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Twenty Years of Israeli-Jordanian Peace
(Washington Institute for Near East Policy) David Schenker - October 26 marks the 20th anniversary of the Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty. While the treaty was celebrated by Israelis, it has not been popular with the Jordanian public. In a 2011 poll, 52% of Jordanians said their government should cancel the agreement. Once the treaty was signed, it opened the floodgates of U.S. economic and military assistance to Jordan. In 1993, Washington provided Amman with just $35 million in economic support; the 2014 figure is $700 million. Moreover, last year, U.S.-Jordanian trade reached $3.3 billion, a nearly tenfold increase from 1994. Similarly, Jordan received just $9 million in U.S. Foreign Military Financing in 1993, compared to $300 million this year. Washington has provided 58 F-16s and a state-of-the-art counterterrorism facility - the King Abdullah Special Operations Training Center (KASOTC) - constructed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 2006-2007. The writer is director of the Program on Arab Politics at The Washington Institute.