<Special Feature 1 "Islam as a Source of Contemporary Thought: New Advances and Outlooks">Normalization with Enemy or Support for Brethren?: The Debate on the Muslims' Visits to the Israeli-occupied Jerusalem

Abstract

In the wake of the Arab-Israeli normalization in 2020, many analysts have made a huge effort to find out the immediate factors for that move. However, there has been a tendency to ignore what seems to be indirect or irrelevant in a quest for a lean description about the transformation in the Arab-Israeli relationship. For a more comprehensive understanding of the recent move, this paper deals with the case of the debate on Muslims' visits to Israeli-occupied Jerusalem. Since 1967, when Israel occupied the eastern part of Jerusalem, whether Arab Muslims would be allowed to visit their holy sites there has been a topic of debate. The majority of Arab Muslims believed that they should avoid such visits, which might be misinterpreted as their acceptance of the Israeli authority over occupied Jerusalem. However, in the 2010s, some Muslim thinkers and politicians began initiatives to urge Arab Muslims to visit Jerusalem's holy sites in order to give assistance to the local Palestinians who were oppressed by the Israeli occupation policies. While initially such callings were heavily criticized, in the middle of the 2010s, the idea of visiting Jerusalem under the Israeli rule gained status as one legitimate option. By reviewing the debate of the 2010s, this paper will reveal an overlooked dimension of the Arab-Israeli rapprochement and attempt to describe the changes in their relationship in a wider sense.