It’s mainly a sour sensation. On the street in Jordan, people ask angrily and sincerely why Jordan ever bothered signing a peace agreement with Israel. And on the Israeli street, people wonder why this peace agreement, which was meant to be special and to constitute a leading example for other Arab states like Lebanon, the Gulf emirates and Morocco, never managed to take off. Well, maybe it got a little bit off the ground, but then it landed with a bang. When, on the Israeli side, we assess the situation on the 15th anniversary of the signing of the peace agreement, the impression is not only sour but, more to the point, there is a sense of missed opportunity. A process destined to generate great things fizzled from the very beginning.

We could have done a lot better. With a little forethought and vision we could have turned Aqaba and Eilat into twin cities generating a long list of cooperative ventures and economic benefits: a shared seaport and airport, the latter hosting tourist flights that keep the hotels filled all year long. Eilat and Aqaba are only 20 minutes apart by car, the Israeli port is overflowing and Aqaba offered to host its cargo ships. The site for a shared airport has even been selected, but the Israeli side has dragged its feet for reasons that to this day are not clear.

What do we have? Some 200 Jordanians cross the border daily to work in Eilat. That’s almost it. This is neither normalization nor the “special” kind of peace promised by the late King Hussein. The peace process stopped before it could even begin to bloom, just months after the assassination of Premier Yitzhak Rabin in November 1995. 

Here we recall the words of King Hussein in his touching eulogy to Rabin in Jerusalem: “I lost a partner,” Hussein said of his friend. The human dimension, a vital element even in relations between former enemies, has faded away. The telephones don’t ring, meetings are few and far between and the human gestures that set the tone on the streets have followed suit and disappeared. 

Yes, there are security ties. Intelligence and security warnings are definitely exchanged. On both sides of the border they have found strategic common denominators and the precise terminology for managing them. We have not yet heard just how many Israeli lives the Jordanians have saved over the years. But who cares?

Dry statistics tell the story of lost expectations. On the eve of the peace-signing ceremony at the Arava border crossing, 82 percent of the Jordanian population (including Palestinians) supported the agreement and praised at length the planned economic and other cooperation. This week, 15 years later, 80 percent of Jordanians (mainly Palestinians) demand to cancel the agreement, expel the Israeli ambassador and “erase the little that has been achieved and everything that was promised.” Israelis, it emerges, are experts at making promises no one bothers to keep.

Yet when we examine all the missed opportunities, it turns out Israelis are not the only ones to blame. Take for example the issue of visas. An Israeli desiring to pop over to Jordan boards a plane or a bus and buys a visa at the border or the airport in Amman. In the other direction, nearly every Jordanian of Palestinian origin is suspect in Israeli eyes of vanishing inside Israel and following in the footsteps of thousands who have already exercised their “right of return” or simply sought work in the Arab sector in Israel. Hence what awaits a Jordanian visitor – and their numbers are dwindling – is an exhausting bureaucratic experience: standing in line at the entrance to the Israeli consulate, presenting a bank statement and family history, being over 65 or 70 years old and mainly, arming himself with patience. “Popping over to eat fish at the Sea of Galilee or humus in Acre” is out of the question. 

Above and beyond all this, there is deep frustration at the highest levels in Jordan that no one on the Israeli side takes the trouble to pick up the phone occasionally, to maintain an atmosphere of partnership, to think together what to do about Abu Mazen (Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas) and how to deal with Hamas, to make decisions together, to avoid surprises. In Amman, all eyes are focused on regional sources of tension. In Jerusalem, everyone looks mainly toward Washington. That we could have been looking together in the same direction; that we have a long list of shared interests – these assets we have lost, perhaps forever