From the Liveblog of
Monday, March 13, 2023
Morocco royal court decries Islamist party for criticizing ties with Israel
Morocco’s royal court on Monday criticized comments by a leading Islamist opposition party that accused the authorities of bias towards Israel.
The North African country and Israel normalized relations in December 2020, part of a series of US-backed deals known as the Abraham Accords that saw Israel also establish ties with the UAE and Bahrain.
Those agreements broke with decades of Arab consensus that ties should only be established with Israel in the event of a peace agreement that gives the Palestinians their own state.
“The general secretariat of the PJD (Justice and Development Party) recently published a declaration containing irresponsible excesses and dangerous approximations regarding relations between the Kingdom of Morocco and the State of Israel,” the royal court says in a statement.
The PJD, a moderate Islamist party led by former prime minister Abdelilah Benkirane, had made a statement last week in which it “deplored” the “recent positions taken by the foreign minister in which he appeared to defend the Zionist entity (Israel) in African and European meetings.”
It charged that this came at a time when Israeli forces were committing “criminal aggression against our Palestinian brothers,” amid a surge of violence in the West Bank.
“Morocco’s position towards the Palestinian question is irreversible,” the royal court says, noting that “the kingdom’s external policy is the prerogative of His Majesty the King (Mohammed VI) under the constitution.”
As such, it “cannot be subjected to political bidding and narrow electoral campaigns,” the statement adds.
