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«Morocco has an important history with its Jewish community, unique to the Arab world», Morocco’s Foreign Affairs Minister Nasser Bourita told Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth on Saturday.
«King Mohammed VI is the religious head of state, and even his predecessors, including his father Hassan II, respected and protected the Jewish community. Morocco's relationship with the Jewish people is a special one, unheard of in any other Arab nation», Bourita recalled.
Nasser Bourita also praised the religious and communal autonomy of Moroccan Jews, noting that the Kingdom's Constitution is the only one that recognizes all Abrahamic religions. «The Jewish community in Casablanca for example, has their own religious court, synagogue and its followers are given full freedom of religious practices», he said.
«Israel's Jewish Moroccan community, which numbers some 700,000, still holds to a special relationship with Morocco. From what I understand, nearly 70,000 Israelis visited here just last year», he recalled.
«From our perspective, we are not talking about normalization because relations were already normal. We are talking about [re-formalizing] the relations between the countries to the relations we had, because there have been relations the entire time. They never stopped».
On Thursday, Morocco announced its decision to normalize diplomatic relations with Israel. Morocco closed its liaison office in Tel Aviv in 2000 at the start of the second Palestinian intifada.
