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What followed was the by-now-familiar White House rigmarole of a statement amounting to a denial, followed by a statement disavowing the denial and amounting to a confirmation.

A White House official told the liberal Ha’aretz newspaper: “These comments, if true, were not authorized by the White House. They do not reflect the U.S. position, and certainly not the President’s position.” Then on Tuesday, in a briefing with reporters, Trump’s National Security Adviser, H.R. McMaster said “no Israeli leaders” will be permitted to accompany Trump to the Western Wall. “He’s going to the Western Wall mainly in connection with the theme to connect three of the world’s great religions … and to highlight the theme that we all have to be united against the enemies of all civilized people.”

This is the sort of subject that you could say Palestinians and Israelis across the political spectrum tend to consider a bit “touchy.”

Palestinians are routinely harangued by deranged imams with conspiracy theories to the effect that there is no ancient Jewish connection whatsoever to the Temple Mount, which also happens to be the site where the Prophet Mohammed is said to have ascended to heaven on a winged horse. The Temple Mount’s Al-Aqsa mosque and the famous Dome of the Rock are administered by the Jerusalem Islamic Waqf, under the authority of the Kingdom of Jordan.

The touchiness of the subject was not exactly eased in the final days of Barack Obama’s administration, when the White House decided to withhold the American veto and abstain from a UN Security Council resolution demanding a halt to “all Israeli settlement activities” in the West Bank. This might have been fair enough, but the resolution also declared that Israel could not claim any “legal validity” to its hold on the Old City of Jerusalem, either.