AMMAN: The Jordanian government on Wednesday hit back at a coalition of opposition parties and trade unions, which strongly criticized a current visit to East Jerusalem by a team representing Jordanian media.
“The trip is organized by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to allow journalists to have a first-hand look at Jordan’s efforts to preserve the Islamic and Christian holy sites. I don’t see any normalization when the sites are under Jordan’s supervision,” Minister of State for Media Affairs and Communication Nabil Sharif said.
Sharif was responding to the National Committee for Anti-Normalization with Israel, which condemned the trip as “gross disregard for the feelings of millions of Arabs and Muslims” and called for disbarring the journalists from the Jordan Press Association (JPA). “We feel betrayed by the journalists who headed to the Israeli Embassy in Amman and applied for a visa,” the committee’s president Badi Rafayaa said.
“To go to the embassy and apply for a visa is bad enough. This is recognition of the state of Israel — a red line for the professional associations that must not be crossed,” he added.
The media men, who represent key daily newspapers and the official Petra news agency, arrived in Jerusalem on Tuesday and were scheduled to travel to the Palestinian Authority areas to meet officials there.
The authorities said the team would appraise steps taken by the Jordanian government to preserve holy places in East Jerusalem, which was captured from Jordan in the 1967 Middle East war, against a flurry of Israeli measures designed to judaize the holy city.
Jordan concluded a peace treaty with Israel in 1994, but the Islamic-led opposition and the country’s 14 professional societies are still opposed to the normalization of ties with the Jewish state.
The pact recognized Jordan’s right to look after Islamic and Christian holy places in East Jerusalem, which the United Nations still consider an occupied territory.
