The Treaty of Peace Between the State of Israel and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, signed on October 26, 1994 at the Arava border crossing by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Prime Minister Abdelsalam al-Majali, and witnessed by President Bill Clinton, formally ended the state of war between the two countries that had existed since 1948. It was the second Arab-Israeli peace treaty, built on a framework announced three months earlier in the Washington Declaration of July 25, 1994. Unlike the Egypt-Israel treaty, it did not involve the return of a large occupied territory. Israel had never held the Jordanian heartland, and King Hussein had formally renounced his claim to the West Bank in July 1988. What the 1994 treaty accomplished was a final, definitive boundary settlement, a normalization of relations, and a deep security partnership that has survived three decades of regional upheaval.
What the treaty settled
The treaty fixed the international boundary along the Yarmouk and Jordan rivers, down the Arava valley, and across the Gulf of Aqaba to the Red Sea, with a detailed technical annex describing the line. Two small anomalies were addressed through a unique arrangement: at Naharayim/Baqura and Al-Ghamr/Zofar, parcels that fell on the Jordanian side of the agreed boundary but contained long-standing Israeli agricultural use were placed under Jordanian sovereignty, with a twenty-five-year automatic-renewal lease granting Israeli farmers continued access. Water rights were specified in Annex II, allocating defined quantities from the Jordan and Yarmouk systems and committing both states to cooperative management. Security cooperation was codified in Article 4, including a mutual commitment not to allow either country’s territory to be used as a base for hostile acts against the other.
Why this counts in the land-for-peace record
Jordan’s treaty belongs in the land-for-peace ledger because Israel did transfer territory. Roughly 380 square kilometers of contested Arava borderland was formally recognized as Jordanian, and small areas were transferred back to Jordan. The transfers were modest compared to the Sinai, but they were real, and they settled a boundary that had been disputed since the 1948 armistice. More importantly, the treaty turned the longest border Israel shares with any Arab state, running roughly 300 kilometers along the Jordan valley, from a potential war front into a cooperative frontier. State Department reporting has consistently treated the Jordan treaty as a cornerstone of regional stability.
The 2019 Baqura and Al-Ghamr recovery
In October 2018, King Abdullah II announced that Jordan would not renew the twenty-five-year leases on the Baqura and Al-Ghamr enclaves, invoking Article 6 of Annexes I(a) and I(b) of the treaty. The leases expired in November 2019 and full Jordanian sovereign control resumed. This was significant politically, because it signaled Jordanian domestic pressure on the relationship, but it was not a breach of the treaty. The treaty anticipated and permitted non-renewal. The boundary settlement remained intact. OZJF treats the Baqura episode as evidence of strain, not collapse.
Why the peace has been cold but durable
Jordanian public opinion has never embraced normalization. Professional associations have maintained anti-normalization stances, and bilateral trade and tourism volumes are modest. Tensions spike predictably during Gaza wars, around Al-Aqsa disturbances, and during periods of West Bank violence. In November 2023 Jordan recalled its ambassador from Tel Aviv. But the state-level relationship has endured. The intelligence cooperation continues. The water cooperation continues. The border remains quiet. USIP analysis has described Jordan’s position as a “three-way balancing act” between its Palestinian-descended population, its Hashemite monarchy, and its strategic interests, and the treaty has survived all three pressures.
Why it endured
Three factors have sustained the peace. First, Jordan’s strategic dependence on American security assistance and economic support, roughly $1.45 billion annually under the current memorandum of understanding, gives Amman a direct material stake in maintaining treaty obligations. Second, the Hashemite monarchy’s custodianship of the Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem, codified in Article 9 of the treaty, gives Jordan a legitimate religious-diplomatic role that the kingdom would not lightly surrender. Third, the security threats the monarchy fears most, from Iranian proxies to Islamic State remnants to Syrian instability, align with Israeli security concerns more than they conflict with them. The King Hussein archives document how the late king framed the treaty as a strategic alignment, not a moral reconciliation. That framing has held. The Jordan treaty, like the Egypt treaty, demonstrates that land for peace can produce durable interstate peace when the counterparty is a stable state with aligned strategic interests.