Anyone who didn’t get an invitation to the ceremony marking a quarter century of the signing of the peace accord between Israel and Jordan in the Arava Valley shouldn’t be insulted. Such a ceremony won’t take place Oct. 26. Not in Israel or in Jordan, and certainly not together. 

I remember well my flight with Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1994 in a military helicopter, from the Knesset’s launchpad to the quickly prepared field in the desert, close to the Jordanian border. We disembarked from the helicopter wearing white caps marking the date of the event, and Rabin struggled to contain his great joy. The special relationship with Jordan was out of the closet, and since we weren’t real enemies before the accord was signed, it seemed that now true friendship would flourish, especially since the Knesset was united behind the peace agreement, which couldn’t have happened without the Oslo Accord, which shortly preceded it.

But after the initial excitement and many Israelis’ visits to Petra, the special economic arrangements signed with the aid of the United States and the successful economic summit that took place a year later in Amman, came different days: Talks with the Palestinians halted and peace negotiations with them never started; the Mossad’s attempt to assassinate the leader of Hamas, Khaled Meshaal, while he was in Amman in September 1997 was seen by the late King Hussein as a betrayal of the agreement by Israel; and the Second Intifada broke out in 2000. All these factors caused a deep crisis that stemmed, among other things, from the Jordanian fear of a flow of Palestinian refugees, driven by despair and family ties, from the West Bank of Jordan to the East Bank, and that these would cause Palestinian violence in Jordan.

I remember a conversation with King Abdullah II, during the intifada, when he told me that for any funeral in the West Bank a mourning tent is erected in the East Bank. He complained that Israel doesn’t properly understand the significance of this. When two Jordanian citizens were killed in the apartment of an Israeli security guard in July 2017, the guard’s escape with the aid of the Israeli ambassador to Jordan at the time, Einat Schlein, and the reception held for him by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, greatly hurt relations with Jordan. They created a crisis that continued for months, until our neighbor in the east agreed to receive a new Israeli ambassador, Amir Weissbrod.