Nobody knows whether this unprecedented spate of Palestinian “suicide stabbings,” combined with a dismally familiar upsurge in West Bank clashes, Gaza rocket fire, Israeli counterstrikes, Israeli Arab demonstrations, right-wing extremist violence, and more such grisly stuff constitutes the start of another protracted round of conflict.

But the portents are not good. This is a stabbing war born of insistent, hysterical intolerance. And the proven futility of spilling more blood — the sheer sickening, depressing futility of it all — is all too evidently no deterrent.

This flareup stems from the energetic dissemination of the false claim that Israel is about to permit Jews to pray on the Temple Mount, and/or otherwise change the policies that Israel has maintained at arguably the world’s most incendiary holy site. The lie has been assiduously spread by enemies like Hamas, Fatah, and the extremist Northern Branch of Israel’s Islamic Movement, widely peddled in mosques and on social media, and bolstered too by spectacularly irresponsible Israeli Arab politicians, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas (who used the UN General Assembly platform to accuse Israel of sending “extremists” into Al-Aqsa Mosque) and those Israeli Jewish right-wing leaders who have misleadingly and pyromaniacally asserted that the Netanyahu government is weighing new policies.

Netanyahu himself should have acted more speedily than he did to ban MKs from deliberately provocative visits to the Mount, and to distance himself and his government more decisively from the right-wing talk of possible changes to a half-century’s “status quo.” When an Israeli minister breaches the prohibition on Jewish prayer during a filmed visit to the Mount — step forward Jewish Home’s Uri Ariel — the entire Muslim world is watching.

Read the article in full at Times of Israel.