Deadly steps from political into religious war
Commentary on the causes and consequences of the attack
1) Ynet news: The 10 quiet years are behind us, Nahum Barnea: They had a huge powder keg in front of them, and they let Feiglin and his friends play with matches;
2) Haaretz: Behind the silent reaction of the Palestinian street, Amira Hass says most Palestinians were appalled by the killing of men at prayer, but share the anger at the occupying power;
3) BBC: Synagogue attack: Netanyahu vow in ‘battle for Jerusalem’ , Netanyahu ups the stakes, + analysis by Jeremy Bowen;
4) Time: Fears of Religious Conflict After Synagogue Killings;
Security police run past the synagogue where the massacre took place. Photo by Reuters.
The 10 quiet years are behind us
Analysis: From one isolated incident to another, we’ve got ourselves an intifada on our hands, which is threatening to be as fatal as the two previous ones, both for us and for them. There are no winners here – only victims.
By Nahum Barnea, Opinion, Ynet news
November 19, 2014
The image from the scene of Tuesday’s synagogue attack in Jerusalem takes us back to the most difficult situations in the history of the Jewish people, to the pogroms, to the riots, to the Holocaust: Jews massacred in their prayer shawls, in the middle of a prayer; holy books drenched in blood; a desecrated synagogue.
There isn’t any sophisticated reasoning that can explain such an act, not to mention justifying it. Therefore, we cannot accept the cries of joy in Gaza and in some of the West Bank cities. Those rejoicing in such a massacre lose their moral right to cry about the occupation. The Palestinians have had many joys in 100 years of conflict, and each one of them further deepened their tragedy.
We must remember of course that there has already been such a massacre of worshippers in the middle of their prayer, at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron. The murderer was Jewish; the worshippers were Muslim. Apart from a few people, the Israeli street responded to that massacre by condemning the act and expressed anxiety and fear. That’s not the way the Palestinian street responded on Tuesday.
From one isolated incident to another isolated incident, we’ve got ourselves an intifada on our hands, which is threatening to be as fatal as the two previous ones. Fatal both for us and for them: There are no winners in this affair – only victims.
The 10 quiet years, which began with Operation Defensive Shield, with Yasser Arafat’s death, with the construction of the fence and with the disappearance of the suicide terrorism, are behind us. It’s hard to know how long the current wave of terror will last and how strong it will be, but it hurts knowing that we spent these past 10 years in vain.
What is needed right now is a concentrated effort to put out the fire. The effort begins with immediate preventive measures: Boosting forces in Jerusalem and on the Judea and Samaria routes; increasing the trust between the IDF and Shin Bet and the Palestinian Authority’s security organizations, taking care of the Arab neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem, which have been neglected for years by the government and municipality.
The effort requires mutual restraint at the top, in the statements made by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and PA officials and in the statements made by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his ministers.
Surveillance of extreme Jewish people and groups must also be expanded. According to past experience, when the government restrains itself, out of choice or due to constraints, the Jewish terrorists jump into the fire. Only a week ago they torched a mosque in a small village east of Ramallah. The price tag for the synagogue massacre could be much higher.
Israeli police guard the block placed outside the homes of the synagogue killers. Photo by Getty.
Back to the Palestinians: Netanyahu promised at his press conference Tuesday to demolish the homes of the families of those who committed the massacre. There is a dispute over the effectiveness of home demolitions: The Shin Bet says it has a deterring effect, while the IDF says it doesn’t and could even achieve the opposite goal – sowing the seeds to the next attack. Each side presents data affirming its opinion, and there is no one to decide.
But all that is irrelevant, because the government – from Naftali Bennett to Yair Lapid – feels it has to show the public that it is punishing the other side, otherwise they will say that it is leftist or weak, and the demolition of homes provides good photos.
Despite Netanyahu’s seniority as prime minister, the Palestinian wave of violence is a new experience for him. In previous terms, his predecessors took most of the blow, leaving him a period of relative calm. His first serious conflict with a terror organization was in the past summer, in Operation Protective Edge, and it was alarmingly long, alarmingly expensive, and ended in an embarrassing tie and a spillover of the fire to Jerusalem.
Now too, his tool box is empty. The books he published about the war on terror are unhelpful: He is forced to learn on the fly.
