From 2015 until April of this year, the hard-left parliamentarian Jeremy Corbyn—a man who called Hamas and Hizballah his friends, was possessed by an obsessive hatred of Israel, and who more than once veered into expressions of undisguised contempt for Jews—led the UK’s Labor party. Britain’s Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) yesterday released its long-awaited, and damning, report on the party’s anti-Semitism, which flourished in the rank-and-file under Corbyn’s watch. Corbyn naturally dismissed the report by downplaying the issue, and blamed those who complained of anti-Semitism as the true problem. For this reaction, the current Labor leadership promptly suspended him.

While many in the West seem to think the current fighting in Israel is about housing policy, or human rights, or the selective blockade of the Gaza Strip, the rhetoric of Palestinian leaders and on Palestinian social media makes clear that it is in fact about al-Aqsa mosque. This should come as no surprise: fabricated claims that “al-Aqsa is in danger” have been used to provoke anti-Jewish violence for a hundred years. In this particular case, explains Haviv Rettig Gur, both Hamas and Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah party exploited the claim in their rivalry for Palestinian hearts and minds: