It's been a decade since Israel and Jordan signed the historic peace treaty that produced the Jewish state's healthiest relationship so far with any of the Arab world's 22 states.
The health of the relationship is reflected in its lack of the kind of acrimony that has characterized the formal Israeli-Egyptian relationship since Anwar Sadat's assassination in 1981. Jordan has not been spending its time intimidating third-world countries which want to establish ties with Israel; it has not allowed terrorists and their supplies to filter through its borders with Israel; and it certainly has not done anything quite like Egypt's ongoing jailing of innocent Israeli citizen Azzam Azzam.
Moreover, during the past decade the Hashemite Kingdom and the Jewish state have been cooperating closely in the management of their joint border, and at the same time have nurtured an economic relationship that includes the systematic transfer of Israeli water to the kingdom.
Clearly, Jordan's distinction is in its conclusion, following the Palestinian revolt it faced in 1970, that Israel is its natural strategic ally. This is what drove Amman to institute ties with Jerusalem many years before their formalization by Yitzhak Rabin and King Hussein.
Egypt has made peace with Israel in an entirely different setting, as it concluded, in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War, that it cannot afford an endless military conflict with its northern neighbor. Not only is this not the same as making peace in order to transform former enemies into allies, but as it turned out the Mubarak regime chose to continue perceiving and treating Israel as a strategic rival.
All this having been said, even the ostensibly mature peace with Jordan is far from perfect.
Diplomatically, Jordan remains formally angry with Israel for the way it is fighting the current war, a sentiment it expresses by keeping its Tel Aviv embassy in the hands of a charge d'affairs. Commercially, trade between the two countries reached a relatively low $66 million last year. And industrially, plans to set up manufacturing zones that would straddle the border between the countries have yet to materialize.
Yes, there is some presence in Jordan of Israeli-owned, labor intensive factories, and the kingdom's gross domestic product has nearly doubled since 1995, to just under $10 billion.
However, all this pales in comparison with the hopes entertained a decade ago by the people who masterminded this peace agreement. The way King Hussein and Rabin saw it, the peace between their countries was supposed to be part of a New Middle East, a newly integrated region inspired by pro-globalization leaders such as Morocco's King Hassan or Sultan Qaboos of Oman.
As it turned out, the region's more influential leaders, most notably Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak and the Saudi royal house, remained cool to that vision, and effectively obstructed the emergence of a New Middle East. It was in that setting that the Palestinians went one step further, and waged yet another war against Israel.
Considering that 60 percent of Jordan's population is Palestinian, the current state of its relations with the Jewish state is probably the most one can expect under the current circumstances. Yet if one wants a glimpse of what things may have been like, one need only look in the direction of Jordan's rapidly expanding economy, and defiantly outgoing diplomacy. A day will come when millions of Arabs will look to Jordan for inspiration as they, too, turn their region to the world, and their history to the future.