The assailants and their collaborators, if they had any, are to blame for the massacre. It’s wrong, and unfair, to place the responsibility for this horrible act on the shoulders of anyone on the Israeli side. The following lines, which relate to our side, were written therefore as footnotes, not in defiance.
First of all, we are lucky to have a prime minister from the right-wing camp. With all the pain and anger over the massacre, we have at least been spared mass protests demanding the prime minister’s resignation, pictures of him in a keffiyeh, inciting speeches from the balcony overlooking Jerusalem’s Zion Square, and a campaign for his removal funded by billionaires from America.
Secondly, Israel’s ministers would be wise to leave Abbas alone. Claiming that the two villains from Jabel Mukaber went out to murder because they heard Abbas give an inciting speech is like claiming that the “price tag” criminals went out to desecrate a mosque because they heard Netanyahu give an inciting speech. The Palestinian terrorists disregard Abbas just like the Jewish inflamers disregard Netanyahu.
It’s true that Abbas has delivered a number of false, demagogic speeches about Israel and the history of the Jewish people in recent weeks. It’s true that he is working to isolate Israel in the international arena. But on the terror front, there is no cleaner person.
As Shin Bet chief Yoram Cohen said Tuesday, and as IDF commanders say, Abbas orders his people to fight terror. It is becoming increasingly difficult – but he does it without hesitation, and so far his people have been obeying his orders.
Netanyahu portrayed Abbas as a terrorist in order to gain international de-legitimization of the PA chairman’s diplomatic campaign against the Israeli government. The problem is real, but the move is pathetic: No one in the world buys into it. On Tuesday, Netanyahu realized the he and his ministers are losing their credibility. He moderated his comments.
He reiterated that “the incitement is the root of the conflict.” The incitement, indeed, inflames the hatred, but it is an outcome of the conflict, not the reason for its existence. Only a naïve person would believe that ending the incitement would end the conflict: There is a land here which both sides are finding it difficult to share, historic, religious, ethnic and national animosity. This bleeding conflict deserves some respect: Ending it with incitement belittles it.
The third point is that the terror is our problem. It is happening inside our capital and against our citizens. The prime minister’s appeal to the world to join our struggle is uncalled for. Jabel Mukaber is not Iran.
The fourth, and perhaps main point, is that the shift from a national conflict to a religious war has been in the air for quite a while. IDF, Shin Bet and police officials have been warning about it repeatedly. Leave God alone, they said, both our god and their god. Don’t get religion involved. A thousand firefighters are incapable of putting out a fire with God at its center.
The warnings did not receive the attention they deserved. On one side, they faced the nationalist populism of politicians like Uri Ariel, Moshe Feiglin, Zeev Elkin, Naftali Bennett, Rabbi Eli Ben-Dahan, Tzipi Hotovely, Miri Regev and others, who thought that changing the status quo on the Temple Mount would promote them.
(Most of them, by the way, disappeared from the horizon the moment the terror begun and there was a danger that someone would point an accusing finger at them. The Temple Mount has been deserted. Feiglin’s supporters are the only ones left there).
On the other side, the warnings faced the holy innocence of liberal circles, delicate and intelligent people in the State Prosecutor’s Office, in politics, in the public discourse, who failed to understand how dangerous it is to try to change the rules of the game on the Mount at this time.
Why shouldn’t Jews pray there, they asked. Why shouldn’t they build synagogues there? What’s the difference between the Women of the Wall and the Temple Mount Faithful? Both want to pray. They had a huge powder keg in front of them, and they let Feiglin and his friends play with matches.
Palestinian women stand in front of Israeli border police officers in the Jerusalem district of Jabal Mukaber November 18, 2014. Photo by Reuters
Behind the silent reaction of the Palestinian street
In private conversations, even those who support killing Israelis seem embarrassed by an attack on civilians at prayer; they don’t speak out because they share the anger that led to the murder.
By Amira Hass, Haaretz
November 19, 2014
In recent weeks, government officials have called for intensifying the collective punishment of Jerusalem’s Palestinian residents to deter potential attackers. But these official, public threats did nothing to deter Uday and Ghassan Abu Jamal. They planned their murderous operation despite knowing their families would suffer one way or another: violent raids on their houses, arrests, humiliation, having their houses sealed or destroyed. They surely knew that if they weren’t killed, they’d be arrested, perhaps tortured during interrogation and sentenced to life. But none of this deterred them.
It’s too easy and early to label Tuesday’s murder in a synagogue as another incident in an emerging religious war. Hamas and other organizations that exploit religion would surely prefer to portray it that way; it strengthens their position as against the PLO’s narrative, which still sees the roots of the conflict as colonial-national and requiring a political solution. But this dichotomy isn’t complete: Even Hamas officials and other pious Muslims frequently say the problem isn’t with Jews as a religious community, but against the occupation.
Nevertheless, there’s no doubt that the skullcap, the hat and the prayer shawl are symbols, both for cartoonists and for those who physically want to harm representatives of the occupation. Like the keffiyeh and the hijab, they are visible signs that make it easier for someone who wants to take revenge on “the enemy.” Similarly, a synagogue during morning prayers is a convenient target – not because it’s a house of prayer, but because it’s full of people who are undoubtedly members of the occupying nation.
One also shouldn’t make light of the feelings roused in Jerusalem’s Palestinians, and Palestinians in general, by the discovery of the body of bus driver Yusuf al-Ramouni. Police hastened to declare him a suicide, but Palestinians don’t see the police as an agency whose goal is to protect them. On the contrary: This is the police force that escorts the bulldozers that destroy their homes, that protects the settlers, that kills Palestinian demonstrators and petty criminals for no reason. Thus Palestinians fundamentally distrust the police’s motives.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas condemned the synagogue attack. His condemnation was honest and genuine, for both moral and pragmatic reasons. In besieged, destroyed Gaza, spokesmen for several Palestinian organizations congratulated the martyrs and voiced support and understanding for their deed. But among the broader public, the main reaction was silence.
When PLO and Fatah representatives are making the rounds of European capitals to encourage votes in favor of recognizing a Palestinian state, most people understand that such an attack could undermine the Palestinian cause, if only for a few weeks. Killing Jewish worshippers in a synagogue looks bad when Palestinian human rights groups are pushing Abbas to join the International Criminal Court so Israeli officials can be indicted for war crimes and violating international law.
Palestinians believe that all means, including armed struggle, are legitimate to fight the occupation. But in private conversations, even those who support killing Israelis seem embarrassed by an attack on civilians at prayer.
So why are those who oppose murdering civilians at prayer keeping silent now? Because they share the despair and anger that pushed the Abu Jamals to attack Jews in a synagogue. Like the Abu Jamals, they feel themselves under assault: The Israeli nation is constantly attacking them with all the tools at its disposal.
The Har Nof neighborhood, where the attack took place, is built on the lands of the former Palestinian village of Deir Yassin. Those who are keeping silent now see the murder as a response to an Israeli policy toward the Palestinians that has been one long chain of attacks, dispossessions and expulsions since 1948.
Synagogue attack: Netanyahu vow in ‘battle for Jerusalem’
By BBC Middle East news
November 18, 2014
Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to win a “battle for Jerusalem” after a deadly attack on a synagogue.
Two Palestinians killed four rabbis in West Jerusalem before being shot dead. A policeman later died of his wounds.
Mr Netanyahu vowed to “settle the score with every terrorist” saying that those “who want to uproot us from our state and capital… will not succeed”.
Jerusalem has seen weeks of unrest, partly fuelled by tension over a disputed holy site.
Tuesday’s attack was the deadliest in Jerusalem for six years. There were about 25 worshippers in the synagogue at the time and at least seven people were also seriously wounded.
Mr Netanyahu ordered the homes of the attackers to be destroyed, saying: “We are in a battle over Jerusalem, our eternal capital.”
He said that this was a “terrible attack at a time of prayer” and condemned what he termed the “shouts of joy” from the Palestinian-controlled Gaza Strip after the attacks.
He said he was strengthening security on the streets of Jerusalem, without giving details.
Mr Netanyahu called on the people of Israel to “stand together as one” but said that “no-one must take the law into their own hands, even if spirits are riled and blood is boiling”.
He added: “I call on all leaders of countries in the Western world: I want to see outrage over this massacre.”
US President Barack Obama has condemned the attack, saying: “There is and can be no justification for such attacks against innocent civilians.”
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas also issued a condemnation of “the attack on Jewish worshippers in their place of prayer and [of] the killing of civilians no matter who is doing it”.
Mr Netanyahu said this was not enough.
He accused Mr Abbas and militant group Hamas of spreading “blood libel” that a bus driver who reportedly took his own life in East Jerusalem on Monday had been “murdered by Jews”.
