OIC To Hold Emergency Meeting To Discuss Jerusalem And Gaza
By Arab News
The Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) will hold an emergency meeting on Sunday to discuss the situation in Jerusalem and Gaza, at the request of Saudi Arabia, it was reported on Thursday.
The meeting between foreign ministers of OIC member nations will address continuing Israeli attacks in the Palestinian territories, which have escalated since Monday.
Israeli troops were massing at the Gaza border on Thursday, while Hamas hit Israel with rockets in intense hostilities that have caused international concern and touched off clashes between Jews and Arabs in Israel.
As fears grow that violence could spiral out of control into a full-blown war, the US announced Wednesday it was sending an envoy, Hady Amr, to the region.
President Joe Biden said that the US was in contact with Saudi Arabia and Egypt about de-escalating the situation in Gaza.
Egypt, Tunisia and other countries in the region could play a short-term role in de-escalating the current conflict, White House press secretary Jen Psaki also said on Thursday.
The moment of truth has arrived in the Middle East. The Abraham Accords will either advance or they will be stymied by Iran, fundamentalist Islam, Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. Religious reconciliation between Arabs and Jews has always taken on a deeply negative significance for the Muslim side of the hundred-year Arab-Israeli conflict. But with the signing of the Abraham Accords, a new more tolerant and moderate style of Islam appeared. Many observers viewed the Accords as the beginning of a modern Muslim triumph over the darkness of jihadism, the long history of Muslim anti-Semitism, the oppression of women, and the complete and total rejection of Israel by Palestinian Hamas. It’s not as if other peace treaties had not been signed before the Accords. But over the course of the last forty years, Israel’s peace treaties — first with Egypt, and then with Jordan — have remained cold. They began as geopolitical necessities and remain so. But there has been little person-to-person contact. And neither treaty had any religious content, what so ever. In fact, within the Arab world, political Islam and its rejection of any type of partnership with the Jewish State always held sway. Then came the Abraham Accords; and it appeared as if the gates of heaven itself had opened, and a new era was about to begin. In the UAE, a religious peace shrine was being built — comprised of a mosque, a synagogue and a church. This development, in-of-itself, became a revelation. Tens of thousands of Israeli and UAE tourists visited from both directions. Investment plans flowed and their was even talk of an Arab-Israeli NATO-like alliance system to counter the imperial ambitions of Iran and its conquest of the Levant. However, now, because of the actions of Palestinian Hamas and their backers in Iran, this whole new era has been placed in doubt. Of course, I will be the first to admit that the issue of right-wing Jewish fundamentalism also plays a part in darkening the scenario of religious reconciliation. I can do this because I was one of the first Jews in the world to publish a peace plan whereupon Jerusalem would become an open city and the capital of both Israel and a democratic Palestinian federation. And it is also true that right-wing Jewish fundamentalists were deeply disappointed by the Abraham Accords. Because these Accords traded away the annexation of large portions of the West Bank for peace and reconciliation with the UAE. But unlike with the Palestinians and their Iranian backers, the vast majority of Israelis welcomed the Accords, cheered them on, and indeed, relished them. The truth is: The majority of Israelis desire peace and would make deep concessions with the Palestinians in order to achieve it. The same cannot be said of the Palestinians. Or, for that matter, the Muslim world as a whole — and its religious leadership in particular — they too reject the very idea of a Jewish State as part of the lands of Biblical Israel. That’s precisely why the Abraham Accords seemed so revolutionary. Of course, not revolutionary in the Islamic Republic of Iran sense of the word; but truly revolutionary, as a vehicle for a vast inter-religious dialog and historical reconciliation between the three religions of Abraham. Because without a Jewish State in the Middle East, and without a true and vital peace between the many Muslims states and the only Jewish one, the very essence of the Abrahamic message becomes tainted with religious imbalance, hatred, violence, and all things evil. Yes evil, because the lands promised in the Hebrew Bible (Torah) to Abraham’s descendants include those of Ishmael. And the fact is that the same lands in the Quran were promised to the children of Moses. Peace and reconciliation are built into the Torah and Quran in a sympathetic combination. For all believers, this is not by accident. The truth is that in the aftermath of Mohammed’s revelation — in early Islamic civilization — Muslim historians and scholars all understood the relationship between the Jewish People, Jerusalem and the Temple Mount. And this was precisely the religious reason why Al Aqsa was built at this site, and that the Noble Sanctuary is the third holist site in Islam. But, of course, in our modern era, with the advent of an actual Jewish State with its capital in Jerusalem; Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Iran, the PLO, the Muslim Brotherhood and political Islam, all deny any connection to Jews with the Holy Land. They don’t deny Jesus and the Christian connection. But at the same time, they reject Jesus’ relationship to Jewish civilization and that civilization’s historical presence in the lands promised to the Jews in the Quran itself. Yes, the moment of truth has arrived in the Middle East. Will the Holy Design for peace with true reconciliation finally reign? Or, will the fundamentalists, on both sides, continue to trash both the Torah and the Quran?