A religious tragedy, but a religious war?

Jerusalem has suffered a serious wave of terror over the last several weeks, but the nature of Tuesday morning’s attack, a brazen assault by gun- and knife-toting Palestinians into the middle of a synagogue during morning prayers, hit Israeli society like a punch in the gut.

This funereal atmosphere may be nowhere better conveyed than on the front pages of Israel’s Hebrew press, which wrenchingly tell of the fact that four of the victims were merely attempting to supplicate before God prior to being slain, still wrapped in their holy prayer garb.

A picture of a left arm, wrapped seven times around with leather straps and tied off on the hand with an unspeakable name of God, stretched out of a prayer shawl dyed red, and lying on a blood-splattered floor, takes up nearly the whole of Yedioth Ahronoth’s front page. Below it, the words “In the middle of prayer,” accompanied by head shots of the five victims, including the four religious Jewish men and the Druze policemen killed in a shootout after responding to the scene.

Israel Hayom’s headline, “In tallit and tefillin” (prayer shawl and phylacteries) evokes the same sense of lugubrious pathos, accompanied by a large picture of a bloodied man being treated outside the synagogue and a smaller photo of a blood-drenched prayer book.

Haaretz goes with the simple headline “Five killed in terror attack at Jerusalem synagogue,” accompanied by a picture of ZAKA volunteers at the site and head shots of the five victims.

The vibrant press in the ultra-Orthodox community, hit hardest by the tragedy, opts for less gore on their front pages, though they tellingly also leave out the death of the policeman.

Hamodia and Hapeles run identical zoomed-out pictures of the outside of the synagogue in the aftermath of the attack, both with snippets of biblical verses from the prophet Jeremiah. Hamodia turns to Lamentations for the saying “Shall they be slain in the sanctuary of the Lord?” while Hapeles chooses “For death is come up into our windows, it is entered into our palaces.”

Yated Neeman, meanwhile, goes with a picture of the funeral for three of the rabbis killed and the headline “With tallit and tefillin — sanctifying the name of God,” as well as a verse from the Yom Kippur and Ninth of Av liturgy about 10 rabbis killed by the Romans: “Leaders were murdered, those who sit up late in synagogues, who were full of commandments as a pomegranate.”

(Hamodia in English also uses a quote from a similar passage about the murder of Rabbi Akiva: “The parchments are burning but the letters are floating in the air,” accompanied by a striking picture of a Talmud damaged by bullet holes.)

You can see all the front pages here.

All the papers make much of the fact that the four Jewish victims were from the same street, and left behind over two dozen children. “We are standing here opposite a holy congregation’s learned men, whose blood was spilled like water. How many orphans were made today! They massacred four victims while they were wrapped in their tallit and tefillin. Death has come up on our window,” Israel Hayom quotes the rabbi of the synagogue as saying.

The secular papers also devote much space to the Druze policeman killed in the attack. “He gave his life to save people,” the head of the police unit tells Yedioth Ahronoth.

Not surprisingly, the opinions and analyses of the presses’ army of pundits are ready to hold forth with words more numerous than stars in the sky or sands on the ground.

The religious nature of the attack is something that hits Haaretz’s Amos Harel hard, noting that the wave of terror looks less like a nationalist struggle than a religious war in the mold of the Islamic State’s own battle for a caliphate. “Tuesday’s attackers weren’t members of ISIS, but the rampage in the synagogue seemed to be inspired by the organization; it was a religious and ideological act, stemming from a deep hatred of Jews. It was an attack on a clearly religious target, carefully chosen for maximum shock value.”

In Israel Hayom, Boaz Bismuth also has no doubts about it: “It needs to be understood once and for all that the conflict today is religious.”

Yossele, get your gun

In the same paper, commentator Emily Amrousi sees the attack as the continuation of the same deadly anti-Semitism that gave the Jewish people the Kishinev pogrom of 1903, the 1929 Palestine riots and Kristallnacht in 1938. Her takeaway? Yossele, get your gun.

“It’s unfortunate none of the worshipers had a gun in Har Nof to stop the terrorists on their rampage. You need to hold, in one hand, your prayer book and phylacteries and in your other, a gun for defense. To be ready,” she writes.

Comments like that will likely transport readers back to the bad old days of the Second Intifada. Nahum Barnea notes in Yedioth that given the current wave of unrest, all the hope of the intervening years between the Second Intifada and the present seems to have been thrown away.

“From isolated incident to isolated incident, we have an intifada on our hands that threatens to be no less deadly than the previous two. Deadly for them and for us. There are no winners in this — only victims. Ten years of quiet, which started with Operation Defensive Shield, the death of [Yasser] Arafat, the building of the security barrier and the disappearance of suicide terrorism, are behind us. How long this wave of terror will go on for, and how heavy it will be, is hard to know, but the heart breaks from the knowledge that we wasted these 10 years,” he says.

Barnea also points out that this was not the first attack to target worshipers while they prayed (as many claimed). That distinction goes to Baruch Goldstein’s assault on Muslim worshipers in Hebron’s Cave of the Patriarchs in 1994. However, he notes that, unlike the near-unanimous condemnation of that attack from Israeli Jews, the Palestinian street has been mostly silent following Tuesday’s bloodbath.

Haaretz’s Amira Hass tries her hand at defending, or at least explaining, that lack of condemnation from Yusuf al-Public, writing that the root distresses that led the two East Jerusalem men to shoot and hack their way through a synagogue are shared by most Palestinians, and don’t represent a religious struggle.

“Like the Abu Jamals, they feel themselves under assault: The Israeli nation is constantly attacking them with all the tools at its disposal. The Har Nof neighborhood, where the attack took place, is built on the lands of the former Palestinian village of Deir Yassin. Those who are keeping silent now see the murder as a response to an Israeli policy toward the Palestinians that has been one long chain of attacks, dispossessions and expulsions since 1948.”

‘They are brave martyrs’

Being mad about dispossession from 66 years ago is one thing, but Israel Hayom reports that in the Jerusalem neighborhood where the two terrorists came from, Tuesday was a day of mourning for the two killed assailant cousins and jubilation over what they did.

“Many visitors came to the mourning tents erected by relatives. The families did not try to hide their joy over the act and said, ‘We are proud of what they did. They are brave martyrs.’ Similar celebrations took place in Gaza and in Palestinian media,” the paper writes.

That account falls in line with the Israeli establishment’s constant blaming of the Palestinian leadership for inciting these terror attacks, but in Yedioth, Shimon Shafir contends that the man responsible for the chaos in Jerusalem is not Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, but none other than Benjamin Netanyahu.

“Netanyahu demands the international community condemn. Truthfully, it doesn’t matter,” he writes. “Just like the EU’s discussions of proposals to punish Israel for settlement building won’t have any impact on the ground. Don’t be mistaken: The immediate and only one responsible for the lack of security for Israel’s citizens is Benjamin Netanyahu.”