Israel is often portrayed as a state that reaches instinctively for force. Yet its longest and quietest frontier tells a rather different story. Along the border with Jordan, where violence once flowed freely, Israeli guns have largely fallen silent. The contrast with Gaza and Lebanon is striking—and offers a useful test of the claim that Israel’s military campaigns are driven principally by vengeance rather than security.

The Border Where Israel Stopped Fighting

Hardly a day passes without another report portraying Israel as a destructive force in the Middle East. British and American news organisations have devoted considerable attention to Israeli military operations and settler violence in Gaza, Lebanon and the West Bank. The cumulative effect is hard to miss: readers are left with an image of a country that uses overwhelming force against its neighbours while paying comparatively little attention to the violence inflicted on Israel itself.

That picture is incomplete.

One of the more revealing places to examine Israel’s conduct is not Gaza or Lebanon, but Jordan. Israel’s border with Jordan is substantially longer than its frontiers with either Lebanon or Gaza. Yet it has been remarkably quiet for decades.

That matters because the eastern frontier provides something approaching a natural experiment. When territory on the other side of the border was used to launch attacks against Israel, Israel responded with force. When the Jordanian state subsequently regained control of that territory and prevented it from becoming a base for attacks, the Israeli response changed dramatically.

The guns stopped.

When Jordan Became the Exception

This was not always the case.

In the years before Jordan’s King Hussein confronted Palestinian militant organisations, groups operating from Jordanian territory launched raids into Israel. Israel responded by striking the areas from which those attacks originated, including agricultural communities in the Jordan Valley.

The logic was coercive as well as military. By making the territory around the frontier increasingly difficult to operate from, Israel sought to persuade Hussein that tolerating armed groups on Jordanian soil was ultimately more dangerous than suppressing them.

The confrontation culminated in the events of Black September in 1970 and the fighting that followed into 1971. Palestinian armed groups were eventually expelled from Jordan, with many moving to Syria and Lebanon.

The subsequent history is perhaps more instructive than the fighting itself.

Once Jordan established effective control over its territory and prevented it from serving as a launching pad for attacks, Israel’s military activity along the frontier largely disappeared. The two countries could remain deeply divided politically while maintaining a comparatively stable security relationship.

That distinction is important. Israel has not treated Jordanian territory as an enemy simply because Jordanian governments have criticised Israel or opposed its policies. Nor has every act of violence involving Jordanians produced a military campaign against Jordan.

In 1997, for example, a Jordanian soldier killed seven Israeli schoolgirls at the Island of Peace, near the Jordan River. King Hussein personally visited the victims’ families. The incident did not lead to war between the two countries.

The peace treaty signed in 1994 has survived such crises, as has extensive practical co-operation. Israel has also supplied Jordan with water, a resource of considerable strategic importance to a water-stressed country.

The broader point is straightforward: the eastern frontier became quiet when the threat emanating from it became manageable.

The Logic of Retaliation

This history complicates a familiar interpretation of Israeli military action.

The argument is not that Israel never acts offensively, nor that every Israeli operation is proportionate or beyond criticism. Wars inevitably produce civilian suffering, displacement and destruction, and those consequences deserve scrutiny regardless of which side initiates a conflict.

The narrower argument is that Israel’s military behaviour is strongly conditioned by whether territory adjacent to Israel is being used to attack it.

Gaza illustrates the dilemma.

Hamas’s attack on October 7, 2023, was launched from territory immediately adjacent to Israeli communities. The assault killed civilians, took hostages and demonstrated the extent to which Hamas had been able to develop a military infrastructure close to the Israeli border.

From Israel’s perspective, destroying that infrastructure is therefore not simply retaliation. It is intended to make a repeat of the attack more difficult.

That distinction does not settle the moral or legal arguments surrounding the war. Nor does it establish that every Israeli strike is necessary or justified. But it does explain why Israeli military planners regard infrastructure used by Hamas as a security problem rather than merely as a target for punishment.

There is, of course, another reality. Many Israelis genuinely do feel anger and a desire for retribution after October 7. The atrocities generated a profound sense of trauma, as well as demands that those responsible be punished.

But popular sentiment and state policy are not necessarily the same thing.

The more consequential question is what happens when the perceived threat disappears.

Jordan provides the answer.

Lebanon’s Unhappy Contrast

Lebanon demonstrates what happens when that condition is absent.

Israel withdrew completely from southern Lebanon in 2000. Yet Hezbollah subsequently constructed an extensive military infrastructure close to the border, with weapons, fortified positions and other facilities embedded within civilian areas.

The result has been a cycle familiar throughout the region: Hezbollah attacks Israel; Israel attacks Hezbollah; civilians live amid the consequences.

The central difference between Lebanon and Jordan is not that Israel possesses different attitudes towards Arabs on opposite sides of its borders. It is that the two states have exercised very different degrees of control over armed groups operating from their territory.

Jordan eventually did what Lebanon has struggled to do: establish a sufficiently strong state monopoly over violence along the frontier.

Once that happened, the Israeli military threat receded.

Lebanon has not reached the same point. Hezbollah remains a powerful armed organisation, while Iran continues to provide it with support. The Lebanese state’s ability to impose its authority throughout the country remains constrained.

That makes a Jordanian-style settlement much harder to reproduce.

A Useful Test of Israeli Intentions

The Israeli-Jordanian frontier therefore offers a useful counterweight to the notion that Israel’s military campaigns can be explained principally by aggression, vengeance or an appetite for territorial destruction.

If those were the principal drivers, one might expect Israel to have continued attacking Jordan regardless of what happened on the other side of the border. It did not.

The change in Israeli behaviour followed a change in the security environment.

That does not make Israel immune from criticism. A government can respond to a genuine security threat and still make mistakes. Military necessity does not automatically excuse civilian casualties, excessive force or poor political judgment. Nor does the existence of an armed adversary absolve governments from considering what comes after military operations end.

But the Jordanian experience makes one proposition difficult to dismiss: Israel’s willingness to use force is closely linked to whether neighbouring territory is being used to threaten Israeli territory and civilians.

There is a final irony.

Israel’s preferred economic relationship with its neighbours is hardly one based on destruction. Water technology, desalination, agriculture and medical research have become important areas of regional co-operation. Israel has substantial incentives to trade, develop and share technology with its neighbours when the security environment permits it.

Jordan shows what that relationship can look like when the border itself is no longer an active battlefield.

Gaza and Lebanon show the opposite.

The lesson is not that every Israeli military action should be accepted without question. It is that the reasons for those actions cannot be understood without examining what happens on the other side of the border.

The quietest Israeli frontier may therefore tell us something important about the noisiest ones: when the attacks stop, Israel can stop fighting too.