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Ammon News - AMMONNEWS - By Jeffrey Robbins - Jordan’s minister of planning painted a sobering picture of the dire challenges facing his fragile country in a meeting with visiting Americans this week.

“We have been hit,” he says, “by a slow-moving tsunami.”

A society whose tolerant traditions contrast sharply with most of the Middle East, Jordan has absorbed 1.4 million refugees from across its border with war-torn Syria, a figure roughly 20 percent of its population. That is the proportional equivalent of the U.S. taking in 60 million refugees, and the burden on Jordan to provide food, housing and social services for them is crushing.

Jordan’s location next to imploded Arab states has meant that it has had to cope with metastasizing Islamic extremism. U.S. meetings in Amman’s Royal Palace and with Jordan’s prime minister were taken up in part by talk of recent ISIS-related attacks, which claimed Jordanian lives and reinforced concerns about their predicament.

The strong, even warm, working relationships between Jordanian and Egyptian officials and their Israeli counterparts is not widely known. This is no accident: The Egyptians and the Jordanians work to keep their relationships with Israel under the table to avoid roiling their venomously anti-Israel streets.

For its part, Israel, which provides key assistance to its two Arab neighbors, including in their fights against Islamic terror, knows that preserving these strategically important ties means helping to keep the co­operation under wraps.

“The security and prosperity of Egypt and Jordan,” one Israeli official said, “are vital to the security and prosperity of Israel.”

Still, Israel would vastly prefer to have Egypt and Jordan urging their populations to accept its existence, to begin conditioning them to the idea of a real peace extending beyond paper treaties. Israel knows that no Arab government can flaunt its cooperation with Tel Aviv, but it believes that Arab governments can find ways to let their people know not only that Israel is not the devil it is portrayed as, but actually a partner.

Egypt and Jordan will be seeking additional U.S. aid next year. There is a strong case for providing it. Congress and the incoming Trump administration would do well to impress on the two governments the importance of stepping up their efforts to reduce the mindless hatred in the region by standing up more publicly against it.