Israel, Jordan Begin to Bridge Gaps : Mideast: The border town of Eilat hopes to bask in the glow of warming relations between the two countries.

The “peace promenade” exists now only as a narrow strip of granite walkway bordering a few hundred yards of seashore at the southern tip of Israel’s southernmost coastal town.

But Mayor Gabi Kadosh is convinced that someday soon, the promenade will stretch around the Gulf of Aqaba, linking the Egyptian resort of Taba to Israel’s Eilat, meandering on to Jordan’s Aqaba and ending somewhere over the Jordan-Saudi border.

The entire distance from Taba to the Jordanian border with Saudi Arabia is just 8 1/2 miles, Kadosh pointed out. But for years, to the residents of Eilat it seemed much farther than that. This resort town lived in isolation from its neighbors.

Today, with relations warming rapidly between Israel and Jordan, the 8 1/2 miles is shrinking fast and Eilatis believe they will feel the impact of peace between Israel and Jordan, when it comes, more immediately than any other Israeli city.

“I am not a prophet, but I have a feeling peace will come very fast now,” said Kadosh, a member of the nationalist Likud bloc who was elected mayor just nine months ago. On his office wall, a new picture--of Kadosh shaking hands with Jordan’s King Hussein at last month’s White House ceremony ending Israel and Jordan’s 46-year state of war--is displayed even more prominently than that of former Prime Minister Menachem Begin, Likud’s first party leader.

“When the king began his statement by saying, ‘I have waited all my life for this moment,’ I knew it came from the bottom of his heart,” Kadosh said.

Since that ceremony, which brought Hussein and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin together publicly for the first time, peace negotiations between the two states have gained momentum. On his way back to Jordan last week, Hussein thrilled Israelis by flying over Israel for the first time, with an escort of Israeli air force jet fighters.

Teams of negotiators from both nations resume talks Tuesday aimed at fashioning a peace treaty. This time, the talks are taking place in Israel rather than thousands of miles away in Washington, where they dragged on at a desultory pace for more than two years.

And today, Rabin plans to join Crown Prince Hassan and U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher for a festive opening of a new border crossing between the two nations, just a few miles north of the twin ports of Aqaba and Eilat. At first, the crossing will be used only by tourists carrying passports that are neither Israeli nor Jordanian, but both sides expect that Jordanians and Israelis will also be able to cross soon.

After the ceremony, Rabin and a small group of Israelis will take a helicopter to Aqaba to join Hussein and Christopher for lunch at the king’s summer palace. Hussein also has invited Rabin and his party to join him for a sail on the royal yacht after lunch. Hussein is making the sort of gestures Israelis crave as they continue to search for acceptance and offers of friendship from their Arab neighbors.

Adding to the sense of excitement, Israeli President Ezer Weizman telephoned Hussein in Amman on Sunday, inaugurating direct communications between Israel and Jordan.

“It is all happening so fast, it feels like a dream to many of us,” said Yehudit Ostfeld, a 30-year resident of Eilat who moved here when it was a village of 6,000 people. Today, the town boasts 35,000 residents and an ever-increasing number of luxury hotels. But for decades, Ostfeld said, Eilatis have felt hemmed in, wedged between hostile neighbors.

“We always thought that Jordan was not in the ordinary category of Arab enemies,” Ostfeld said. “We could look across the bay and see Aqaba. It seemed so close, too close for us to be enemies. We felt that if there wasn’t this huge conflict between Israel and the Arab states, Jordan and Israel could have made peace long ago.”

Kadosh said he already is counting on meeting his Aqaba counterpart and on being able to enlist his help in tackling the problems of pollution, sewage treatment, water supply and insect control that plague the bay.

“For Eilat, peace will be a huge change,” Kadosh said. “Right now, we are a border city. Tourists in Europe or anywhere else hesitate to come to Eilat, because they think it must be a dangerous place, surrounded by enemies. But soon, we will be a city of peace, a bridge for people traveling to Egypt, to Jordan to Israel or Saudi Arabia.”

Kadosh said his administration already is working on plans to market Eilat as a base from which tourists can visit Aqaba, the ancient Jordanian city of Petra, Taba in Egypt’s Sinai desert or even Mecca, Islam’s holiest city, in Saudi Arabia.

Kadosh’s office is cluttered with drawings for vacation villages and housing tracts that he believes will begin to sprout rapidly once a peace treaty is signed. By the turn of the century, he predicted, the city’s population will have ballooned to 60,000--all because of peace.

“In Washington, at the ceremony, I felt I was witnessing not just the signing of a piece of paper but a marriage, the marriage of two peoples,” Kadosh said.