Published in Israel Hayom, October 30, 2014.
Abbas is complicit in the assassination attempt on Yehuda Glick. Abbas has explicitly exhorted and incited to Palestinian violence against Israel in Jerusalem.
Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas is responsible for the escalating violence in Jerusalem. He is no less implicated than other rabble-rousers who continue to foment violence in eastern Jerusalem and on the Temple Mount – such as Sheikh Raed Salah, head of Northern Islamic Movement in Israel, and Qatari-funded Hamas and Salafi cells in the city.
Abbas has explicitly exhorted and incited to Palestinian violence against Israel in Jerusalem. He has taken the path of an arsonist. And thus, he bears direct culpability in the attempted assassination last night of Israeli national rights activist Yehuda Glick.
Abbas has given speeches in the last few weeks accusing Jews of engaging in dark conspiracies to “Judaize” Jerusalem and “desecrate” the Temple Mount. Two weeks ago Abbas went so far as to urge Palestinians to prevent Jews from entering the area “in any way.”
“We must prevent the settlers from entering the Noble Sanctuary in any way. This is our Al-Aksa and our church. They have no right to enter and desecrate them. We must confront them and defend our holy sites,” Abbas fulminated on October 17.
Abbas’s Foreign Ministry has spread flammable lies about Israeli “plans to destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque” too. Its spokesman told the official PA daily newspaper Al-Hayat Al-Jadida that “The Israeli government has been carrying out a plan to Judaize the Al-Aqsa Mosque (i.e., the Temple Mount Plaza), and the rate of escalation and repression against Al-Aqsa is increasing… (Israel is moving towards) dividing it geographically and according to time (allocating times and spaces for different religions), destroying it and building what is referred to as ‘the Temple’ in its place… Ongoing calls have been made by the extreme right to enlist a large number of settlers to assault the Al-Aqsa Mosque in order to perform their Talmudic rituals in it.”
“Talmudic rituals” is rank and derisive PA parlance for Jewish prayer at the holiest site on earth to the Jewish People.
A direct line runs from such ranting to the attempted assassination of Yehuda Glick. Glick is a prominent and persistent agitator for Jewish prayer rights on the Temple Mount, and he has been the recipient of death threats. Essentially, Abbas legitimized these threats, and gave his imprimatur to the attempts to turn the Temple Mount into the hottest battleground between Israel and the Arab world.
Unfortunately but understandably, the Netanyahu government is hesitant to changing the status quo on the Mount; the situation whereby Jews have only limited visitation rights and are all-together forbidden from praying there; while the Moslems claim exclusive religious rights and have rigged the site as an armed camp.
Nevertheless, in defiance of Abbas, Israel ought to bring about a time-sharing agreement with alternating slots for Jewish and Moslem prayer on the Mount, similar to the arrangement in place in the Cave of Machpela in Hebron; or an agreement which establishes a small, permanent Jewish prayer area in a corner of the vast and mostly unused Temple Mount plaza. But alas there are no signs that this government is going to do so.
The terribly-mislabeled Palestinian “Authority,” which has become an extremist actor, has created a situation where Israel dare not assert the basic religious and national rights of the Jewish People in Jerusalem.
