AMMAN, Nov 26, Reuters - Thousands of Jordanians protested on Friday against a water-for-energy deal with Israel and the United Arabs, calling for their government to scrap its peace agreement with Israel and saying any normalisation was a humiliating submission.
Police were deployed heavily around the city centre of Amman, leading to the Husseini mosque where demonstrators marched after Friday prayers.
The protesters chanted, some carrying banners such as Normalisation is Treason in a protest organized by a mix of opposition parties, including Islamists and leftists as well as tribal groups and unions, no to the agreement of shame.
Jordan, Israel and the UAE signed the deal last Monday in the presence of U.S. climate envoy John Kerry.
Jordan would install 600 megawatts of solar power generating capacity to be exported to Israel, while Israel would provide water-scarce Jordan with 200 million cubic meters of desalinated water.
The UAE, which became the first Gulf state to normalise relations with Israel last year, was expected to build a solar plant in Jordan.
The feasibility studies are under way, but it will be one of the largest regional cooperation projects between Israel and Arab countries, Western diplomats say.
This deal is intended to link Jordan with the Zionist entity completely. It is not a trade deal, it is a normalization deal that is shameful and humiliating, said Ali Abu Sukkar, a prominent Islamist opposition figure.
Many Jordanians oppose the normalisation of ties with Israel, which resulted in a landmark peace deal in 1994, which opened the way for far-reaching cooperation in energy, water and gas.
Anti-Israel sentiment is high in a country where most of the 10 million citizens are of Palestinian descent. In the fighting that followed the creation of Israel in 1948, they or their parents were expelled or fled to Jordan.
Despite a ban on protests, sporadic demonstrations sprang up at university campuses across the country after the deal was announced this week. Hundreds of students chanted Anti-Israel slogans and called for the government to sever ties with its neighbour and scrap the project.