Mahmoud Al-Sharaan-Amman

It was not sufficient or satisfactory for the Jordanian street to approve the parliament yesterday, a proposal to stop pumping and importing Israeli gas, according to an official with the national campaign to drop the agreement, and the government’s referral of the proposal to turn it into a draft law was criticized, and it is the one that oversees the agreement.

The law proposal came with a parliamentary majority, and Parliament Speaker Atef Tarawneh requested that the proposal be granted an urgency characteristic, saying, "The government is before God and the people to shoulder their responsibilities towards this proposal."

The text of the law proposal "prohibits any of the ministries and state institutions and companies owned by them from importing gas or any petroleum derivatives from the Zionist entity."

The vote on the law coincided with a sit-in in front of the parliament for the national campaign to topple the Israeli gas agreement, which prevented its members from attending the voting session.

The House of Representatives approved the proposed law to prevent the import of gas from Israel by an overwhelming majority (Al Jazeera Net)

Parliamentary disaster
The campaign considered preventing the attendance of the parliament session "a disaster against the voice of the people" and that the parliament's decision "is catastrophic by all standards, which proves that parliamentarians today are a partner and an accomplice in treachery," calling for a press conference to respond to the parliamentary decision tomorrow Monday.

"The council is supposed to put confidence in the government," campaign coordinator Hisham Bustani told Al Jazeera Net. "How is a law proposal transferred to the government that oversees the gas agreement?"

Bustani believes that the proposal "was not enough. There are bills placed in the drawers of the government, and there are legislative procedures that take many years, and a parliamentary decision was supposed to be taken to stop the agreement and hold the signatories to account."

The proposal fulfills the required
The head of the Parliamentary Legal Committee, MP Abdel Moneim Al-Odat, responds to the campaign’s statements that the proposal represents the desire of members of the House of Representatives and obliges the government to put it into law form.

The deputy continues that the government must present the law to the council within two regular sessions, and if the current government does not decide on it, it will be transferred to the next government and the next council, if their age ends.

The first Israeli gas payments to the Kingdom arrived at the beginning of this year, according to an agreement signed by the National Electricity Company wholly owned by the government to buy and sell natural gas from the American company Noel Energy in 2016, as it has the right to invest in the Israeli Leviathan gas field in the Mediterranean.

The agreement provides for supplying Jordan with about 45 billion cubic meters of natural gas with a value of ten billion dollars over 15 years, as of January 1, 2020.

For his part, an official source for Al-Jazeera Net indicates that the government is obligated to deal with the constitution with the proposed law, by studying it and sending it to the Legislation and Opinion Bureau, then returning it and presenting it to the House of Representatives, without specifying a time period for its presentation.

The proposed law passed by the parliamentarians was not subject to the Israeli Gas Agreement (Al-Jazeera Net)

No cancellation of the agreement
The law proposal did not stipulate canceling the Israeli gas agreement, nor did it stipulate a ban on importing gas from Tel Aviv on private companies, or the government banning licenses for private companies to import Israeli gas.

Parliamentary expert Walid Hosni confirms that the law proposal has not canceled the gas agreement concluded, and will not be applied retroactively, and that is clear in the text of the law.

During his conversation with Al-Jazeera Net, he indicates that the most dangerous in the law proposal includes the ban on the government with its ministries, its official public institutions and the companies owned by it, to import the gas from Israel, and this gives the right to private companies, public shareholding, and individuals to import gas from Israel.

He adds that the text contained in the law proposal to include government-owned companies, including the National Electricity Company, which signed the agreement with the government, without talking about its retroactivity, means that he approved the validity of the agreement, and thus violates what is required by the law.

29 deputies (out of 150) signed the memorandum adopted by the Parliamentary Reform Bloc, demanding that the government withhold confidence from the backdrop of the Israeli Gas Agreement, but Council Speaker Atef Tarawneh did not include it on the meeting's agenda.