Defense Minister Moshe Dayan has warned Jordan that if it continued to wage “a war of terror” against Israel, the war would pass to Jordanian soil and be decided there.
Speaking at a meeting of the regional council at Samakh, attended by representatives of settlements in the Israeli side of the Jordan Valley, Gen. Dayan emphasized that Israel would not accept a cease-fire agreement that was not applied to terrorist activities and under which terrorist organizations were permitted to wage war on Israel’s side of the cease-fire line. This “unilateral right” is not for the Arabs alone, he warned.
“If Jordan wants to become the sword of the Arab countries and if Jordan tries to do what Egypt stopped doing after it evacuated residents of cities and towns along the Suez Canal, then Jordan would also have to pay for it,” Gen. Dayan declared. He warned that the entire Jordan Valley would become a battlefield with no place for civilian life because families and livestock could not “live under the same roof with acts of war.”
He told the settlers that while some 70,000 Jordanians had left Jordan Valley settlements as refugees in Jordan, there had been increased recruiting of Israeli civilians and youth for border settlements.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
