The following article appeared ori­gin­ally in “The Daily Telegraph”

16^th October 2015

by Alex Ryvchin, Public Affairs Director, ECAJ

Palestini­an cleric Muhammad Salah stands at the pulpit of his mosque in Gaza clutching a large kitchen knife. His hand repeatedly comes down in a violent stabbing motion. He does not speak in an allegory, or sermonise to his flock.
He delivers a very specific command: “Form stabbing squads. We don’t want just a single stabber. Attack in threes and fours. Some should restrain the victim, while the others attack him with axes and butcher knives. Cut them into body parts.”
He lists Israeli cities where they are to strike: Afula, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
Results quickly follow. In Afula on the day of Muhammad Salah’s sermon, a young Palestini­an woman stabs a security guard at a bus station. The following day, in Jerusalem, a 16-year-old Palestini­an stabs two Jewish men in their 60’s.
More stabbing attacks follow in Jerusalem two days later. In one attack a boy of 13 riding his bicycle is set upon and stabbed nearly to death.
The next day, in Ra’anana near Tel Aviv, there are two stabbing attacks in the morning, an hour apart.
In Jerusalem, two Palestini­ans board a bus, one opens fire, the other begins hacking at pas­sen­gers. At least three are killed, more than a dozen wounded. Also, in Jerusalem, chilling footage has emerged of a Palestini­an delib­er­ately ramming two Orthodox Jews standing at a bus-stop before leaving the vehicle and hacking one of the men to death.
We have seen images of an Israeli man with a knife lodged in the base of his skull. Only the handle is visible.
In another image a Jewish prayer shawl is soaked in blood, evoking dreaded memories of the Har Nof massacre in November, 2014, when two Palestini­ans slaughtered Jews at prayer in a Jerusalem synagogue.
Now a bloodied hatchet lies on the footpath where, minutes earlier, commuters stood in the morning rush.
A clearer con­nec­tion between the incite­ment and the act could hardly be conceived.
In any civilised society such clerics would be defrocked in disgrace, their chilling words would be imme­di­ately condemned and repu­di­ated. But this is Palestine.
Last month, in another bloody call to arms, Palestini­an President Mahmoud Abbas, con­sidered by many to be a moderate, declared Jews have no right to access the Temple Mount, the site of the First and Second Jewish Temples for more than 1000 years.
“(The Jews) have no right to desecrate it with their filthy feet,” he said.
He called upon his people “to do whatever we can to defend Jerusalem. Every drop of blood that was spilt in Jerusalem is pure blood as long as it’s for the sake of Allah. Every martyr will be in heaven and every wounded person will be rewarded, by Allah’s will.”
But defend Jerusalem from what and from whom? Jerusalem was unified by Israel during the Six Day War in June, 1967, after Israeli forces repelled the Jordanian army.
The Jord­ani­ans had illegally seized and occupied the eastern part of the city during the 1948 war. They had barred Jews from access to their holy places, desec­rated Jewish graves and destroyed scores of syn­agogues and other religious sites.
Within hours of military victory, Moshe Dayan, Israel’s famed general and defence minister declared: “We did not come to conquer sacred sites of others or to restrict their religious rights, but rather to ensure the integrity of the city and to live in it with others in fra­tern­ity.”
Dayan then did something extraordin­ary. Having just restored Jewish sov­er­eignty to the holiest site in Judaism for the first time in almost two millennia he issued a decree for­bid­ding Jews from praying on the Temple Mount.
Dayan’s decree is still in force, in what is fre­quently referred to as the “status quo”.
The Temple Mount is as sacred to Jews as the Kabbah in Mecca is to Muslims and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is to Chris­ti­ans. Yet, in an extension of Dayan’s mag­nan­im­ous gesture, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has con­sist­ently and unam­bigu­ously affirmed the status quo will not change.
Among Palestini­ans, however, con­spir­acy theories abound, about an imagined Israeli plot to destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque which sits atop the Temple Mount and to build a third Jewish temple in its place.
Fed with these lurid fantasies and dangerous con­spir­acy theories it is little wonder some Palestini­ans are com­mit­ting acts of unspeak­able brutality aimed indis­crim­in­ately at Jews generally.
The images of violence and the themes under­pin­ning it will be familiar to Aus­trali­an audiences. Barbaric crimes targeting civilians or police officers are being carried out by indoc­trin­ated teenagers in the name of religious duty.
The sequence of events that will surely follow will also be familiar. Israel will be urged to show restraint. Its reaction will be spot­lighted by biased observers, rather than the bloody crimes which compelled it to act.
Israelis are coping, as they always have. Meanwhile, a sick and corroded Palestini­an society, reared on the sermons of maniacal preachers and corrupt politi­cians, and increas­ingly detached from reality, descends into an orgy of criminal violence which is destined once again to turn in on itself.