The PA's chief negotiator and former prime minister Ahmed Qurei has slammed the building of the synagogue, calling it a "danger" and furthermore accusing Israel of fabricating a Jewish history in Jerusalem.
In addition, as I wrote, one of the things that really upsets the Arabs is the height of the Hurva. As Palestine News Network writes:
The skyline around Abdullah bin Omar, or Omari Mosque, will be dwarfed by the new synagogue creating the illusion that the Old City of Jerusalem is Jewish.Yet Jerusalem in 1900 included not one but two tall domed synagogues that dominated the skyline, the Hurva and the Tiferes Yisrael synagogues, as can be seen in the lower right of this picture (click to enlarge):
This picture of Tiferes Yisrael shows how it dominated its immediate surroundings, circa 1940:
An interesting implication about this new kerfuffle is that it proves beyond any doubt that Israel's "moderate" peace partners are anti-Jewish, not only anti-Zionist. The Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem has been around since at least Second Temple times but the apparent official policy of the PA is to render it Judenrein, exactly the way Jordan did in 1948 when it demolished 35 synagogues there.
The fact that the PA does not countenance the presence of any Jews or the restoration of destroyed synagogues in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem shows that their policy is one of ethnic cleansing, not peace.