Although the same line marked out an Israeli-Jordanian ceasefire line in 1949, after Israel’s war of independence, Israel had always argued that it was not a legal international boundary.After the 1967 war, Israel pushed out east of the British line, unilaterally occupying a strip of Jordanian territory along the valley, comprising a total of 381 sq km. For Jordan, the main dispute with Israel centred on demarcation of its western boundary along what Israel calls the Arava Valley, running between the southern tip of the Dead Sea and the northern tip of the Gulf of Aqaba on the Red Sea. The American offer to pay dollars 700m-dollars 1bn ( pounds 430m- pounds 614m) in Jordanian debt relief, and to modernise Jordan’s armed forces, helped to push King Hussein to the peace table. The King saw in the treaty a chance to shore up the status of his kingdom against a potential threat from a Palestinian state.For Israel, the prospect that peace with Jordan would hasten peace with the whole Arab world encouraged compromise.

The lands they argued over were of dubious value, while security concerns were relatively easy to answer.
When the political will for peace was there, the nuts and bolts of the agreement dropped suddenly into place. For four years Israel and Jordan have disputed these same kilometres and measures of water, holding them up as a reason not to make peace. However, unlike the disputes that once bogged down peace talks with Egypt, and unlike the present disputes with the Palestinians or Syrians, the issues that separated Israel and Jordan were never substantial. ‘A kilometre here, a kilometre there, a drop of water more, a drop of water less – what is this compared to a peace agreement?’ asked Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli Prime Minister, when challenged in his cabinet about compromises he made to secure today’s peace treaty. His next scheduled engagement was a morning session of talks with Mr Mubarak and Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organisation.The eerie, dark-of-night visit to Sadat’s tomb was symbolic of the frantic pace of a trip that during today, Thursday and Friday will take Mr Clinton to six countries – Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Israel, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.’A six-day trip crammed into about three days,’ one Clinton adviser said.. The burial place is sited alongside a 10-lane highway near the reviewing stands where Muslim fanatics shot Sadat dead in 1981, two years after he had made peace with Israel.
Mr Clinton, joined by the Egyptian President, Hosni Mubarak, laid a wreath at the tomb before going to Quebbeh Palace for a few hours’ rest. Mr Clinton’s heavily guarded motorcade brought him directly to Sadat’s tomb from Cairo International Airport, where the presidential Boeing 747, Air Force One, landed at 1am.

CAIRO (Reuter) – President Bill Clinton began a frenetic tour of the Middle East early today with a visit minutes after he arrived in Cairo to the tomb of the assassinated Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat. He demands a total Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights and Lebanon before signing a peace with Israel.(Photograph omitted). Mr Clinton will then travel to the ancient Nabataean city of Petra, the fortress north of Aqaba, before travelling to Amman to address the parliament.Tomorrow, he will fly to Damascus to meet the Syrian President, Hafez al-Assad. ‘I do not know how many of you are aware that the piece of marble which carried the date of the third Hashemite reconstruction was damaged within 24 hours of its erection,’ he said ‘It is still damaged now.