| Wadi Arabah Boundary definition |
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Wadi Arabah Boundary definition : a Carto-Morphologic perspective The eastern boundary of Israel along the Arabah valley was determined during the Peace Agreement with the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan with reference to its definition during the British Mandate in Palestine . A formal definition was published in 1922 stating : "The Palestine Order in Council 1922 shall not apply to the territory lying east of a line drown from a point two miles west of the town of Akabah in the Gulf of Akabah up the centre of the Wadi Arabah, the Dead Sea and the Jordan River …..” . Two main interpretations were given for this definition : line of lowest points and a line following the center of the wadi (center line) as perceived in its generalized wide extent. During the early 1920s there was drawn a line on 1:250,000 scale maps which was supposed to represent the lowest points interpretation. Officials who participated in the process of defining and marking this line claimed during interviews with Prof. Brawer that these maps represent the low quality of sources available at that time. A survey of maps from the early 1900s revealed that there were official British 1:125,000 scale maps of high quality covering 2/3 of the area of the Arabah. Using these maps there was conducted a carto-morphologic analysis of the lowest points interpretation for the area of the Arabah divide. In parallel , there was drawn the center line for the whole Arabah following the determination of the extent of depositional units in the valley according to a gerneralized geomorphological map. Both interpretations indicated that the boundary line on the 1:250,000 maps represent a significant shift of the boundary westward (in many places by more than 1 km). As a consequence, there was a significant decrease in the area of Palestine during the British rule, a fact which influenced in some way the definition of the agreed boundary in 1994. 
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