Israel Matzav: What if it had been a synagogue?

What if it had been a synagogue?

As many of you may have heard, 'Jewish extremists' (not proven but presumed) set fire to a mosque in Samaria over the weekend. Since then, the situation has been 'tense.'

The fire has been condemned by Israel's government, by all of its major political parties, by its chief rabbis and by most of the revenants who live in Judea and Samaria.

Jonathan Tobin asks what the reaction would have been if instead of Jews (allegedly) setting a mosque on fire, Arabs had set a synagogue on fire. This is not a hypothetical question. It has happened before.

In October 2000, at the start of the Palestinians’ second intifada, the Tomb of Joseph, a Jewish holy site in Nablus that served as a synagogue and religious school, was literally torn to pieces by an Arab mob. As Palestinian Authority “police” looked on, the mob destroyed the building and burned the sacred texts inside. But instead of treating the crime as an embarrassment to the national cause, among Palestinians it was treated as a cause for celebration. Another ancient synagogue in Jericho was also burned down that month. And even before the intifada, the Tomb of Rachel, a Jewish shrine near Bethlehem, was subjected to continual attacks. It had to be surrounded by fortifications to keep both the building and worshipers from harm.

In 2005, the Israeli government evacuated Gaza and removed every single Jewish soldier and settler from the area. The only things left behind were buildings, including the synagogues that had served the Jews who were forced out. But rather than treat these edifices with respect, if only to use them for their own purposes, the Palestinians burned every one down in a barbaric communal orgy of destruction. Again, no apologies were forthcoming from the Palestinians. Nor did world opinion treat this incident as worthy of condemnation. The fact that the Palestinians could not bring themselves to let even one former synagogue stand was a frightening reminder that the two sides still don’t view the conflict in the same way. To the Palestinians, this is not a tragic misunderstanding between two peoples but rather a zero-sum game.

If you want to know why there is no peace - and no prospect of peace anytime soon (if ever) - in our region, read the whole thing.

Israel Matzav: What if it had been a synagogue?