French envoy warns: Israel’s security ties with Jordan and Egypt at risk

Israel’s ties with Egypt and Jordan, long considered the cornerstones of its regional security and diplomatic architecture, are at risk if the Gaza war spirals, French Ambassador Frederic Journes told The Jerusalem Post this week.

“Escalation [of the war] is putting at risk Israel’s relationship with the region as a whole, the peace Israel already built a long time ago with its two direct Arab neighbors and the normalization it was creating with its broader [region], which we believe should be back on track at some point,” he said.

Among the issues of concern has been the potential for Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank to be displaced as a result of the violence, Journes said.

Balancing the ties with Jordan and Egypt

Egypt and Jordan “do not want any involvement in that” and view such a step as “unacceptable,” Journes explained, adding that it would be seen as a “radical shift in their security balance with Israel.”

The Hashemite Kingdom is “extremely concerned” that the actions of some “radical settlers” in the West Bank would scare Palestinians to the point where they would head to neighboring Jordan.

Jordan has said that if this translates into “the larger-scale movement” of people from the West Bank into its country “that would jeopardize their entire security relationship with Israel,” Journes stated.

He spoke with the paper during a lull in the Gaza war that began on October 7, during a week in which public attention was focused on the release of Hamas-held hostages, including three Israelis with French citizenship.

Journes arrived in Israel from his previous post as France’s ambassador to Switzerland at the end of August, when Israel appeared on the verge of regional peace with its neighbors, including a normalization deal with Saudi Arabia.He was credentialed on September 19, less than three weeks before Hamas killed over 1,200 people in southern Israel and seized some 240 hostages.

That attack and the war that followed have put at risk not just the regional ties that Israel wants to build, but also its long-standing diplomatic ties with Egypt from 1978 and Jordan from 1994.

The internal displacement within Gaza of what is now 1.9 million Palestinians, out of the enclave’s 2.7 million, coupled with statements by Israeli politicians about relocating them even temporarily to Egypt’s Sinai, has raised concerns.

Blunt statements by Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and other politicians about the voluntary relocation of Palestinians out of Gaza have only underscored such fears in the Arab world, including in Jordan and Egypt.Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has reassured his allies and has publicly stated that such fears are baseless and that Israel is not transferring or displacing Palestinians.

As a sign of the emotional cords struck by the war, which according to Hamas has claimed over 14,800 Palestinian lives, Arab officials have spoken out about their fears of forced transfer.

Jordanian Prime Minister Bisher al-Khasawneh said this week his country would resort to “all the means in its power” to prevent Israel from implementing any transfer policy to expel Palestinians en masse from the West Bank.

Any threat to Jordan’s national security would “put all options on the table,” Khasawneh said, adding that recent deployments of troops along the borders with Israel were part of measures to protect the country’s security.

“Any displacements or creating the conditions that would lead to it, Jordan will consider it as a declaration of war and constitutes a material breach of the peace treaty,” state media quoted Khasawneh as saying.

The concern is so great that even the attempts to relocate Palestinians from northern Gaza, where the fighting has been, to the south for safety have triggered these kinds of transfer fears, Journes said.

“Israel is trying to reassure Jordan and Egypt,” said Journes, adding that the Hashemite Kingdom has been given a special role in the provision of humanitarian aid to Gaza in the last weeks.

The war created tensions among Israel and its allies over the scope of the IDF’s military campaign, even as it has solicited a high level of support and sympathy over the October 7 attack.

French President Emmanuel Macron visited the Jewish state in the aftermath of the attack, as did the country’s foreign and defense ministers, as well as the head of the parliament.

France has been strongly supportive of Israel’s goal of ousting Hamas from Gaza, but like many European countries has had concerns about Israel’s military actions, particularly the high casualty count, and about its plans for the day after the war.

There is a question here of whether all of Israel’s military goals are reachable, Journes said.

“If the conflict remains limited to Gaza, there is still something at stake for Israel, which is the extent of the success in carrying out its military objectives, if they are reachable,” he said

“Depriving Hamas [of] territorial control, not allowing its leadership to coordinate actions from Gaza into Israel, that is reachable,” he said.

Moving forward, should the war resume, he stated, it would be important for Israel to maintain a low casualty count and ensure the provision of humanitarian aid. France has donated €100 million to help Palestinians in Gaza, including providing a floating hospital to treat the wounded.

Journes, who served as a first adviser in France’s Embassy in Kabul from 2010 to 2011, compared Israel’s battle against Hamas with those the West has fought in Afghanistan, Iraq, and specifically its war against ISIS in Mosul in 2017, in which 10,000 civilians were killed.

Out of the three campaigns, the only one that succeeded was in Mosul, he said, where “we deprived ISIS of their ability to control territory” and “eliminated their leadership” and position as a “driving revolutionary Islamic force in the Arab world.”

Israel should “[use] that example to take it into account to calculate the warfare better,” Journes said. Even he noted, however, that Hamas is a different sort of enemy.

ISIS also had less public support in Mosul, and the Global Coalition against Daesh had more political support because the coalition had done a better job than Israel on information warfare, he added.

That warfare is the second battlefront, he said, explaining that there is an “information dimension to this crisis, and Israel is having a hard time with that.

Once war broke out, one of Israel’s highest goals should have been to“discredit Hamas” and to “convince everybody that Hamas cannot be taken into account anymore as a respectable political player,” Journes said, adding that “to me that was fundamental.”

In the last weeks, the opposite has happened, and Hamas has “strengthened its legitimacy in the Arab world,” Journes said.

At issue for Israel in the public sphere has been the civilian casualty count. Journes said that in comparison to Mosul, the casualty count is higher, without the same comparable result at that stage.

Hamas has designed this war to ensure a high tally, Journes stated. Hamas is not trying to keep the IDF at bay; it is trying to lure the IDF into battlegrounds in civilian centers, to ensure the highest amount of casualties among noncombatants, he explained.

Despite this, he said, Israel must minimize the civilian casualty count should the war resume, particularly if the battleground moves from northern to southern Gaza.

“What we are telling Israel, what the Americans are telling Israel,” he said, is that “with the continuation of the war, until the ceasefire, this must be much higher in Israel’s consideration.”

Journes emphasized that he believes Israel had a fundamental base of international support. France, the US, and others “have been saying Israel has a right to defend itself because Israel has been attacked.

“Israel is enjoying, since October 7, much higher international support than it did during its previous preemptive wars, and that should not be neglected,” he stressed.

But “we need to understand in which world we are operating today and which enemy Israel has in front of it right now,” Journes stated.

What Israel does in the aftermath of the war also matters, he said, as he explained the importance of restoring the Palestinian Authority to Gaza and linking that territory with the West Bank as part of a push for a two-state resolution to the conflict.

The international community, he said, also has to do a better job of meeting Israel’s concerns regarding the PA.“Israel has been saying three things that are important in the last three weeks,” Journes said.

 It has insisted that it can only work with the PA if three basic conditions are in place, he said, as he listed those concerns. The PA must recognize the October 7 massacre, halt its monthly payments to terrorists and their families, and stop educational incitement against Jews and Israel.

“These are extremely important, and we need to take them into account,” Journes said.He also spoke of the importance of Palestinian recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, a point that Netanyahu has long underscored.

The fact that this point was neglected during the Oslo peace process in the 1990s was one of the reasons “it was not concluded positively,” he said.

Moving forward, he explained, “The acceptability of Israel needs to be put back at the core of any political process.”Reuters contributed to this report.