The wave of Arab terror that has now claimed 14 lives in Israel in less than three weeks has tallied an additional casualty. On Saturday night, over 100 Palestinians broke into the tomb of the biblical patriarch Joseph, at Shechem. The intruders smashed it and set it aflame, adding desecration to death on the eve of Passover, which celebrates the Exodus from the Egypt that Joseph once ruled as viceroy.

Prime Minister Bennett reports that “Dozens of Palestinian rioters in a campaign of destruction simply violated a holy place for us, the Jews.” He has declared that “we will not abide such an assault on a place that is holy to us” and vowed that “to the rioters.” He grasps that to attack Israelis on the streets today is to make war on Israel’s present, but to attack its holy sites is more strategic — to erase its very past.

The aim of both is to ensure that Israel has no future. That is why the Palestinians and their allies refuse to recognize the antiquity of the Jewish tie to Jerusalem and why it was necessary for the Nation-State Law to acknowledge and declare that “The land of Israel is the historical homeland of the Jewish people.” That law, enacted in 2018, echoes the founding document of the modern Jewish state.

Israel’s Declaration of Independence begins “the Land of Israel was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped.” Lest one think that these are truths too obvious to name, feature a Resolution from 2017 of the United Nations Children’s Fund, which labels Israel an “occupying power” in its own capital city. Talk about chutzpah.

Joseph’s tomb is ostensibly under the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority. It deserves to be held to account. Israel’s measure of custody over the Temple Mount in Jerusalem and the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron is frequently used as a pretext for violence against Jews. What happened at the resting place of Jacob’s favored son testifies that the threat to holy sites comes not from Zionism but from its foes. 

The latest assault on Joseph’s Tomb follows similar attacks in 2014 and 2015. On the one hand, these crimes are particular against Jews in the Land of Israel. Yet they remind of the larger fight, including the Taliban’s destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in 2001 and American Museum of Natural History’s decision to remove the Equestrian Statue of Theodore Roosevelt, whose foes want it “melted down or recycled.”

Decolonize This Place, the group to which the Museum of Natural History acceded in removing the statue of TR, acknowledges the connection. It declares itself committed to breaking free from “the genocidal grip of U.S. imperialism and Zionism.” The best response to these attacks is to rebuild — not only Joseph’s Tomb but other monuments sacred and secular and to mark the hostility to them for what it is.