YASUF, West Bank — Residents of this Palestinian village say they are accustomed to fights with the Israeli settlers around them, but earlier this month came an insult that opened a deeper vein: On the way to morning prayers, villagers caught the smell of smoke from their main mosque.
The alleged arson Dec. 11 blackened the building’s interior and destroyed dozens of Korans and the wooden pulpit. The mosque was also defaced with Hebrew graffiti. That indicates the vandalism was part of the “price tag” strategy used by militant Israeli settlers who have vowed that any government attempt to restrict their use of land in the occupied West Bank — such as a recently announced moratorium on some construction — will trigger reprisals against Palestinians.
Those who burned the mosque “are extremists and Arab-haters, fundamentalists,” said Abdul Fathi Madi, head of religious affairs for the West Bank area that includes Yasuf, as workers repainted the building and hauled in new carpet.
Concern about religious extremism is never far below the surface on either side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israeli leaders regard Palestinian incitement — from disavowals of Jewish history to the animal characters that the militant Hamas group uses in its children’s television programs to voice the need to “slaughter” Jews — as a key barrier to a peace agreement. Palestinians argue that attacks such as the one in Yasuf or the recent burning of a farmer’s supply house in nearby Ein Aboun are meant to keep the West Bank in Jewish hands.
But in the case of the mosque fire, Israeli leaders condemned the attack and promised an aggressive investigation.
The country’s chief rabbi likened the incident to the destruction of German synagogues before the Holocaust, a rare evocation by an Israeli of the Nazi mass killings in relation to the Palestinians, whom Israel more often accuses of diminishing the tragedy.
