BRIDGING THE RIVER JORDAN : This Year in Jerusalem for Jordanians : Pact: The Holy City has been but a glow on the horizon for many who wished to visit. Now they can realize a dream.

All his life, when clear nights have made it possible to see for hundreds of miles, Abdul Salam Samarneh Ajarmeh has gazed with longing at the lights of Jerusalem twinkling on the horizon.

On Wednesday, as he watched the leaders of Jordan and Israel sign a peace treaty and embrace, Ajarmeh started planning his first visit to the Holy City.

“Sure, I am going to go,” Ajarmeh said, smiling broadly at the image of senior Jordanian and Israeli military officers shaking hands and exchanging gifts near the close of the desert ceremony.

Ajarmeh had gathered with his brothers and some friends in the tiny bookstore he owns to watch the signing on television.

“Look how happy, how relaxed, King Hussein looks,” Ajarmeh said. “He is at peace with himself because he knows that he is doing the right thing.”

King Hussein is counting on villages such as Naur to form the bedrock of support for his bold conclusion of a formal peace treaty with Israel.

Lying 20 miles south of Amman, Naur is home to a mix of settled Bedouins, Circassians and Christians. Several thousand Palestinians who fled east across the Jordan River in 1948, when Israel was born, or in 1967, when Jordan lost the West Bank to Israel in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, also call Naur home.

The village is organized along tribal lines, and tribes--generally fiercely loyal to King Hussein--are the basis of social stability in Jordan.

Ajarmeh counts 20,000 members of his tribe--nearly half the population of Naur. Four of his immediate relatives, he said, are army officers. One of his 11 brothers is in the police force.

“These days, there are some saying they do not recognize the state and our leadership,” Hussein told a group of army officers in a speech Monday night about opposition to the peace treaty with Israel. “We told them if we assume that there is no state and we were back to our tribes, my tribe is the biggest, and that is the overwhelming majority of the people, and my organization is the largest in the country, and if you want to push things to the limit, we will deal with this issue.”

The sons of Naur have for decades flocked to jobs in the army, police and muhkhabarat , or secret police.

Ajarmeh estimates that about 40% of the men in this village of 45,000 are employed in one branch of the security forces or another.

Over the years, they have seen the government establish new, modern schools in Naur, build factories and provide subsidies to those in the security forces to build homes and put their children through university.

Nauris, Ajarmeh said, are loyal people who trust King Hussein to make the right choices for Jordan.

“All his life, the king has worried about leaving something for the generations to come,” Ajarmeh said. “This peace will be a good thing, I think. During all these years, we were in a state of no war, no peace. Now, we finally have a solution that might improve the economy and create more jobs.”

Ajarmeh and his friends expressed the general feeling that perhaps the signing was a bit sudden, but they had little patience with the strident opposition to the peace treaty being expressed by Islamic fundamentalists in Jordan.

Fundamentalists staged a rally in downtown Amman on Tuesday--defying a government ban--and fundamentalist parliamentarians boycotted President Clinton’s speech to the Parliament on Wednesday night.

The Islamic Action Front, the political wing of the powerful Muslim Brotherhood, has repeatedly pledged publicly that it will do all that it can, within democratic limits, to torpedo the implementation of Jordan’s treaty with Israel.

Ajarmeh said he has little sympathy for the Palestinians who say that the king concluded a formal peace with Israel too quickly and who charge him with improperly maintaining Jordan’s religious claims to the Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem.

“The Palestinians signed an agreement with Israel before us,” Ajarmeh protested, referring to the September, 1993, framework accord that Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization signed in Washington. That accord granted limited self-rule to the Palestinians in the West Bank town of Jericho and the Gaza Strip.

But he shakes his head in vigorous dissent when a reporter suggests that opposition to the peace treaty from Palestinians--who many believe form a majority of the population in Jordan--could lead to civil war here.

“Impossible,” Ajarmeh said. “There will never be problems again in Jordan between Jordanians and Palestinians.”

In 1970, the king unleashed his army on the PLO-controlled refugee camps after the PLO challenged the regime’s hold on power. In what Palestinians term Black September, the PLO was crushed and driven out of Jordan.

Ever since, control of the camps has been in the hands of the Jordanian security forces.

Such days are behind Jordanians now, Ajarmeh insisted. The signing of a peace treaty with Israel offers hope, he said, of a better life for everyone, if peace brings the economic benefits many Jordanians expect it to deliver.

“There will be more jobs, business will be better. The government will not have to spend so much on the military and will give more money to local projects,” Ajarmeh predicted.

As the crow flies, Jerusalem is only a two-hour drive from Naur.

Before the state of Israel was born, Nauris and other villagers in what was then Transjordan made the trip regularly. Villagers would sell vegetables and livestock in Jerusalem, and bring back cloth and other dry goods to their homes.

But in 1948, Israel accepted the United Nations’ partition of Palestine into Jewish and Palestinian states, declared its independence and successfully defended itself against the combined Arab armies.

When the fighting stopped, Jordan held East Jerusalem, including the walled Old City that houses sites holy to Islam, Judaism and Christianity. It also held what became known as the West Bank (of the Jordan River) and the East Bank--now the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. The first wave of Palestinian refugees flooded into Jordan.

Ajarmeh, a Bedouin whose mother was Palestinian, was born the year that Jordan lost the West Bank and East Jerusalem to Israel. That defeat led to another, even more destabilizing flood of refugees into Jordan and ended any contact between East Bank Jordanians and Jerusalem.

For Ajarmeh, Jerusalem has always been a tantalizing dream--until Wednesday.

Asked how he feels about the prospect of hosting Israelis in Jordan or traveling to the Jewish state, Ajarmeh shrugged.

“Why not?” he asked. “We already see many foreigners in Jordan.”