An article on the Al Jazeera website offers a more insightful
view of the brutal and bloody incidents taking place in Israel.
After the knife/axe attack on the Jerusalem synagogue, Netanyahu
and many of Israel's leaders, including Finance Minister Yair Lapid, blamed
Abbas for the attack on a synagogue in Jerusalem, slamming PA incitement and
insinuating he was working with Hamas to incite violence against Israelis. Abbas
has condemned Sunday's deadly attack, but his Israeli naysayers claim past
comments calling on Palestinians to "defend al-Aqsa" are to blame. The
terrorists who carried out the attack on the synagogue in Jerusalem have no
previous security records and did not operate within the framework of any
organization, Shin Bet security service chief Yoram Cohen told members of a
Knesset committee after the incident. "Abbas is not interested in terror
and is not inciting to terror. He's not even doing so behind closed
doors," Shin Bet head Yoram Cohen told the Knesset's Foreign Affairs andDefense Committee.
According to the Shin Bet head, the central factors behind
the current violence, was the murder of Palestinian teen Mohammed Abu Khdeir -
who was killed by Jewish vigilante in retribution for the kidnapping and murder
of three Israeli teens last June - and attempts by Israeli legislators to
change the status-quo on the Temple Mount. Visits by right-wing Members of
Knesset and attempts to introduce legislation which would change the status quo
on the flashpoint holy site were the main factors for rising tensions in East
Jerusalem as it incites anger among the Palestinians.
Many in government circles have not just tolerated but
actively supported a movement agitating for "Jewish prayer rights" at
Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif - a sacred site to both Muslims and Jews. There
has been a tendency in some quarters to see the prayer issue as a kind of
harmless coexistence campaign focused on equal rights. It is not. This movement
goes against a long-established status quo agreement, whereby non-Muslims can
visit, but not worship ‘. Israel's housing minister, Uri Ariel, has said that
he supports such a project as demolishing the Dome of the Rock mosque and
building a “Third Jewish Temple”.
Aided, abetted and funded by the Israeli government, extremist
settlers has been colonising swaths of East. It isn't just Jewish
neighbourhoods in the occupied east that are continually expanding; settlers
have also taken properties in Palestinian neighbourhoods such as Sheikh Jarrah
and non-Jewish parts of the Old City - throwing Palestinian families quite
literally out onto the streets. And it is the same movement that - fully
supported by the government and the mayor of Jerusalem - has commandeered
crucial sites.
Daniel Seidemann, an Israeli lawyer specialising in
Israeli-Palestinian relations in Jerusalem, explains that the accelerating,
rightist-driven changes in the city have meant that Palestinians "feel
vulnerable and threatened - and they are not being paranoid. The anger is
understandable and derives from serious sources".
Defining the recent conflict as a "religious war",
serves a clear political purpose. It means the Israeli government can bind its
cause with the "war on terror", claiming that Palestinians are just
like ISIL in their motivation - a hyper-violent, hyper-fundamentalist jihadi
mission. It deprives Palestinians of cause or motivation, save for just one
factor: religious hatred. It implies that there is no way out and no solution;
that the violence is inevitable.
Never mind that the Palestinians in Jerusalem have lived
under a punitive occupation for decades. Never mind that they are blatantly
treated as second-class citizens, subjected to intense surveillance, harassment
and arrests (900 in East Jerusalem since July); that they routinely deal with
settler violence, house demolitions, chants of "Death to Arabs," and
curtailed access to religious sites. Never mind the prevailing and overriding
message that their lives count less than others. For if the horrifying spate of
attacks in Jerusalem are exclusively about innate hatred for Jews - well, how
can anything else even matter?
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