Over the past two weeks, seven Israelis have been murdered and many more have been injured in at least 26 terrorist attacks in Israel. In one particularly grueling attack captured by surveillance video on Tuesday, a Palestinian man rammed his car into Israelis waiting at a bus stop in Jerusalem. He then emerged from the wreckage brandishing a meat cleaver and started hacking at pedestrians.

American Response

The United States Department of State immediately responded to this and several other prior terrorist attacks on Israeli citizens by evenly distributing the blame between Palestinians and Israelis. “We remain deeply concerned about escalating tensions and urge all sides to take affirmative steps to restore calm and prevent actions that would further escalate tensions,” a press statement from the department’s website said. In other words, the Palestinians must tone down the violence, and so must the Jews—the victims!

Associated Press’s Matt Lee quizzed State Department spokesman Mark Toner about what the department means by calling on both the Palestinians and the Israelis to deescalate the crisis in Israel. “Does the [Obama] administration believe that Israel is inciting or not condemning violence?” he asked.

Toner responded saying, “[W]hat we’ve been very clear about saying is that we want to see both sides take affirmative steps, affirmative actions that reduce tensions in the region.” He then mentioned the horrific attacks against Israelis but added, “[W]e’ve seen also attacks on Palestinians, [investigations for which] remain ongoing.”

The attacks Toner referenced occurred “three or four weeks ago.” They supposedly legitimized a Palestinian “Day of Rage”—a day of killing Jews. Yet despite the facts on the ground, the United States kicked off another round of its moral equivalence game, with plenty of blame to pass around.

Matt Lee then asked what it was the United States expected from the Israelis to reduce the violence in Israel. Mark Toner said the Israelis should “[uphold] the status quo in Haram al-Sharif and [the] Temple Mount.” The problem with that statement is that it’s based on the lie that Arab propagandists have frequently repeated: “Dirty” Jews are secretly plotting to blow up mosques and desecrate Muslim holy sites.

Chief among those Arab propagandists is Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas himself. In a September 16 speech on Palestinian tv, Abbas said, “[W]e bless every drop of blood spilled for Jerusalem. With the help of Allah, every shaheed [martyr] will be in heaven. … Al-Aqsa is ours and so is the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. [Jews] have no right to desecrate them with their filthy feet. We will not allow them to, and we will do everything in our power to protect Jerusalem.”

Israel has consistently upheld a decades-old policy of protecting and preserving all holy sites in Israel—whether they’re Jewish, Christian or Muslim. Contrary to insinuations by the State Department (not to mention Palestinian terrorists), Israel has upheld that status quo since 1967, when it took control of East Jerusalem and the Temple Mount.

State Department head John Kerry similarly attributed the violence in Jerusalem to Israeli policies. At a forum on Tuesday at Harvard, Secretary Kerry said, “[U]nless we get going, a two-state solution could conceivably be stolen from everybody.” He added that “there’s been a massive increase in settlements over the course of the last years. Now you have this violence because there’s a frustration that is growing ….”

Kerry would have you believe that Palestinians are declaring a “Day of Rage” and stabbing Jews because they are just frustrated; they merely want a two-state solution and to make peace with Israel.

But terror does not come because of frustration over the peace process, as Israeli Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu said this week. “Terror comes from the desire to annihilate us.”

The Palestinians themselves have called this uprising the “hibat al-Quds”—or the “Jerusalem awakening.” The terror is coming as a response to a false conspiracy about a Jewish takeover of Muslim holy sites. At its core, it’s a religious war!

Commentary’s Jonathan Tobin wrote,

While the narrative about this latest outbreak of violence from critics of Israel is that it is all about the sins of the “occupation” and Israel denying hope to the Palestinians, what we are hearing from them is a very different story. Read any of the accounts of the motivations of the people going into the streets to stab random Jews they encounter or the mobs in the West Bank who are seeking to set off confrontations with Israeli troops, and you don’t hear much about frustration about the peace process. … What you do see are accounts of Muslim religious fervor that is drenched in the fever of martyrdom and faith-based hate.

Jewish Response

In a Times of Israel article on Wednesday titled “If I Forget Thee East Jerusalem, Let My Writing Hand Wither,” Joshua Davidovich noted that news coverage in Israel has now shifted its primary focus from the terrorist attacks themselves to the government’s response, “which includes an army deployment to Jerusalem—nearly unheard of in the annals of the state—and a similarly drastic move of setting up checkpoints in East Jerusalem neighborhoods and possibly closing them off altogether.”

Yedioth Ahronoth’s headline said, “Jerusalem: Soldiers to Guard Buses.” Israel Hayom said, “Army to enter cities.” Haaretz’s main headline said the Israeli “Cabinet Is Considering Cutting Off East Jerusalem.”

These are the early stages of the division of Jerusalem—the once united capital of Israel.

Another Israel Hayom article said, “As terrorism mounts, Israelis take security into their own hands.” It noted a sharp increase in Israeli civilians purchasing pepper sprays, stun guns and clubs to protect themselves. Jewish citizens are enrolling in classes where they can learn to fight like the Israeli military.

According to Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, there is now a shortage of private security guards because of increased demand. And those guards are now officially approved by the Economy Ministry to work overtime.

This is leading to the fulfilment of a critical prophecy in Zechariah 14:1-2: “Behold, the day of the Lord cometh, and thy spoil shall be divided in the midst of thee. For I will gather all nations against Jerusalem to battle; and the city shall be taken, and the houses rifled, and the women ravished; and half of the city shall go forth into captivity, and the residue of the people shall not be cut off from the city.”

We have been preparing you for this prophesied development for years. When there were flare-ups between Israel and Hezbollah in the north, and then between Gaza and Israel in the south, my father explained that the West Bank would be next, and then finally, Jerusalem.

Read more about this prophecy and about the future of Jerusalem in our free booklet Jerusalem in Prophecy.