Hamas had said the Jerusalem attack was in revenge for the death of the driver, who was found hanged inside a vehicle. His family did not accept the post-mortem findings of suicide.
Mustafa Barghouti, a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, said he held Mr Netanyahu responsible “for every bloodshed that has happened, whether for Palestinians or Israelis”.
He said: “I want to remind you and remind everybody that since the beginning of this year, the Israeli army and Israeli settlers have killed 2,260 Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.”
The vast majority of those deaths occurred in the summer conflict between Israel and militants in Gaza, which also left 73 dead on the Israeli side.
‘No justification’
The attack happened at the Bnei Torah Kehilat Yaakov synagogue and religious seminary site on Harav Shimon Agassi Street – home to a largely Orthodox Jewish community in the Har Nof neighbourhood.
The attackers were armed with a pistol and meat cleavers.
The rabbis who died were Moshe Twersky, 59, head of the seminary; Arieh Kupinsky, 43; and Kalman Levine, 55, all of whom also held US passports. The fourth victim, Avraham Goldberg, 68, was also a UK citizen.
The funerals of the four were held in Jerusalem on Tuesday, with thousands in attendance.
It was later confirmed that Zidan Seif, a 30-year-old traffic officer who arrived at the scene and came under attack, had died of his wounds in Hadassah hospital.
The Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades, the military wing of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, said it had carried out the attack.
Palestinians identified the attackers as cousins Uday and Ghassan Abu Jamal, from East Jerusalem.
After the attack, there were reports of clashes in the Jabal Mukaber district of East Jerusalem, as Israeli security forces moved in to make arrests that included some members of the attackers’ families.
Tensions in the city have risen in recent weeks, with two deadly attacks by Palestinian militants on pedestrians in the city and announcements by Israel of plans to build more settler homes in East Jerusalem.
The Jerusalem compound that has been the focus of much of the unrest – known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as al-Haram al-Sharif – is the holiest site in Judaism, while the al-Aqsa Mosque within the compound is the third holiest site in Islam.
Orthodox Jewish campaigners in Israel are challenging the longstanding ban on Jews praying at the compound.
Palestinians want East Jerusalem, occupied by Israel since 1967, as the capital of a future state.
Analysis:
BBC Middle East editor Jeremy BowenThe two sides are further apart than ever. Their conflict used to be, at root, about the possession of land. But since Israel captured the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, in 1967 it has become more defined by religion.
Perhaps that was why the Palestinians chose a synagogue for the attack that killed the four Jewish worshippers and a policeman.
Many Palestinians believe Israel is preparing to allow Jews to pray in the compound of the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, the third holiest site for Muslims after Mecca and Medina.
The Israeli government has denied that emphatically. But Palestinians listen to calls from hard right-wing Jewish nationalists and believe it might happen.
Tuesday November 18, 2014: Ultra-Orthodox Jews around the grave of Rabbi Abraham Shmuel Goldberg, the British-Israeli victim of the synagogue massacre. Photo by Zuma Press.
Fears of Religious Conflict After Synagogue Killings
By Ilene Prusher, Time
November 18, 2014
The dead include three American citizens, one British citizen and one Israeli police officer
Two Palestinians from East Jerusalem burst into a West Jerusalem synagogue on Tuesday morning, killing five Israelis and wounding seven others with knives and axes in an attack that is being viewed by both sides as a potential turning point in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
That conflict, simmering since the end of a seven-week long war this summer between Israel and Islamist militants in Gaza, has reached boiling point in recent weeks. There have been a string of Palestinian stabbing attacks targeting Israelis so far this month, resulting in the deaths of four Israelis. Palestinians accuse Israel of ratcheting up tensions around Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, or Noble Sanctuary, an area sacred to both Jews and Muslims, and say the building of Israeli homes in the West Bank and East Jerusalem has provoked Palestinian ire.
But Tuesday’s attack in a crowded synagogue where worshippers has just begun their morning prayers is the most serious attack in recent weeks. Both Israelis and Palestinians noted the choice of target and the skyrocketing tensions over Jerusalem’s holy sites – the Temple Mount or Noble Sanctuary houses the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and has the Western Wall at its base. Many expressed concerns that this may be morphing into a religious war more than a struggle over land.
