A clandestine undertaking on behalf of Israel, the Jets and the Jews.

 
The Jordan Valley

Until Ehud Barak's concessions at Camp David and Taba in 2000-01, when Israel reportedly agreed to withdraw from the Jordan Valley six years after a peace agreement, there was a consensus in Israel that the Jordan Valley must remain under Israeli control. As Dore Gold has written "it was Israel's foreign minister under the first Rabin government, Yigal Allon, who specified what 'secure borders' meant in the pages of Foreign Affairs in October 1976. Allon, one of Israel's greatest military minds, argued that Israel would need to preserve a strategic zone in the eastern West Bank running up from the Jordan Valley to the eastern slopes of the West Bank hill ridge. This area would allow Israel's small standing army to hold off an assault from a combination of Arab states to Israel's east for enough time for Israel to mobilize and deploy its reserve forces, which constitute the bulk of Israel's military power. For 'secure borders' Allon envisioned that Israel would need some 700 square miles of the 2100 square miles that make up the West Bank (about one-third). Allon's thinking guided the peace plans of both Labor and Likud governemnts: Rabin described his goals before the Knesset in 1995 in terms that closely resembled the ideas of Allon, who was both his mentor and his former commander in 1948."

In today's Haaretz, Akiva Eldar writes that the argument that Israel must keep the Jordan Valley is now obsolete, in light of the fall of Saddam Hussein and the peace agreement with Jordan. Others have made arguments similar to Eldar's.

During the negotiations relating to the Clinton Plan, Shaul Mofaz - then Israel's Chief of Staff and now its Defense Minister, was very critical of the concessions on the Jordan Valley. According to a Haaretz report at that time, following a cabinet meeting to discuss the Clinton Plan "ministers commented that according to Mofaz, the Clinton plan would expose Israel to great danger and is almost out of the question from a security standpoint. One of those present at the meeting said he emerged 'stunned' after hearing Mofaz's assessment. Senior IDF officers expressed surprise and leveled harsh criticism at the American plan."

I'm not a military expert, but at the very least it would seem that in light of the Palestinians' tendency to smuggle weapons from Egypt into Gaza and Egypt's failure to prevent such activity, despite its peace treaty with Israel, relinquishing control of the Jordan Valley would likely result in similar smuggling by Palestinians between Jordan and the West Bank.
posted on 7/07/2003