The Civil Defence Department said that it had participated in fighting brush fires that swept large areas in Israel and the occupied West Bank after the Jordanian government received an official request for help this morning.That last sentence was clearly meant to head off criticism of the being "normalization" with Israel, saying that this goes beyond politics.
It said in a statement that the contribution is part of the humanitarian regional effort in which a number of countries, including Egypt, Turkey and the Palestinian National Authority, took part alongside other world nations. It added that the fires fall within the category of natural disasters.
On the Ammon News Facebook page in Arabic, the comments from Jordanians to this story were quite mixed.
The first reaction was against the aid, saying that Israel and Jews were burning Palestinian identity in the land and that the fires were divine retribution.
The second pointed out that Israelis reacted strongly against Jordan for sponsoring the UNESCO resolution on the Temple Mount, yet Jordan needs to be smart. When Israel asks for aid, it suffers embarrassment, and by Jordan giving help it puts Jordan at a moral advantage in any future negotiations.
One person justified the aid as good training for Jordanian firefighters.
This woman was puzzled:
Yet another asked "What is the problem?" and the following commenter said that Jordan acted 100% properly.
This was all a big contrast to the reactions to the Jordanian gas deal with Israel, where practically everyone who wrote about it publicly was against the deal even though the government supported it.