Like the 1983 murders of three worshippers in the Mountain Lodge Pentecostal Church near Darkley, Co Armagh, the synagogue attack in Jerusalem on Tuesday will inject a new and more toxic sectarian poison and despair into a conflict whose protagonists appear weekly to plumb new depths of savagery. Now the sanctuary of a church is no longer immune. Religious hatred piles on nationalist bitterness, excuses for revenge accumulate, and tit for tat killings escalate in a dialogue of the deaf and deliberate mutual incomprehension.
The brutal killings in the quiet neighbourhood of Har Nof of a policeman and four rabbis – Moshe Twersky, Kalman Zeev Levine, Aryeh Kupinsky, and Avraham Shmuel Gold – was the deadliest attack on Israeli civilians in more than three years and the worst in Jerusalem since 2008. Many believe the city, which has in recent months seen an escalation of violent incidents and intercommunal tension appears poised on the edge of a new Palestinian intifada fed by heightened religious zealotry and hatred.
That the killings should apparently be the work of individuals rather than organisations might be a crumb of comfort were it not for the crass insistence by Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine on praising the attack as a legitimate response to the "occupation's crimes".
The tragedy is that such a response will gain currency in parts of the Palestinian community partly because of the equally insensitive promise by Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu to "respond with a heavy hand", starting with the demolition of the homes of the families of the two attackers. To his credit the President of the Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas deplored the killings.
The result of the war of words will be to ratchet up the cycle of violence in the city – particularly polarised at the moment over concerns by both communities over the future of the Al Aqsa mosque/Temple Mount – and which has seen five Israelis and a foreign visitor run over or stabbed by lone Palestinians, and a dozen Palestinians killed by the security forces.