“We don’t want to see ourselves as Jews as being in a war with Islam – a religious war would be a disaster from every perspective,” said Israel’s President, Reuven Rivlin, in comments to reporters, broadcast live as the news was unfolding. “We have a long-standing dispute between Jews and Arabs, between Israelis and Palestinians, but we must not allow this to be twisted into a war between religions.”
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas condemned the attack but also demanded “an end to the ongoing incursions into the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the provocative acts by Israeli settlers as well as incitement by some Israeli ministers.” Rivlin applauded Abbas’ condemnation but said he was not doing enough, adding, “We’re hearing imams who are using every opportunity to incite against Israel.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had harsher criticism for the Palestinian leader, saying that the attack was a direct result of incitement by Hamas as well as by Abbas. Netanyahu’s ultra-nationalist Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman took it a step further and accused Abbas of deliberately trying to turn the conflict into a religious war between Muslims and Jews. Abbas recently characterized Jews as having desecrated the Temple Mount, which Lieberman said legitimizes attacks like the one on Tuesday.
Zakaria al-Qaq, a lecturer in national security at Al-Quds University which has campuses in Jerusalem and in the West Bank, said he was concerned that the atmosphere in the region – including the rise of the Islamic State in various enclaves in Iraq and Syria – was pushing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to take on a more religious hue.
Ultra-Orthodox Jews mourn over the bodies of three of the victims of the synagogue attack. Photo by AFP / Getty Images.
“I’m afraid that today’s events will be a sort of turning point in terms of dragging the conflict towards having a different label on it, and it will look more like a religious conflict,” says Al-Qaq. Even though reports surfaced Tuesday that the attack may have been carried out by the Palestinian Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a secular nationalist group, al-Qaq said people were already drawing their conclusions about what this new stage of the conflict would look like. It would not necessarily be a third Intifada, or uprising, as some have predicted, but an unprecedented religious war.
“Regardless of whether the perpetrators are secular or religious, they have decided to use a place of prayer to inflame the religious identity of the conflict, moving it from Palestinian-Israeli to Muslim-Jewish,” Al-Qaq says. “If there will be any retaliation from any side, even just a radical group of Israelis who decide to attack a mosque that will inflame the situation very seriously. If you put it in the regional context, looking at Sunni vs. Shia tensions and the rise of ISIS, and just days ago in northern Israel, a riot pitting Muslims against Druze, we see that this is how the ball is rolling now – everything being dictated by religion.”
Receiving the first reports of the attack around 7 a.m., police rushed to the scene and shot dead the two Palestinians, who were from the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Jabel Mukaber. Chaim Weingarten, a volunteer for ZAKA, an Israeli organization that arranges for religious burial following terrorist attacks, said he felt it as if “ISIS has arrived in Jerusalem.” He explained what he saw in comments provided to the media by ZAKA: “This was an extremely difficult scene. The terrorists used live fire and a butcher’s knife. The terrorists cut off the arm of a worshiper wearing tefillin (phylacteries). Horrific images that leave me with very difficult emotions.”
Israeli police said that three of the dead were originally from the U.S. and one was from Britain. An Israeli police officer died from his injuries hours after the attack, bringing the death toll to five, a spokeswoman at Hadassah hospital told CNN. Among the victims of the attack is an Israeli-American rabbi, Moshe Twersky, 59. He was the head an English-speaking seminary, or yeshiva, and is the son of a renowned rabbi and Harvard professor, Rabbi Yitzhak (Isadore) Twersky of Boston, and well as the grandson of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, one of the founders of Jewish Modern Orthodoxy.
Tuesday’s attack came after a Palestinian bus driver, Yusuf Hasan al-Ramuni, was found hanging in his bus on Sunday. Israeli forensic officials ruled it was a suicide and said there was no evidence of foul play, but Palestinians believe it was a murder staged to look like a suicide, and held protests on Monday in response.
Ghazi Hamad, a senior Hamas official in Gaza, said in a BBC interview that attacks like Tuesday’s should be anticipated.
“Everyone expected that this would happen,” Hamad said. “Every day Jerusalem is boiling, every day there is a new crime against a Palestinian citizen. We didn’t see any effort of the Israeli government to stop the settlers from attacking the al-Aqsa mosque. They should open their eyes and see there is a revolution in Jerusalem, there is an uprising.”
In the aftermath of the killings, Israeli media reported clashes between Palestinian and police near the East Jerusalem homes of the two alleged attackers.