JERUSALEM — This holy city--always the emotional heart of the Arab-Israeli conflict--has become the setting for a recent, elaborate, high-stakes cat-and-mouse game between Israelis and Palestinians.
Palestinian officials are playing the mice, scurrying in and out of Jerusalem, trying to force the Israelis to put discussions of sovereignty on the table. The Israelis are the increasingly frustrated, angry cats.
Both sides believe their every move may determine the ultimate status of a city each claims as its capital.
The game is played in rhetoric and deed. It came close to theater of the absurd this week, with the revelation by outraged Israeli officials that a senior Palestinian official had "secretly" visited Al Aqsa mosque on Wednesday.
Neither side is laughing.
Even as Yasser Abed-Rabbo, minister of information in the Palestinian Authority, made his unauthorized visit that so incensed the Israeli government, Jordan's King Hussein flew over the city for the first time since the Jordanian loss of Jerusalem in the 1967 Middle East War.
The king's move was welcomed here as further evidence of Jordan's willingness to make peace. Abed-Rabbo's gesture was denounced in a formal statement by Moshe Shahal, the Israeli police minister, as not in keeping with conduct appropriate to a Palestinian minister.
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Israel insists it has the right to say when and where Palestinian ministers may travel inside Israel; it considers all of Jerusalem part of Israel. "There is no question of whether or not they are allowed to visit," Shahal said. "The question is of prior coordination and acting according to agreements."
Jerusalem Mayor Ehud Olmert was more blunt, saying of Abed-Rabbo's visit: "This was done clearly and with prior planning as a provocation, which is aimed to serve specific public relations purposes and to give some sort of political expression and to get reactions both among us and the Palestinian public. In a situation like this, to create provocations around the Temple Mount, this is playing with fire."
For the Israelis, the difference between Hussein's interest and that of the Palestinians is clear and crucial.
The king, who claims the Prophet Mohammed as a direct ancestor, has taken to saying recently that only God should be sovereign over Jerusalem's holy sites. Israel took that to mean that he was willing to allow Israel to exercise political sovereignty over the city, so long as Muslims were granted "sovereignty" over Temple Mount in the walled Old City.
