When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu engages in boastful rhetoric about the meetings he holds with Arab leaders – including the recent revelation of a secret meeting five years ago with the United Arab Emirates’ foreign minister – he seemingly ignores Islamic forces looking on at these diplomatic moves. The recent tensions over Jerusalem’s Temple Mount make it clear that any diplomatic or security move is also immediately gauged from a perspective that transcends the religious importance of the holy sites.
The Al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount, like the Kaaba in Mecca and the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron, is an Islamic site that is inseparable from the core issues of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. They are sites that, when harmed, spark public outrage that can put the regimes in Arab and other Muslim states on a collision course with Islamic movements in their countries.
It also puts them in conflict with a sensitive Muslim public that can delegitimize closer ties between Israel and Arab countries, and places them in conflict with a secular Arab public that views the events as a deliberate attempt by Israel to take over Palestinian sites. [...]
Saudi Arabia, whose king, Salman, did lobby the United States to pressure Israel to reopen the Temple Mount compound to Muslim worshippers, refrained from making statements on the matter – and the silence was not only on the part of senior Saudi officials. It was also impossible to find detailed news reports in Friday’s Saudi press on the sequence of events on the Temple Mount. [...]
These comments contain a hint of a Jordanian expectation of a gesture on Israel’s part that will give the Jordanian monarch ammunition that will convince Abbas to agree to new security arrangements on the Temple Mount. It is possible Netanyahu received similar messages from the Egyptian president.
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