In the wake of Mauritania's decision to close Israel's embassy in protest against the recent Israeli military operation in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, the Jewish state is now facing the challenge of mending ties with the Muslim world.

On Friday, Mauritania, one of the three Arab countries to have diplomatic relations with Israel and have maintained the ties for more than a decade, ordered the Israeli ambassador to the West African country to leave within 48 hours.

The development came after reports in January that Mauritanian Foreign Ministry spokesman Babah Ould Sidi Abdalla said the country's ambassador in Tel Aviv has been ordered to come back for consultation.

Mauritanian State Council President Gen. Mohamed Ould Abdela Aziz declared a freeze on ties with Israel at a mini-summit of Arab countries held in Qatar in January, in protest against the 22- day-long Cast Lead Operation in Gaza, which ended on Jan. 18.

The devastating Israeli war with a declared aim of ending Palestinian rocket fires against its south has killed over 1,300 Palestinians and wounded 5,500 others.

Israel was taken by surprise when Mauritania, which was highly critical of the Jewish state during the Gaza operation, announced its decision to shut down Israel's embassy in Nouakchott.

After Mauritania recalled its ambassador to Israel for consultation, Israel assumed that was the end of the matter and that bilateral relations would pick up.

"As someone who served in Nouakchott for four years, I am fully aware of the importance of this relationship, especially on the bilateral front but also with regard to the Arab world as a whole," said Israel's former ambassador to Mauritania, Boaz Bizmuth.

Even before the decision, Mauritania, which followed Egypt and Jordan in becoming the third member of the Arab League to recognize Israel, was indicating things might change.

Since a military junta took control of Mauritania in August 2008, Nouakchott has adopted a tough stance against Israel talking up the idea of ending ties with the Jewish state.

Asked if the Mauritanian decision to freeze ties was a low point in Israel-Arab relations, Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor said "that is not a term used by diplomats, but the situation is less good than it was."

Palmor is not only concerned about the turn of events over the last few days but also the worsening relationship between Israel and the Muslim world in general.

"We've got fewer diplomatic offices in the Arab world today than we had a few months ago -- it's a numeric fact," said the spokesman, lamenting the closure of Israel's mission in Qatar earlier this year.

However, he stressed "we are maintaining contacts with all these nations and we hope they'll realize there are common interests that should overcome all these negative feelings."

Israel's former ambassador to Turkey, Alon Liel, is far more pessimistic about Israel's standing in the Arab and Muslim worlds. It is not something that began with Gaza operation, he maintained, but rather a decade of tension and worsening relations.

It began with the outbreak of the second Intifada, or uprising, which erupted against Israel in the Palestinian territories in 2000, and continued in the wake of Israel's war with Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006, said Liel.

"We've lost Morocco, Tunisia, Oman, Qatar. We're in the middle of losing Mauritania, a crisis with Turkey. At the end of the last century we had far more stable relations with a larger proportion of the Muslim world," said the former ambassador.

As Mauritania was severing ties with Israel, Turkey, a predominately Muslim country, was seemingly repairing the bridges destroyed in the wake of Gaza operation.

Turkey's Foreign Minister Ali Babacan met his Israeli counterpart Tzipi Livni on Thursday on the sidelines of a NATO summit in Brussels.

There were widespread protests in Turkey against Israel's Gaza operation. Turkish Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was greeted by thousands of supporters in mid-night when he returned to Turkey from Davos, Switzerland after walking out of a panel debate with Israeli President Shimon Peres hosted by the World Economic Forum at the end of January.

After Thursday's meeting between Babacan and Livni, Ankara said it is willing once again to act as a broker for peace talks between Israel and Syria. Before the Gaza campaign, officials from Jerusalem and Damascus had been in indirect contact, with Turkey acting as mediator.

A further sign things are back to normal is the planned visit to Israel later this year by Turkish President Abdullah Gul.

However, Liel believes nothing has changed.

"The Israeli-Turkish crisis is very deep and its source is Turkey's prime minister," he said.

"I don't believe that a single meeting between Israeli foreign minister who is about to leave office and the Turkish foreign minister in Brussels alters two months of anti-Israeli incitement in Turkey and peoples' taking to the streets."

Yet there is still room for some optimism. In Israel's corridors of power, there was a positive reaction to meetings between senior American diplomats and both Turkish and Syrian leaders over the weekend.

Israel believes the apparent new direction taken by the U.S. administration led by Barack Obama in dealing with the Middle East could open up doors for the Jewish state.

Nevertheless, as an Israeli official put it, "there's a long way to go before we can say the crisis is over."

(Xinhua News Agency March 9, 2009)