Naharayim gate closed as area lost to Jordan
Thousands flock to site as Jerusalem fails to convince Amman to extend 25-year agreement
IDF soldiers closed the metal yellow gate to Naharayim’s Island of Peace for the last time on Saturday – an act that symbolically marked Israel’s loss of that territory, as well as land at Tzofar, to neighboring Jordan.
The Hashemite Kingdom on Sunday plans to terminate a special 25-year annex in the 1994 Israeli-Jordanian peace agreement which granted Israelis access to the land, even though it was under Jordanian sovereignty. Under the terms of the peace deal, Jordan could end or extend the annex arrangement after 25 years.
It’s a move that comes about on the Hebrew anniversary of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, the prime minister who signed the 1994 agreement with former Jordanian King Hussein.
“This is a very painful day,” Emek Hayarden Regional Council head Idan Grinbaum said Saturday, just before the gate clanged shut as the sun set behind it.
“That was a symbolic and tough moment,” Grinbaum said as he discussed the gate’s closure with The Jerusalem Post several hours later. Grinbaum is a native of Kibbutz Ashdot Ya’acov, whose members have farmed land in Naharayim since the 1920s. He has been one of the public faces of the campaign to save Naharayim.
Blue and White MK Zvi Hauser submitted a request for an urgent Knesset debate on the failure of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to sway Jordan to extend the agreement.
Jordan had given Israel a year’s advance notice that it had no plans to continue granting Israelis access to Tzofar and Naharayim. During most of that year, Israel has weathered two election campaigns and has been in the hands of a caretaker government.
“The cancellation of an arrangement that has been in place for 25 consecutive years is detrimental to peace and to its fruits, as well as to the Israeli public’s confidence with regard to future plans to maintain daily neighborly relations based on mutual respect,” Hauser said.
Democratic Union head MK Nitzan Horowitz, who visited Naharayim, charged that Netanyahu had squandered
Jordanian goodwill and had failed to advance ties with the Hashemite Kingdom and as a result, Naharayim and Tzofar were lost.
The two tracts of land had been a sticking point in the 1994 agreement. The dispute was resolved when it was agreed that the lands would be under Jordanian sovereignty, but that farmers from Moshav Tzofar could lease the land and continue to farm.
The Naharayim land, also known as the Island of Peace, is privately owned by Israelis and the Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael-Jewish National Fund. Israelis were allowed to farm the land and to tour the site, which has historical Zionist significance.
The area’s first hydro-electric plan was opened at Naharayim by Russian Jewish immigrant Pinhas Rutenberg. Golda Meir secretly met former Jordanian King Abdullah I in Naharayim in 1947. In 1997, seven Israeli girls, ages 13 and 14, were killed by a Jordanian soldier at the site. The memorial to the girls, at the edge of the site, will remain in Israel hands.
Over the weekend, thousands of Israelis flocked to Naharayim to visit the land that borders the two countries and is located a short distance away from the Lake Kinneret (the Sea of Galilee), where the Jordan and Yarmuk Rivers meet.
Grinbaum said that he and a few other members from Kibbutz Ashdot Ya’acov went on the last tour of the island Saturday and were among the last few people to walk through the gate before it closed.
“I spoke with the media there [and told them] this is a very sad and emotional moment for all of us, especially for the members of Kibbutz Ashdot Ya’acov, which ended more than 70 years of work on this land in the Island of Peace,” he said. “Blood was shed to keep this land. What makes it even harder is the fact that no one – no official representative from the Israeli government – found a way, today or earlier, to say to the members of Ashdot Ya’acov, ‘Folks, thank you very much. You did a very good job keeping the land for the State of Israel, but now it is time to say goodbye.’”
“No one found the time to look at them in the eye and tell them simple sentences like this,” Grinbaum added. “It is very sad that this is the way the government of Israel treats its citizens.”
The Jordanians, he said, plan to celebrate the end of agreement on Naharayim and had already begun building tents for a ceremony at the site. Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi is expected to give a press conference there on Monday.
Grinbaum said he hoped that in the future, a new government headed by a fulltime prime minister would find a way to sway the Jordanian government to restore access to the site.
“We will keep on working with the Jordanian side,” he
Yes, as a source close to Bennett admitted, he was talking
to people in Blue and White. But Bennett had been doing that since a week after the election, and it was all about trying to facilitate a unity government.
And yes, the New Right played hard-to-get with Netanyahu when the prime minister tried to get all the parties in the right-wing bloc to sign a document pledging fealty to him, and then Bennett turned down an offer last week of a mid-level ministry along with a seat in the security cabinet.
Those were all smart negotiating moves that obviously convinced Netanyahu to make a very generous offer.
But it didn’t take a political expert to realize there was never a realistic scenario in which Bennett would join a Gantz-led government that doesn’t have Netanyahu in it.
That would be, as a source close to Bennett said, “political suicide.” Bennett’s base is solidly right-wing. He doesn’t attract centrist-leaning rightwing voters, as the April election, in which the New Right didn’t pass the electoral threshold, proved. And the Right still overwhelmingly supports Netanyahu.
It made no strategic political sense for Bennett and Shaked to abandon Netanyahu’s 55-seat right-wing bloc, and Netanyahu, often called a “wizard” for his political skill, must have known it.
Netanyahu is paying a big price, having a defense minister who he can’t stand and giving the most-coveted cabinet post to a three-seat party, for very little in return. Having a larger faction than Blue and White is not that big of
a deal when he has the bloc behind him anyway.
The precarious political situation – both Bennett and Shaked’s specifically, and the broader political context – is the other thing that makes the agreement of dubious value to them.
First of all, Bennett agreed that the post would only be until a new government was formed. If there’s a third election, then that would be for six months. If another election is prevented, then it’ll be in a little over six weeks at most. It’s not as short as Anthony Scaramucci’s tenure as White House Communications Director, which lasted only 10 days, but it’s not much.
It’s a smart spin on the New Right’s part to say that between the protests in Lebanon, the US pulling out of Syria and Iran winning its proxy war against the Saudis in Yemen, Israel really needs a full-time defense minister.
But Yisrael Beytenu leader Avigdor Liberman’s two years in the job show that Netanyahu makes sure to mostly hold the reins if he doesn’t trust the defense minister. Bennett would have an uphill battle trying to make an impact in office in the best of times, but he’s even less likely to do so in a micro-term in an interim government.
The New Right is in a very difficult political position. They didn’t pass the electoral threshold in April, and they’ve since managed to alienate their former party, Bayit Yehudi, to the point that it is unlikely that they’ll be able to run with them again as they did in September.
Plus, Bayit Yehudi leader Rafi Peretz is not likely to give up on his top spot again, after putting Shaked there didn’t win them too many more votes.
Meanwhile, the New Right’s deal with Likud has nothing to do with the next election. They only merged factions in the Knesset, not parties, and Netanyahu told Likud ministers that Bennett and Shaked were not promised spots in the Likud list for the next Knesset.
Shaked is thought to be popular in Likud, but Netanyahu blocked her from running with them in September. Even in the post-Netanyahu era, the competition is so stiff to be his heir that Bennett and Shaked don’t stand much of a chance.
It seems that Bennett is betting all he has, politically, on six weeks to six months in the Defense Ministry. If the New Right lives to see another election, that extra line on his CV, the job he’s wanted for years, will probably be the center of its campaign.
For now, Bennett’s dream has come true. But down the line, the question will be whether the bet pays off and if that’s enough to save Bennett and Shaked’s political careers. •