Jordan, Or Arabia Ingrata

Many a young student taking first-year Latin used to be taught the first sentence of Julius Caesar’s commentary on the Roman conquest of Gaul — De Bello Gallico (The Gallic Wars): Omnia Gallia in tres partes divisa est. All of Gaul is divided into three parts. To wit: Gallia Cisalpina, Gallia Narbonensis, and Gallia Aquitania. Many students then learn in second-year Latin that the Romans divided Arabia, conquered by Rome, into Arabia Felix (“Fortunate Arabia,” roughly, modern-day Yemen), Arabia Deserta (“Desert Arabia” or roughly, Saudi Arabia), and Arabia Petraea (“Stony Arabia” or modern-day Jordan). Hence, derived from the latter toponym, we have the redolently-named Petra, “the rose-red city half as old as Time,” with its caves, temples, and tombs carved from blushing pink sandstone. But Jordan’s behavior toward Israel, with which it is officially at peace, surely has earned it a different designation. No longer is it Arabia Petraea; more fittingly, it should be called Arabia Ingrata, Ungrateful Arabia.

More on how Jordan the Ingrate has been treating the Jewish state that has been unstintingly helping it can be found here: “After slamming Israel, Jordan now wants more Israeli water – analysis,” by Herb Keinon, Jerusalem Post, March 5, 2024:

Both countries need each other. But this is something that Jordanian officials seem to forget in their often vitriolic condemnations of Israel at home and around the world.

On November 16, Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi – whose anti-Israel rhetoric since October 7 has been strident – took to Al Jazeera to say the planned signing a month later of a three-way Jordan-Israel-UAE water-for-energy deal would not take place.

“We will not sign this agreement any longer. Can you imagine a Jordanian minister sitting next to an Israeli minister to sign a water and electricity agreement, all while Israel continues to kill children in Gaza?” the top Jordanian diplomat said.

The Israelis are trying to avoid killing children, or any other non-combatants, in Gaza. They have done everything they can to warn civilians away from places that are about to be targeted by the IDF. It is Hamas that prevents many Gazans from moving to safer places, for it wants to maximize civilian casualties in order to score propaganda points against Israel. Hamas is known to have fired on Gazans trying to leave northern Gaza early in the war, shooting them down as they tried to flee south — beyond the Wadi Gaza — on the main north-south corridor of Al-Rashid Street.

Under the deal, Jordan was to supply Israel with solar energy from a UAE-funded plant in exchange for desalinated water from Israel.

This arrangement has been a good deal for both Jordan and Israel; the UAE pays for a plant in Jordan, which produces solar energy. That energy then is transferred to Israel. In return, Israel provides desalinated water to Jordan, one of the most “water-poor” countries in the world.

“Israel’s aggression and crimes [in Gaza] can no longer be justified as self-defense. It has been killing innocent civilians and attacking hospitals,” he [Foreign Minister Safadi] continued. “If any other state had committed a fraction of what Israel is doing now, we would have seen sanctions imposed on it from every corner of the globe.”

Israel is now engaged in the fourth war for its survival. The others are the wars of1948, 1967, and 1973. After the atrocities — the mass rapes, torture, mutilation, and murder of 1,300 Israelis and the kidnapping of 250 more — Israel cannot any longer live with the terror group responsible, Hamas, still ruling Gaza; the IDF must dismantle Hamas as a military threat. And the notion that Israel is weighed by a different measure than other is true, but not in the way that Ayman Safadi thinks. Israel is held to a much higher standard than any other country. Few give Israel credit for the way the IDF has conducted the war in Gaza under hellish conditions. It is engaged in urban warfare, in one of the most densely-populated areas in the world, against an enemy that holds its own people as human shields, hiding its own operatives and weapons among civilians, in schools, apartment houses, mosques, and hospitals. Israel has through messaging, leafletting, and telephoning managed to warn civilians way from buildings that are soon to be targeted. And the results are clear: as of March 7, Hamas has declared that 30,000 Gazans have died. It does not distinguish between civilians and combatants, but tries to suggest that all of them are civilians, and — echoing Hamas – the nightly news always includes after the Hamas-supplied number of dead the phrase “mainly women and children,” though no evidence for this characterization of the victims is ever provided. The media unthinkingly, or with malice aforethought, tell the world that “30,000 people have been killed, mainly of them women and children.” People accept it. The damage is done.