Travelling to Jordan

We live in Israel, a country in the Middle East. Our closest neighbour is Jordan with whom we have the longest border. From the founding of the State of Israel in 1948 we were (formally) at war with Jordan until 1994 when a peace treaty was signed between King Hussein and Prime Minister Itzhak Rabin. At that time there were high hopes of a Middle East peace that everybody could profit from. Busloads of Israeli tourists “invaded” Jordan and Jordanian tourist operators built new hotels especially around Petra to accommodate the sudden new influx of tourists. But Jordan is the kind of place where Israelis would come once only and by 2000 the peace atmosphere had soured and all the new tourism dried up.

I went to Jordan the first time for a short day trip from Eilat to Aqaba in 1994. I took my daughters who were then 10 and 14 and didn’t feel comfortable in the Arab atmosphere. I felt fine but immediately saw that Jordan is no big deal. What I mean by that is that for the many years that Jordan was Israel’s enemy, it was pictured in Israeli conciousness as a big country with a powerful and competent army. Once again, the picture of the enemy over there was very different for the reality we encountered with our own eyes once we could visit freely for ourselves. We suddenly saw Jordan for what it is, a relatively poor, Middle Eastern country, underdeveloped by European standards, a far cry from the modern and highly Westernized Israel and therefore not really a potent enemy (in military terms) compared to Israel’s might.

I didn’t go again to Jordan until 2 years ago on my trip to India. At the time I was unable to get flight tickets from Israel to India at the time we wanted to travel, and a creative travel agent suggested we travel overland to Amman (it’s only a few hours) and take a flight from there to Delhi. It was an excellent idea – Amman Airport is pleasant and provincial and the Jordanian Airlines flight to Delhi was short and comfortable. More importantly it showed us that (contrary to popular perception amongst Israeli Jews) there’s nothing particularly frightening about traveling to Jordan. Israeli newspapers occasionally rate various countries for how anti-Semitic they are and Jordan regularly appears at the top of the list. Since over 50% of the population are Palestinian (i.e. refugees or descendants of refugees) that’s maybe not that surprising. On a personal level there was nothing in our short experience in Jordan which justified feeling uncomfortable.