Just in case the continued construction of illegal settlements in East Jerusalem (Beit-ul-Moqaddas)and the West Bank were not enough to scupper a resumption of peace talks with the Palestinians, the Israelis have just demolished a mosque on Palestinian territory which they said had been built “illegally.”

In the Alice-in-Wonderland world of Israel’s justification for its occupation and colonization of Arab lands, it is perfectly alright for the Israelis to defy international law by erecting their own structures on land seized illegally from Palestinians, but it is somehow not acceptable for the Palestinians to build anything on their own property.
In fact, there is compelling evidence that the mosque in the West Bank village of Khirbet Yarza had not been recently built, as the Israelis claimed, but had been in existence before the 1967 invasion. The villagers have papers and photographs showing that this was a long-standing structure.
However, it is totally inappropriate for the Palestinians to be obliged to try and justify anything that they do on their own land. Whether the mosque and the other buildings that the Israeli Army razed to the ground this week had been built yesterday or a hundred years ago is irrelevant. The destruction of these structures was yet another crime for which one day Israel will be made to answer.
Imagine what would have happened if a Palestinian farmer had taken a bulldozer to one of the Israeli buildings constructed with flagrant illegality on his own farm land. Imagine indeed, if the building he smashed down was a newly built synagogue. Assuming that the luckless farmer was not gunned down before he could assert his right to do what he wanted on his own property, but succeeded in destroying the synagogue, imagine the hue and cry, not just in Israel but among Zionists throughout the world.
It would be characterized as a brutal anti-Semitic attack on a place of worship and great would be the vows of vengeance and retribution. Yet Israelis see no difficulty whatsoever in doing the selfsame thing to the Palestinians. So steeped are they in their conviction that they can do what they like in the Occupied Territories and continue to get away with it. This nasty, barbaric operation, of such significance to the villagers of Khirbet Yarza along with all Palestinians and the wider Muslim world, was dismissed by the Israelis as if it was almost routine.
There is, of course, a strategy behind this Israeli sacrilege. It has indeed been routine for successive Israeli governments to produce a steady flow of provocations designed to enrage the Palestinians and keep them from the negotiating table. Israel is a country built for over 50 years on conflict which has no idea how to survive a peace that would severely tighten U.S. purse strings and force it to work and integrate with its Arab neighbors.
Therefore, for all their talk of wanting a settlement, government after government has placed obstacles in the path of negotiations. And just in case the refusal to stop illegal settlement building is not enough, the Netanyahu administration has added to Palestinian anger and humiliation with this brazen and sacrilegious destruction of a humble place of worship. How much longer are the international community in general and the Americans in particular going to countenance this criminal activity by duplicitous and manipulative Israeli governments? What will it take for Washington to wake up?