Will Jordan extend Israeli lease of farmlands?
Israeli farmers will soon be forced to abandon their agricultural lands at Naharayim, in Jordanian territory, at the end of their 25-year leases this month according to a provision of the peace treaty between Jordan and Israel.
For the past 25 years, Eli Arazi of Kibbutz Ashdot Yaakov (Meuhad) has been crossing the border between Israel and Jordan almost every day to work his fields in the Naharayim enclave in Jordanian territory. He can do so because of a provision in the 1994 peace agreement between Israel and Jordan that provides some Israeli farmers in the Jordan Valley with the unusual privilege of crossing into the neighboring Arab state without a passport or bureaucracy. Jordanian soldiers at the border open the gate so they can pass into Naharayim with their agricultural equipment to work in their olive, avocado and banana groves and their watermelon patches and cornfields. On Oct. 26, however, 25 years after the signing of the peace accord, it appears the farmers will be forced to abandon the land that they have been working for decades.
In the early 1920s, Pinhas Rutenberg bought land in the Naharayim region from King Abdullah to build a hydroelectric power plant. The mandatory border established in 1922 ran west of this land, effectively making it part of Transjordan, which obtained full independence in 1946. After Israel’s War of Independence (1948) and the ensuing Armistice Agreement (1949) signed on Rhodes, kibbutzim in the region began growing crops in the Naharayim area.
The peace agreement signed October 26, 1994, by Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Jordanian King Hussein determined that the official border between their two countries would be based on the mandatory border. This posed a problem for Moshav Tzofar, in the Arava region, and two kibbutzim, Ashdot Yaakov (Ichud) and Ashdot Yaakov (Meuhad), in the Jordan Valley, because their fields and orchards are located east of the mandatory line, within Jordanian territory. As a gesture of goodwill, Jordan agreed to allow Israeli farmers there to continue to work the lands for a period of 25 years. It was also agreed that the arrangement would be automatically renewed unless one of the parties expressly opposed it.
In October 2018, Jordan's King Abdullah II said that he would not be renewing the arrangement. The announcement sent the farmers of Tzofar and Ashdot Yaakov into a tailspin. It, in effect, threatened their livelihood, bringing an abrupt end to agricultural and tourist activities that they had developed over decades. On Oct. 16 this year, Maariv reported that Israel and Jordan had reached an interim agreement to extend the Tzofar lease by six months, but other reports dispute this.
