The Bnei Torah Kehillat Yaakov synagogue, whose worshipers joined other victims of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on Nov. 18, does not serve the residents of one of the radical settlements in the heart of the West Bank. The Har Nof neighborhood, where this house of prayer is located, is not one of the Jewish neighborhoods built in East Jerusalem after the 1967 war despite fierce Arab opposition. Very few among the population of this ultra-Orthodox neighborhood on the western outskirts of West Jerusalem serve in the military. Those among them who vote in general elections often cast their ballots for the ultra-Orthodox Yahadut HaTorah or Shas Party. These two parties are not part of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government, the one that approves the expropriation of Palestinian lands for the construction of Jewish neighborhoods and encourages Jews to settle in the village of Silwan, at the foot of the Temple Mount.

The decision by two Palestinians to conduct a massacre at this site, of all places, and to select these particular people to murder, out of all others, is a sign that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is undergoing a dangerous shift. It has been turning from a dispute over land and security, for which rational solutions can be found, into a religious-nationalistic conflict, a less rational realm. Terms such as “compromise,” “logic” and “brotherhood of nations” are located outside the latter's jurisdiction.

The religious component of two Muslims murdering four Jewish worshipers walking slowly on the doorsteps of a synagogue enhances and radicalizes emotions and reactions to this terror attack in comparison to those after an attack in a market, on a bus or in a shopping mall. Similar emotions and reactions were registered following the March 2008 murder of eight students at Jerusalem’s Merkaz HaRav rabbinical college as they studied a Talmud page and after the March 2002 murder of 30 Jews who had sat down to celebrate Passover at the Park Hotel in the town of Netanya. By the same token, a Jewish settler's murdering of 29 Muslim worshipers kneeling in prayer at Hebron's Ibrahim Mosque (Cave of the Patriarchs) in February 1994 along with arson attacks on dozens of mosques and the spraying of hateful graffiti on the walls of monasteries produce a different response than an attack on the passengers of a Palestinian taxi or the burning of Arabs’ fields in the Mount Hebron area.

One can read one Muslim version of this phenomenon in the Hamas charter and on the organization’s websites. The more the Oslo Accord becomes a distant memory and the secular camp loses altitude, the more the Palestinian public tends to seek solace in the arms of religion, and the extremist Hamas gains altitude. Ambiguity and the political divide within the Israeli peace camp combined with the inability of the Labor, Yesh Atid, Meretz and Hatnua parties to propose an alternative leadership leave the political sphere wide open for religious-nationalistic messages, which of late include more often than not the Temple Mount.