Wednesday, February 08, 2006

After the Hamas Victory: The Increasing Importance of Israel's Strategic Barrier in the Jordan Valley

Thanks to Roy for alerting us to this material from Institute for Contemporary Affairs (founded jointly with the Wechsler Family Foundation) JERUSALEM ISSUE BRIEF Vol. 5, No. 17, 7 February 2006 by Dore Gold (this is a brief extract only - follow the link for the full article with references)...

The massive electoral victory of Hamas in the Palestinian parliamentary elections has created an entirely new strategic reality for Israel which vastly increases the importance of the Jordan Valley (a desert zone almost devoid of population) for Israel's security in the near term.

With Hamas dominating the Palestinian Authority, Jordan could find itself sandwiched between the pro-Iranian forces in Iraq and a pro-Iranian Palestinian Authority. In addition, should Israel face a new round of armed Palestinian violence, its ability to isolate the Hamas regime from external reinforcement will be a key security requirement.

....Control of the Jordan Valley enables Israel to deal with any likely eventuality to the east. Should Israel withdraw from the Jordan Valley to the line of the security fence, it would not be able to stop the flow of insurgents and equipment into the West Bank to the terrain dominating Ben-Gurion Airport and other vital parts of Israel's national infrastructure along its coastal plain.

While some have misinterpreted Sharon's ultimate map of withdrawal in the West Bank, asserting that he planned to pull back to the line of the security fence or even to the line that President Clinton had proposed in 2000, all evidence indicates that Sharon was determined to retain the Jordan Valley and many other vital areas beyond the security fence.

Israel's Eastern Front
After the 2003 Iraq War, it became commonplace in parts of the Western policymaking community to assert that, since the U.S. had eliminated the threat emanating from the armored formations of Saddam Hussein, Israel could relax its traditional territorial claims for defensible borders in the West Bank. The argument was further reinforced by the fact that Israel had a peace treaty with the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan since 1994. This led many observers to the conclusion that Israel no longer needed to control its strategic barrier in the Jordan Valley that served as its primary line of defense since 1967.

....It was Israel's deputy prime minister, Yigal Allon, who first proposed to the Israeli cabinet just after the Six-Day War on July 26, 1967, that Israel retain new defensible borders based primarily on control of the eastern slopes of the West Bank hill ridge down to the bottom of the Jordan Valley, as well as the Judean Desert that was adjacent to the Dead Sea. As Israel's foreign minister in 1976, in the first government of Yitzhak Rabin, Allon wrote in Foreign Affairs: "I am referring to the arid zone that lies between the Jordan River to the east, and the eastern chain of the Samaria and Judean mountains to the West from Mt. Gilboa in the North through the Judean desert until it joins the Negev desert. The area of this desert zone is only 700 square miles and it is almost devoid of population."

In 1972, Allon explained that this security zone, amounting to approximately one-third of the West Bank, needed to be placed under Israeli sovereignty. Israel paved a north-south road in the West Bank known as the Allon Road, just above the Jordan Valley, that roughly marked the western border of the "Allon Plan" region.

... In October 1995, just one month before he was assassinated, Rabin stressed in his last Knesset address: "the security border of Israel will be located in the Jordan Valley, in the broadest meaning of that term." Rabin still believed in the critical importance of the Jordan Valley in 1995, even though he had signed the Oslo Accords two years earlier and had negotiated a peace treaty with the Jordanians, as well, in 1994.

In 2005, Eitan Haber, who was Rabin's chief of staff and speechwriter, confirmed that Rabin sought to retain well above a third of the West Bank. According to Haber, Rabin said the Palestinians would receive 50 percent or maybe, at the most, 60 to 70 percent of the West Bank.

...Prime Minister Ariel Sharon maintained Rabin's legacy. In an interview on April 24, 2005, Sharon went into considerable detail: "The Jordan Rift Valley is very important and it's not just the rift valley we're talking about [but]...up to the Allon Road and a step above the Allon Road."

Indeed, Allon's concepts had already crossed party lines in Israel years earlier, for back in 1997, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described his own ultimate map for the borders of Israel by using the term "Allon-Plus."

Some American publications have misinterpreted Sharon's ultimate map of withdrawal in the West Bank, asserting that he planned to pull back to the line of the security fence or even to the line that President Clinton had proposed in 2000. But all evidence indicates that Sharon was determined to retain the Jordan Valley and many other vital areas beyond the security fence.

...Finally, on February 6, 2006, Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz, whose ministry was responsible for designing the route of the security fence under Sharon, declared his view that the Jordan Valley would ultimately be incorporated into Israel.

...In 2006, Israel faces a rapidly changing strategic landscape. ....If mujahideen from Iraq seek to infiltrate the Hashemite Kingdom, there is little to stop them from gaining entry. According to those stationed along the Iraqi-Jordanian border, the entire border zone is extremely porous.

...Speaking on January 23, 2006, at the Herzliya Conference to a panel on "Defensible Borders for Israel," former IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. (res.) Moshe Yaalon warned that Israel might face the threat of mujahideen from the Iraq war seeking to infiltrate into Israel. .... Iran is determined to become the dominant force in post-Saddam Iraq, utilizing the fact that Shiites make up 65 percent of the Iraqi population..... it would be a mistake to rule out the prospect that Iraq might become a new center of Shiite terror groups like Hizballah, that would seek to infiltrate Jordan and, eventually, Israel. Indeed, Moqtada al-Sadr, the radical Iraqi Shiite cleric, declared in 2004: "I am the beating arm for Hizballah and Hamas here in Iraq." With Hamas dominating the Palestinian Authority, Jordan could find itself sandwiched between the pro-Iranian forces in Iraq and a pro-Iranian Palestinian Authority.

...It is a very real possibility that ...missiles have entered terrorist inventories and could be supplied in large numbers to the Palestinians, altering the scale of any future confrontations.
Moreover, there is an even greater strategic threat emerging from ... the potential destabilization of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan itself. Dr. Azzam Huneidi, head of Jordan's Islamic Action Front, which represents the Muslim Brotherhood in the Jordanian parliament, expressed his confidence that the Hamas victory among the Palestinians will be followed by the victory of other Islamist parties.

Control of the Jordan Valley enables Israel to deal with any likely eventuality to the east. Should Israel withdraw from the Jordan Valley to the line of the security fence, as some observers have suggested, it would not be able to stop the flow of insurgents and equipment into the West Bank to the terrain dominating Ben-Gurion Airport and other vital parts of Israel's national infrastructure along its coastal plain. In addition, the vacuum created by any such Israeli pullout could draw insurgent volunteers into Jordan in great numbers, which would destabilize the Hashemite monarchy.

Dr. Dore Gold, who served as Israel's ambassador to the United Nations in 1997-1999, heads the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. His book Hatred's Kingdom surveys the rise of Islamic militancy in Saudi Arabia.

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