Turning nationalism into religious hatred

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?