Kuwaitis to visit Jerusalem

In advance of the tours, Kuwait's Foreign Minister and Deputy Prime Minister made an unofficial trip to pray in Jerusalem a month ago, during a landmark visit to the PA – the first by a ranking Kuwaiti official to the West Bank since 1967. Sheikh Sabah al-Khaled al-Sabah prayed at the al-Aqsa Mosque. His visit was coordinated with Israel but there were no Israeli officials present.

In an interview with the Kuwaiti daily al-Qabas, published on Monday, the head of the Holidays Office at Kuwait Airways Corporation, Khalaf Al-Mana, stressed that the tours do not constitute Kuwaiti recognition of Israel or normalization of ties with the Jewish state. Kuwait, like the majority of Arab states, do not maintain official ties with Israel. Nonetheless, the tourists will have to go through the Israeli border crossing from Jordan to Israel and through an Israeli military checkpoint from the West Bank into Jerusalem.

Al-Mana said the tourists' passports will not be stamped by Israel. He said the company had received all the necessary permits from Jordan and the Palestinian Authority and would start the tours on Oct. 22.

The tourists will be flown from Kuwait to the Jordanian capital of Amman, where they will board a bus and travel to Jerusalem.

They will spend two nights at a Palestinian-owned hotel in East Jerusalem and attend Friday prayers at the al-Aqsa Mosque, Islam's third holiest site.

Israel captured East Jerusalem from Jordan in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and annexed it by law, viewing it as part of its unified capital city. Most countries do not recognize the Israeli annexation and thus, in Kuwait's view, its foreign minister and its tourists are not visiting Israel, but rather illegally annexed Palestinian territory.

The Palestinian Authority, for its part, wants East Jerusalem to be the capital of a future Palestinian state.

The current seat of the Palestinian government is in the West Bank city of Ramallah, where the Kuwaiti tourists will go shopping as part of their excursion.

Kuwait's official position on Jerusalem is encapsulated in a declaration issued at the end of the Arab Summit in May in Kuwait City, where all of the participating states agreed on "the full rejection of the...Judaization of Jerusalem [and] attacks [by Israel] against Islamic and Christian shrines [in Jerusalem]."

The official Kuwait News Agency reported Sheikh Sabah's visit without mentioning the words "Israel" or "Judaization," instead emphasizing Kuwait's "constant and forever" support of the Palestinian people and quoting the minister as saying he would be paying "more visits to Palestine, including Jerusalem."

Israel's foreign ministry said in response that it was not aware of the planned Kuwaiti tours.