Socio-Economics History Blog

Socio-Economics History Blog

A New Challenge to Jordan’s Status On The Temple Mount

by mosesman
A clause embedded in the normalisation agreements marks a ‘radical change in the status quo’ at the holy Al-Aqsa compound in occupied East Jerusalem, observers say.
  • A New Challenge to Jordan’s Status On The Temple Mount
    by NADAV SHRAGAI, https://www.jns.org/
    Rabat and Riyadh will now try to make it as difficult as possible for Jordan to maintain its status at the holy site, thereby also challenging Israel and the United States on this sensitive matter.
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    (December 14, 2020 / JNS) Fifty-one years have passed since the establishment in Rabat, Morocco, of one of the most hostile organizations towards Israel ever. One of the more prestigious committees in the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, formerly known as the Organization of the Islamic Conference, is the Jerusalem Committee. Morocco’s kings, the “defenders of Islam’s holy sites in Jerusalem,” have led this committee for decades. From Morocco’s standpoint, normalization of ties with Israel is not just a renewed embrace of the Moroccan diaspora in Israel, but a stake with which it can improve the kingdom’s standing at the Al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount, the third holiest place in Islam.
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    Morocco has for years expressed interest in the Temple Mount. It donated dozens of prayer rugs to mosques at the site, and also transferred funds, through the Jerusalem Committee, to renovate homes and complexes in the area surrounding the Western Wall. Moroccan Foreign Minister Nasser Bourita, the central figure involved in forging the understandings and agreements recently reached with Israel, visited the mount in March 2018.
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    The array of powers and map of players on the Temple Mount are expected to undergo a period of change in the near future. Israel’s rapprochement with Saudi Arabia alongside its normalization of ties with Morocco, a Saudi ally, create a new axis of Muslim powers on the Temple Mount.
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    Jordan, the current “guardian” of the Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem and on the Temple Mount, is aware of all this and more concerned than ever. Its status on the Temple Mount may be anchored in the peace deal it signed with Israel in 1994 and in the many understandings, both formal and informal, reached with it later on, but ever since U.S. President Donald Trump’s so-called “deal of the century” was released, Muslim competition over the Temple Mount has been taken up a notch.
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