The Jordanian Foreign Ministry sent a letter to the Israeli embassy in Amman in protest of what it claimed was ‘visits of “extremists under the protection of the Israeli Police” to the al-Aqsa Mosque,’ which is located on the Temple Mount. In the letter, Jordan claimed the visits had taken place repeatedly over the course of a week, in which Jewish settlers were defiling the holy sanctuary; demanding the Israeli government to immediately “stop these acts of provocation and honor Jordan’s role as the custodian of the holy sites of Islam in Jerusalem,” a role Israel is obligated to honor, under the peace treaty between the two countries.
Jordan warned in the letter that ‘the ongoing situation was damaging to relations between the two countries and undermines the historic ‘status quo’ of the al-Aqsa mosque,’ a term in Latin that preserves the existing state of affairs as it was before a war: in this case prior to the Middle East war of 1967, in which non-Muslims were not permitted to worship or visit the Temple Mount.
The letter by Jordan’s Foreign Ministry further accused Israel’s “behavior” as tantamount to provoking Muslim feelings and constitutes a violation of Article 9 of the peace treaty between the two countries, which requires Israel to give high priority to the Jordanian historic role in the Muslim Holy shrines in Jerusalem. That said, the letter did not touch on subsection 3 of Article 9, which calls on both Israel and Jordan to act together to promote interfaith relations among the three monotheistic religions, with the aim of working toward religious understanding, moral commitment, freedom of religious worship, tolerance and peace.