AL JAZEERA (30/1/2020)
With her clenched fists raised high, Ibtisam stands at the vanguard of hundreds of protesters who have gathered in Amman to rail against a gas deal.
“The people of Jordan do not compromise! What a shame, what a shame! An agreement full of shame,” the protesters chant in unison.
It’s Ibtisam’s second protest since the beginning of the year when gas from Israel’s Leviathan field started to be pumped into Jordan after the signature of a $10 billion deal. Protesters say they don’t want to become dependent on Israel and call on Jordan to reclaim its sovereignty.
“We will burn firewood,” the middle-aged Ibtisam tells Al Jazeera. Anything, she says, but “gas from the occupation.”
Wearing a red keffiyeh on her head – the scarf that became a symbol of the Palestinian struggle – Ibtisam is a Palestinian refugee. More than half of Jordan’s population is of Palestinian descent.
A grassroots movement against the gas deal started in 2014 when a letter of intent to buy gas from Israel was first signed by Jordan’s state-owned National Electric Power Company. Since then there has been widespread popular opposition to the agreement that will see Israeli gas being supplied to Jordan for the next 15 years, with an estimated half of the revenue going directly into Israeli government coffers.
“This is humiliation,” says Mahdi Suleiman, a retired military officer who joined the protest with a photo of his son, one of around 24 Jordanians held in Israeli prisons. “It is an agreement of humiliation and shame.”
For many, the import of Israeli gas forces normalisation with Israel on every household and marks a trend of sidelining Palestinian rights in favour of Israeli interests. The protesters raise their voices in unison against the gas deal but also against the Wadi Araba peace treaty, signed between Jordan and Israel in 1994, and US president Donald Trump’s plan dubbed the “deal of the century.”
“Wadi Araba is not peace!” protesters shout. “Wadi Araba is treason!”
Held on January 17 before Trump announced his Middle East “peace plan”, the demonstration aimed at showing opposition to any agreement that would normalise the occupation of Palestinian territories. Trump’s proposal, announced on January 28 and drafted without the participation of Palestinians, allows Israel to keep all its illegal settlements and to annex large parts of the Palestinian territories it currently occupies.
The campaign pushing against the gas deal has brought together unions, political parties, military veterans and women’s associations.
“It’s a movement against injustice and settler colonialism,” says the campaign organiser Hisham Bustani, “It’s about holding up an ethical position.” But the anger sparked by the deal goes beyond solidarity with Palestinians.
“The US administration played a huge role in orchestrating this deal,” says Bustani. The gas will be supplied by Israel’s Delek Group the US oil company Noble Energy, which struck the deal with the Jordanian state-owned power utility in 2016.
According to the New York Times, Hillary Clinton raised the issue with Jordan’s King Abdullah II when she was Secretary of State in 2011, and the deal was encouraged by US official to “cement the fragile peace” between Israel and its neighbours. Israeli gas also started being exported to Egypt this year.
“Instead of investing in Jordan to develop the economy and to create job opportunities we are spending billions of dollars to buy subordination,” Bustani tells Al Jazeera. According to the campaigner, it is a “catastrophic” decision to make Jordan reliant on a politically belligerent Israel in the strategic sector of energy.
The Jordanian government said that the agreement will help secure stable energy prices and allow annual savings of at least $500 million which will help reduce a chronic budget deficit. But experts have questioned the economic benefits of Israeli gas imports and have said Jordan gets enough liquefied gas from the Aqaba gas terminal built in the south of the country. Economists have said that Jordan is actually paying above the market prices for Israeli gas and that there is no economic logic behind the deal. Jordan’s Ministry of Energy and National Electric Power Company did not respond to Al Jazeera’s requests for comment.
On January 19, the Jordanian parliament approved a draft law to ban imports of Israeli gas. The government said it would review the motion. But if the past is any guide, it is unlikely to find traction.
While the members of the parliament are elected, the cabinet of ministers that forms the government is appointed by the king.
In December 2014, the parliament also voted against the deal, but the government pressed ahead with the agreement and has continued to defend it.
Protesters have also voiced concerns with the lack of transparency surrounding the deal since it was held behind closed-doors and the terms kept secret. The details of the agreement were only made public in 2019 by an opposition MP who shared the information with local media.
Investment in local resources and renewable energy
Critics of the deal say that the billions spent investing in Israeli gas should instead be channelled into Jordan to generate jobs in a country suffering from a staggering unemployment rate, and to develop solar and wind energy.
“Jordan has a very big potential for renewable energy,” says Rami Barhoush, president of the Arab Group for the Protection of Nature (APN). “We have more than 310 days of sunshine a year and vast areas of land capable of producing wind energy.”
Barhoush says that the pipeline built to transport gas from Israel destroyed land and affected several villages in Jordan. APN, a non-profit focusing on environmental protection and sovereignty over national resources, has lead planting initiatives to replace trees uprooted by the Israeli occupation and most recently by the pipeline.
According to Ahmad Harb, a professor at the German Jordanian University, Jordan invested a lot in renewable energy in the past decade and has become one of the main solar energy producers in the Middle East. In 2017, it announced the “Green Corridor”, a new project to allow solar and wind power produced in the south of the country to be transmitted to consumption centres.
But in January 2019, the Jordanian government suspended approvals for large-scale renewable energy projects until technical studies to assess the capacity of the electrical grid are completed.
“This decision was made because the network needs to be updated,” explains Harb, who specialises in renewable energy. “Until this problem is solved we are limited in our production of renewable energy.” Energy experts say Jordan is already generating more energy than it consumes but doesn’t have the storage capacity.
Since the gas deal obliges Jordan to import a certain amount of gas over a period of 15 years, experts fear it will restrict the introduction of renewable energy to the grid and the ability to rely on local resources.
“It would be better if the government invested in upgrading the network and allowed more investment in renewable energy,” says the professor.
The energy and environment expert Ayoub Abu Dayyeh says that continuing to invest in fossil fuels will hold back Jordan’s prospects of producing clean and sovereign energy, but he has more questions than answers.
“Do we really need this deal when we have such a big potential for renewable energy? Why pay those 10 billion dollars for energy coming from the outside? Are our governments democratic enough to take decisions that look after the well-being and interests of the population, or just policies focused on short-term profit?” he asks.