EILAT, Israel — As the sun sets on this Israeli resort town, a tour bus makes its way down the main street, stopping at several hotels along the Red Sea. But the passengers on this charter bus are not tourists enjoying the balmy year-round weather here, where the blue sea meets the red desert mountains. They are Jordanian day workers who make beds and wash dishes in hotels, and must return to the border crossing before it closes each evening.
They are not allowed to stay overnight in Israel, or to go anywhere alone outside of the hotels where they work under a special program that aims to fill a labor shortage while improving bilateral relations between Israel and Jordan. The only items a worker can carry across the border are a mobile phone and one opened pack of cigarettes, according to Israeli government restrictions.
“But I am happy,” says 30-year-old Ala, who works in housekeeping in Eilat’s Prima Music hotel, where old vinyl records hang from the lobby’s ceiling, each floor plays a different genre of music, and a recording studio exists where guests can produce their own songs. “The money is much better here.” Ala, who declined to give his full name for security reasons, says he now makes more than three times the money he made working in his father’s building supply store in Amman.
The program, which began in late 2015 with 500 workers and is now expanding to include a total of 1,500 workers, is just one sign of the delicate and quietly growing economic relationship between Israel and Jordan. The two countries — which have long worked together on security issues despite their share of diplomatic disputes — have made little progress on economic cooperation, which was also included in the 1994 peace treaty they signed.
Until now.
“We have to be quiet about it because there are a lot of people around us in the Middle East who don’t like this,” says Adi Ashkenazi, former director general of the economic research division of Israel’s Regional Cooperation Ministry, who was involved in setting up the hotel workers program and other projects with Jordan. “But there is a big strategic interest of Israel and Jordan to work together, especially now when you see that the Middle East is split in two, into the moderate countries against the Iran-Hezbollah-Syria Shiite axis.”
Other joint projects include the construction of a pipeline for Israel to supply $10 billion of natural gas to Jordan’s electric company, and progress on a long-stalled joint $800 million water desalination project that will supply Jordan with much-needed drinking water while also aiming to restore the shrinking Dead Sea, which borders both countries.
In northern Israel, a bridge will soon open to the Jordan Gateway Industrial Park, built in an international zone between the two countries, with the goal of helping both countries reach new markets. Products made here can be transported tax-free to Israel’s nearby port city of Haifa, giving Jordan direct access to the Mediterranean Sea. Israeli businesses can use the international space to trade and work with places such as the Persian Gulf countries, which still officially adhere to the Arab League’s boycott on business with Israel due to the country’s policies toward the Palestinians.
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It is against this background that the Eilat hotel program came to fruition. Eilat’s population of 50,000 is not big enough to supply employees for the town’s 12,000 hotel rooms, says Shabtai Shai, president of the Eilat Hotels Association. Past government programs have tried to entice Israelis to move to Eilat to fill hotel jobs, largely without success. And for several years, hotels here relied on asylum-seekers from Sudan and Eritrea who arrived in Israel in large numbers earlier this decade, to fill jobs.
But with government policy frequently changing toward these migrants, it was not a steady labor force, Shai says. So he spent three years working with at least eight different Israeli government agencies in addition to the Jordanians to get the program off the ground.
“At first, I didn’t believe it would materialize because there were so many obstacles,” ranging from security concerns to labor union opposition, Shai says. The workers, who undergo background checks by both Israel and Jordan, are supplied by three Jordanian manpower companies. Recruited from across Jordan, most move to the city of Aqaba, just across the border from Eilat, and live in housing provided by the manpower agencies and make the daily commute to Israel. They are compensated according to Israeli labor laws, and receive health insurance and benefits like pensions.
“We are very lucky to have them, they have a great work ethic, and we finally have a stable supply of labor,” says Hilla Yosha Gross, manager of the Prima Music, where Jordanians make up between 10 percent and 20 percent of employees, depending on the season.
Hotel managers also say they would like to employ the Jordanians in other departments, but Israeli government regulations limit them to working only in cleaning.
“It’s really a shame,” says David Blum, human resources manager of the Isrotel chain, which has eight hotels in Eilat. Several Jordanian workers interviewed at Isrotel’s Royal Garden hotel here say they had left jobs in Jordan requiring more skills, such as tour guiding, sales and marketing, in order to clean in Israel, due to the higher wages. Isrotel has been creative to find ways to keep morale up among employees restricted to the housekeeping department. The hotel has promoted some to being coaches for new Jordanian employees.
“I really enjoy the teaching part of the work,” says one 27-year-old Jordanian housekeeping employee at Istrotel Royal Garden who used to work in travel sales in Aqaba, and who was recently promoted to being a coach.
In Jordan, there has been some backlash against the program, including a social media campaign by the anti-normalization-with-Israel group Itharrak, and some complaints about how workers are treated, according to reports in The Jordan Times.
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There is still hesitancy on the part of Jordan to be seen by its population and by other Arab countries as working too closely with Israel, due to Israel’s ongoing control over the Palestinian territories, says Hady Amr, visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution and former deputy special envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations under the Obama administration. About 70 percent of Jordan’s population is of Palestinian origin.
“In private Jordan and Israel have an extremely close relationship,” Amr says, especially cooperating on security issues. “But there is a certain amount of public frigidness.”
In Israel, the program is largely considered a success, and workers and hotel managers say they hope this is just the beginning of increased cooperation.
“I hope to do this work here long term,” says Ala at the Prima hotel, who, recently married, moved into an apartment in Aqaba with his wife, and is building his life around future plans to work in Israel. Shai calls it a “win-win situation,” but remains cautiously optimistic.
“The friendship can go far from here. But if one bad thing happens, that can cancel the whole program,” Shai says. “Thank God, until now it has been quiet, but we have to remind them all the time that everyone is looking at us, that everyone needs to behave.”
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Program Allows Jordanians to Quietly Work in Israel originally appeared on usnews.com
