Common Agenda on Sept. 14, 1993. The Oslo process had caught the Jordanians by surprise: They were taken aback and wanted to guarantee their place in the new arrangements that were emerging in the region.
The common agenda became the starting point for peace negotiations between the two states; these negotiations ended a few months later in King Hussein’s palace. Then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the Jordanian king held their discussions in the palace for many long hours into the night. The two heads of state came to arrangements regarding all the points that had remained, until then, in dispute. The peace treaty was signed on Oct. 26, 1994.
As a result of the common agenda, several representatives of localities in the Negev’s Arava region along Israel’s eastern border asked to meet with me; I was then deputy minister of foreign affairs. They explained that they had important information regarding a future peace agreement between Israel and Jordan. When I received them, I was surprised to hear their story and their request.
They told me that during the years after the signing of the Armistice Agreement between Israel and Jordan in 1949, Israeli farmers in villages and kibbutzim had moved the border signs between the two states. They had been cultivating land tracts and fields beyond the armistice line, and the Jordanians had not stopped them. The farmers said that if the peace agreement perpetuated the armistice line, they would lose their main source of income. They demanded that we make sure that the new border include the sections that they, the Israelis, had cultivated.
