PALESTINIAN Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is right to warn that Israel’s provocations in East Jerusalem could start a new “religious war.”

Violent clashes between Palestinians and Israelis are growing in the occupied West Bank as well as in Jerusalem itself.

In the West Bank yesterday Israeli troops shot dead a Palestinian demonstrator. But over the past fortnight civilians on both sides have been victims.

This does not absolve Israel of responsibility for what is happening, however.

Calls from members of the cabinet in Tel Aviv for the division of the al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock are the last straw for the people of East Jerusalem.

Illegally annexed by Israel in 1967, the eastern half of the ancient city is internationally recognised — including by Israel’s get-out-of-jail-free card at the UN, the United States — as the capital of any future Palestinian state.

Yet the ever-expansionist settler-state has continually sought to undermine that future by changing “facts on the ground” in the east, just as it has made every effort to permanently derail the peace process through the illegal colonisation of the West Bank.

Israel continues to demolish Palestinian houses in the east, replacing them with new units of Jewish-only housing in a more open declaration of official racism than any other state on Earth would dare to make.

Jewish settlements are springing up not only within the city but around it in a deliberate bid to cut the rest of Palestine off from its capital.

Land in West Jerusalem is mostly owned by the state and operated by the Israel Lands Authority (ILA), which will only lease it to Israeli citizens or those eligible to immigrate under the Law of Return, ie Jews.

This makes Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s 2009 claim that there is “no ban” on Palestinian residents of the east buying property in the west disingenuous at best.

And the ILA has dramatically and illegally snapped up huge swathes of East Jerusalem, accelerating the ethnic cleansing in Palestine itself.

Netanyahu’s commitment to that cleansing was all too clear this week in his challenge to Palestinian demonstrators: “To all those who are demonstrating and shouting their denunciation of Israel and support of a Palestinian state, I can say one simple thing: you are invited to move there — to the Palestinian Authority or to Gaza.”

Combined with his bizarre rant at the weekend invoking “David, Solomon, Isaiah, Jeremiah and the kings and prophets of Israel,” this represents a rightward lurch even from an unrepentant war criminal like the Israeli PM.

No doubt he has his eye on the leadership elections in his Likud party due in January. The competition for Most Fanatical Nationalist in the Israeli cabinet is also tough.

The premier has to hold his own against his rabid xenophobe of a Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman and the equally unsavoury Economy Minister Naftali Bennett, who leads the ultra-zionist Jewish Home party and the “extra-parliamentary movement” My Israel.

But party politicking on the Israeli right do not excuse a policy of confrontation which is claiming more lives by the day.

With ministers in Tel Aviv daring each other to commit greater and greater outrages like a bunch of playground bullies, the need for international action to rein Israel in is urgent.

Britain’s historic responsibility for the dispossession of the Palestinian people through the Balfour Declaration should shame London into taking the lead.

It won’t — so we have to. All pressure must be brought to bear on Parliament to this end.