In addressing the situation today, it should be clear that there is no justification for any incitement to violence. When you say that Israel wants to undermine the status of the al-Aqsa Mosque or change the status quo on the Temple Mount/al-Haram al-Sharif, it is equivalent to yelling “fire” in a crowded theater, given the role that such allegations have played in provoking past violence.

As Secretary of State John Kerry said in an interview with National Public Radio last Friday, “There’s no excuse for the violence. No amount of frustration is appropriate to license any violence anywhere at any time. No violence should occur. And the Palestinians need to understand, and President [Mahmoud] Abbas has been committed to nonviolence. He needs to be condemning this, loudly and clearly. And he needs to not engage in some of the incitement that his voice has sometimes been heard to encourage. So that has to stop.”

This incitement includes public remarks by President Abbas, during which he said that “every drop of blood spilled in Jerusalem is pure. Every martyr will reach paradise, and every injured person will be rewarded by God.” He has also said that Jews “have no right to desecrate the mosque with their dirty feet.” Abbas has not renounced these statements, and in recent days he has called for “popular nonviolent struggle.” (This is not to say that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has not made some questionable statements of his own. Recently, he said that the leader of the Palestinian national movement in the 1940s was more adamant about killing Jews than Adolf Hitler, a claim that has been refuted by Holocaust historians.)

Sadly, the charge that Israel is out to destroy the mosque is not new. This claim was made in 1929, resulting in riots in Hebron that killed 63 people. More recently, fatal violence surrounding the Temple Mount occurred in 1991 (20 killed), 1996 (87 killed), 2000 (153 killed within the first month of violence), and 2014 (9 killed). I want to be clear that this does not mean that all Palestinians favor this approach. In fact, more than 400 Jews were saved in 1929, when many found refuge in the homes of Palestinians.

Read the article in full at the Washington Institute.