A few days ago, Sheikh Muhammad Hussein, the mufti of the Palestinian Authority and Jerusalem, published a fatwa (religious ruling) stating that Muslims in the United Arab Emirates were forbidden to visit Al-Aqsa Mosque.
Who has ever heard of a fatwa like that? Who will enforce it? Whom is it supposed to deter? Will Arab states seeking to follow in the Emirates' footsteps be put off from normalizing relations with Israel out of fear that Mohammed Hussein will issue a similar fatwa for their own citizens?
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The Palestinians' relations with Arab countries aren't an ongoing love story. The Palestinians weren't prepared to accept any solution that allowed Jews in western Israel any sovereign territory whatsoever and dragged the Arab countries into joining their opposition to the UN Partition Plan in November 1947.
During the War of Independence, Arab countries sent forces which, other than the Jordanians (whose real goal was to capture the territory earmarked for a Palestinian state for Jordan), comprised only a sliver of those countries' military power.
The Arab countries themselves did take in Arab refugees from Palestine, some of who we ran off and some of whom we expelled, but only Jordan granted them citizenship. All the others kept them as second-class citizens. In 1948, Egypt, under the auspices of the Arab league, set up in the Gaza Strip the ridiculous "All-Palestine Government," whereas Arab state exploited the Palestinian problem for their domestic and international needs.
The Palestinian expectation that the Arab countries would fight us and clear the way for the 1948 refugees to return was pathetic, and the Palestinian leadership's destructive transition to the use of terrorism in the late 1960s stemmed from a no less pathetic desire to take the fate of the Palestinians into their own hands and bring about the solution they desired, by themselves.
The expectation that Arab states would, at least, provide continual diplomatic backing for the Palestinians took a blow in the Camp David Accords, and when Anwar Sadat rose to power in Egypt. The country's need for peace with Israel (to get the Sinai Peninsula back, and because it wanted security and economic ties with the US), prompted Sadat to avoid the standard precondition that there would be no peace unless a Palestinian state was established. The Palestinians managed to initiate an Arab boycott of Egypt, and have the country expelled from the Arab League, but neither lasted for long.
The Madrid Conference of 1991 led the Palestinians to hope that by holding simultaneous negotiations with the Jordanians, the Syrians, and the Lebanese, not one of these entities would be able to sign a separate peace deal with Israel. But then they themselves violated that agreement with the Oslo Accords, which did not condition Israeli-Palestinian peace on peace between Israel and any other Arab state.
The agreement between Israel and Jordan, which was signed a day after the Oslo Accords, also at the White House, was a clear statement that Jordan was not waiting for peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians. The fact that separate negotiations with Syria after the Oslo Accords were signed, was a signal that Syria had made a similar decision. The normalization deal between Israel and Mauretania, signed in 1999, as well as the upcoming normalization deal between Israel and the UAE, are also clear statements that the Arab world is still interesting in making peace with Israel, and will not wait for approval from the Palestinians to ink such deals.
The Palestinian leadership refuses to understand that the more Arab state that open embassies in Israel, the stronger pressure we will be under to reach an agreement with the Palestinians, and that these countries can help bring that about. Muhammad Hussein's fatwa will do the opposite: It will turn the Palestinians into outcasts.
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