Annexing the Jordan Valley Doesn’t Make Security Sense

The 1994 peace treaty between Israel and Jordan included two clauses whose security importance is as great and perhaps greater than the demilitarization of the Sinai Peninsula in the peace treaty with Egypt. These clauses turn Kahol Lavan chairman MK Benny Gantz’s intention and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s demand to annex the Jordan Valley to Israel into a tasteless joke showing a lack of national responsibility.
The first, Clause 4 of the fourth article, prohibits Jordan and Israel from signing military agreements with states or organizations hostile to the other party, or “allowing the entry, stationing and operating on their territory, or through it, of military forces … in circumstances which may adversely prejudice the security of the other Party.” In other words, based on the working assumption that the Jordanian army intends to or can threaten Israel, Israel’s real security boundary is not the Jordan River, but Jordan’s border with Iraq, Syria and Saudi Arabia, which are hundreds of kilometers away from Israel’s population centers. This clause gives Israel greater strategic depth than what the Zionist Movement ever sought in any demand since the 1919 Versailles peace conference.