WASHINGTON INSTITUTE
by Simon Henderson
September 19, 2014

On September 14, Kuwait’s first deputy prime minister and foreign minister Sheikh Sabah al-Khaled al-Hamad al-Sabah flew from Jordan to Ramallah for talks with Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas. The trip was noteworthy enough on its own given Kuwait’s continuing enmity toward the Palestinians for siding with Saddam Hussein when Iraq invaded in 1990. What was arguably much more significant was that Sheikh Sabah, a senior member of the ruling family, also took a side trip to Jerusalem to pray in the Old City — essentially a journey into Israel.

In the view of much of the world, he did not actually visit Israel itself but rather only occupied territory annexed by Israel after the 1967 war. Kuwait does not have official relations with Israel and, unlike Oman and Qatar, never allowed the establishment of an Israeli trade office. The one Israeli diplomatic outpost in the Gulf — not officially declared but referred to obliquely and almost certainly unintentionally last year in an official budget document — is not in Kuwait.

Still, Sheikh Sabah’s move was a rare and high-profile breaking of the longstanding Arab boycott against visiting the iconic Mosque of Omar (also known as the Dome of the Rock) and the al-Aqsa Mosque, both of which sit on top of what Arabs call al-Haram al-Sharif and Jews and Christians refer to as the Temple Mount. Known visits by prominent Arabs to the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount since 1967 can be counted on one hand: President Anwar Sadat of Egypt in 1977, Egyptian foreign minister Amr Mousa in 1994, and Egypt’s Grand Mufti and a Jordanian prince in 2012. As recently as May of this year, former Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki al-Faisal publicly declined an invitation to visit Jerusalem because it was under occupation — though the offer came from his former Israeli counterpart, Amos Yadlin, with whom the prince was publicly debating regional issues, thereby breaking another Arab diplomatic convention…..

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http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/view/kuwaiti-official-makes-jerusalem-pilgrimage