A Jordanian business owner in the Red Sea resort town of Aqaba told two Israeli tourists to leave her restaurant last week.
The New York-based Human Rights Watch organization said restaurant owner Salwa Barghouti was described by the group as a Jordanian-Palestinian.
According to the Associated Press, Barghouti told the organization that she refused to serve the two tourists, and ejected them, simply “because they were Israeli.”
Neither Barghouti nor Jordanian government officials answered AP calls on the issue. The Human Rights Watch organization, meanwhile, said in a statement that Jordan is bound by international law to ban racial discrimination in public places.
More than half of Jordan's population is comprised of Palestinian Authority Arabs who migrated to the country after Israel won territory in their area in the 1967 Six Day War and 1973 Yom Kippur War. The country's ruling echelon, however, is comprised of the Hashemite Bedouin tribe.
Although the Hashemite Kingdom signed a peace treaty with the Jewish State in 1994, there is still a great deal of anti-Israel Islamist sentiment in Jordan.
Nevertheless, the two countries also share a number of hi-tech and business ventures, as well as many joint scientific projects. Last month 30 participants from Jordan and the PA attended a week-long seminar on desalination technology conducted by IDE Technologies, an internationally-recognized Israeli firm. The seminar was held at Kibbutz Shefayim in central Israel.