Ammon News - AMMONNEWS - Israel and Jordan have been negotiating over this issue for several months now. Israel, which controls security on the mount, including entrance to it, believes that opening the mosques to paying visitors would give the Muslim Waqf, which manages the site’s day-to-day religious affairs, an incentive to keep the peace on the mount.
The Waqf, a religious trust, was once controlled by the Palestinian Authority. But it is now under growing Jordanian influence.
Some details of the negotiations were revealed in a report by the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based NGO, which is slated for publication on Tuesday. After meeting with decision makers in Israel, Jordan and the PA, the report’s authors concluded that such a move could indeed help keep peace on the mount. But they warned that Israel’s new government might make a deal harder to achieve.
An official in the Prime Minister's Office, however, stated, "There are no negotiations and no change in the status quo at the Temple Mount."
Until 2000, Jewish and Christian visitors to Al-Aqsa could enter the Dome of the Rock, Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Islamic Museum on the mount by buying a ticket from the Waqf. But that practice ended when the second intifada erupted in September 2000.
For the next three years, Israel barred Jews and tourists from the mount entirely. But in August 2003, it reopened the site to Jews and tourists despite opposition from both the Waqf and Amman. Ever since, there have been frequent clashes between Jewish visitors – mainly activists from groups that want Jews to be allowed to pray at the site – and Muslim activists, most of them brought to the mount for this purpose by the northern branch of Israel’s Islamic Movement.
A year ago, against the background of the war in Gaza and a wave of violence in Jerusalem, the security situation on the mount worsened severely. Muslim activists repeatedly attacked Jewish visitors and Israeli police on the mount with stones and firecrackers, and dozens of people were wounded in these clashes. Defense officials say the clashes contributed to an upsurge in terror in Jerusalem and the West Bank; some terrorists said explicitly during this period that they committed their attacks to “defend” Al-Aqsa, which Muslims calls the Noble Sanctuary.
One tactic police used to try to suppress the violence was restricting access to the mount for Muslim men below a certain age. The International Crisis Group report says Palestinians viewed this as collective punishment, and also as a first step toward changing the status quo to allowing Jewish prayer on the mount. Jewish politicians and activists reinforced this view by speaking in favor of such a change. Consequently, the report said, the access restrictions actually intensified the violence, by making Muslims feel threatened.
The turning point came in November 2014, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attended a meeting in Amman with Jordan’s King Abdullah and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry. Their agreements weren’t made public, but since then, Israel has made visible efforts to reduce tensions on the mount. It lifted access restrictions on Muslim worshippers almost entirely and increased restrictions on Jewish access. Jews were initially allowed to visit in groups of only five at a time, later raised to 15, and these groups often faced long waits, which the report said may have been deliberate attempts to discourage them from coming and to keep their visits short.
Netanyahu also ordered ministers and MKs not to visit the mount, and aside from one visit by former MK Moshe Feiglin, this order has been obeyed. At the same time, whether by chance or design, politicians began talking less about Jewish access to the mount. Feiglin, for instance, wasn’t reelected, and Miri Regev, who championed the issue as chairwoman of the Knesset Interior Committee, has dropped it in her new role as culture minister.
Finally, law enforcement agencies have worked to bar Al-Aqsa activists from the site. For instance, Yehuda Glick, whose activism led to his being seriously wounded in an attempted assassination last October, was indicted for shoving a Muslim woman on the mount and barred from entering the site until his trial ends. Sources involved in the issue said the police and prosecution seem to be using the indictment to keep him away from the mount for as long as possible.
All these steps produced the desired result: There has been no serious violence on the mount in recent months, though altercations between Muslim activists and Jewish visitors continue. Attorney Daniel Seidemann, an expert on East Jerusalem who isn’t normally a Netanyahu fan, said, “The prime minister deserves high marks” on this issue.
Netanyahu’s staff agrees. The report quoted one of his advisers as saying that “the two main stakeholders knew how to act responsibly. The overall sense is of an achievement, a sustainable achievement. We achieved it in spite of provocateurs from both sides.”
The success of this joint Israeli-Jordanian effort prompted the current talks on allowing visitors to enter the mosques again, as they could until 2000. This has two significant implications. First, it would mean a resumption of full coordination on the mount between Israel, Jordan and the Waqf, for the first time since 2000. Currently, this coordination is limited to policing and, to some extent, archaeological digs. Second, it would restore Jordan, as opposed to the PA, to primacy on the mount.
Israeli officials interviewed for the report said Israel wants the mosques opened to visitors for two reasons. One is to strengthen King Abdullah, both on the mount and in his conflict with Jordanian Islamists. The second is to provide the Waqf with a large and stable source of revenue from ticket sales to visitors, and thereby increase its motivation to keep the peace and stop young Muslims from throwing stones, since it knows Israel could close the gates if violence broke out.
For King Abdullah, the main benefit is Israeli recognition of his primacy on the mount. This is important, a palace official told the report’s authors, because “instability at Al-Aqsa harms internal Jordanian security and King Abdullah’s standing. We managed the Arab Spring with barely any protests of more than 800 participants. But an escalation at Al-Aqsa could bring out 80,000.”
Nevertheless, some significant hurdles emerged during the talks. For instance, Jordan demanded that two types of visitors be denied access to the mosques – soldiers in uniform and religious Jews, whom it claimed might try to pray there. Israel refused, and Jordan subsequently rescinded its sweeping objection to all religious Jews. But it insists on a mechanism for keeping Jewish provocateurs out of the mosques.
Moreover, though the talks continued after Israel’s election in March, the report’s authors believe the election results have reduced Netanyahu’s political leeway for giving Jordan a say in denying certain visitors access to the mount. Some politicians who previously advocated for greater Jewish access to the mount are now ministers, it noted, and younger politicians will be trying to embarrass them by pressuring them from the right. This could make the current coalition less willing to accept restrictions on Jewish access to the mount.
Nevertheless, the report advised both sides to try to conclude a deal on letting visitors enter the mosques. It also advised Israel to refrain from restricting access by Muslim worshippers as a punitive measure, to continue banning Jewish prayer on the mount, and to start barring Temple Mount activists from posting pictures of themselves trying to evade this ban on social media, since such posts spark chain reactions on Arab social networks.
The authors added that they don’t rule out Jewish prayer on the mount someday. However, they stressed, this can be done only as part of a comprehensive political agreement.
*Haaretz
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