JNS.org – This past winter, it had seemed as if spring had come early for Israeli-Jordanian relations. A series of visits and meetings between King Abdullah and senior Israelis, including President Isaac Herzog, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, Foreign Minister Yair Lapid and Defense Minister Benny Gantz, created a false sense of warmth. At the moment of truth, however, as riots erupted on the Temple Mount, Jordan dropped the mask, with senior kingdom officials competing against each other to see who could spout the vilest slander and incitement against Israel.

However, just as no one should have gotten too excited over the short honeymoon period, no one should overreact to this latest in a long line of crises. This is Jordan, this is how it has always been, and this has always been the pattern of our relations with it, even prior to the 1994 peace treaty.

A brief reminder: on the eve of the Yom Kippur War, King Hussein, Abdullah’s father, warned Israel that Egypt and Syria were about to launch an attack. In Israel, as we know, no one heeded the warning. Later, after the war broke out, Hussein stayed out of the fray along his border with Israel, but deployed one of his armored brigades to help the Syrians.

Incidentally, three years earlier, in the summer of 1970, the Syrians attacked Jordan, but that attack was rebuffed after Israel sent a secret message to Damascus warning the Syrians that if they didn’t withdraw their forces from Jordan, Israel would attack them.

The reality is plain to see, at least to anyone not wearing the rose-tinted glasses of a political or diplomatic novice. In the space around us, Israel doesn’t have a more reliable security partner than Jordan. To be more precise, it doesn’t have a more reliable partner than Jordan’s security agencies and army. At the same time, though, very few can compete with the hostility to Israel of the Jordanian public, which is nourished and exacerbated by virulent media outlets and politicians who spread hatred and call for violence.

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