Tuesday morning on CNN’s “Legal View with Ashleigh Banfield,” author and attorney Alan Dershowitz told Banfield that with the terrorist attack Tuesday morning at a Jerusalem synagogue that killed 4 rabbis, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has turned from a political conflict into a religious one.
“Yes, it could be [a turning point,]” Dershowitz said. “Because it turns what has been a political conflict into a religious conflict and it’s harder to resolve religious conflicts because religious people tend to think in terms of extremes.”
“Hamas is a religious organization, whose goal is the destruction of the nation-state of the Jewish people,” Dershowitz continued. “It’s very hard to compromise that, and this is a religious attack on a religious institution.”
“But how can you separate religion from political when it comes to the Middle East, it has almost been invariably Muslim against Jews?” Banfield asked.
“But Israel is a secular state,” Dershowitz explained. “And its military actions have all been based on military considerations and political considerations. It never attacks mosques, it never attacks religious places, it never attacks Islam.”
“This could be more lone wolf than organizational,” Banfield interjected.
“It’s never lone wolf,” Dershowitz replied. “In the sense that you read the statements made by Abbas and by Hamas and you see that there are incitements there. [Abbas] wrote a letter of consolation to the man who previously murdered an Israeli in a similar area, and he wrote a letter to the family.”
“They name parks after their terrorists and murderers. Israel, on the other hand, always condemns individuals who make attacks on individual Palestinians, so there’s no moral equation or symmetry there.”
Follow Danuel Nussbaum on Twitter @NussBB
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