There is an honorific reserved for Jewish martyrs who have been slain by anti-Semites. When their names are written they are followed by the Hebrew letters that are transliterated into English as hy”d, for Hashem yinkom damo, a prayer for the vengeance of God. The letters will now follow the names of Rabbis Moshe Twersky hy”d, Aryeh Kopinsky hy”d, Rabbi Avraham Shmuel Goldberg hy”d, and Rabbi Kalman Levine hy”d. That three of the four Israelis were Americans and one a Briton reminds of how widely God will have to range in answering another prayer that is customary at such a time as this, that He comfort the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.

It is hard to think of many crimes as ghastly as the slaughter of these rabbis as they prayed with words of the Torah strapped to their heads. They were murdered after incitement by the very Palestinian Arab leadership that America asserts is a potential partner for peace. It is a leadership with which liberal establishment has been urging us to treat on the question of Jerusalem, a question that our own state department and the United Nations insist on listing as open long after it should have been closed.

For a generation now we have been describing the escalating struggle over Israel’s capital as the Battle of Jerusalem. This the campaign to wrest Judaism’s holiest city from Israel’s sovereignty. It has been the strategy of the so-called peace process to defer Jerusalem, the knottiest question, to the end of the negotiations. We have been arguing for years that this sets up the entire peace process for perpetual failure, because Israel’s sovereignty over Jerusalem is not subject to negotiation. It strikes us that an honest approach to peace would require an acknowledgement of this at the beginning rather than the end of talks.

Secretary of State Kerry seemed to be shaken when he spoke of the rabbis being “hatcheted” to death in the murders at Har Nof (he blamed the Palestinians at all levels), but as recently as two weeks ago his lawyers were before the Supreme Court of the United States arguing that he, like his predecessors, can be permitted to spurn a law requiring the State Department to issue to an American youngster born at Jerusalem a passport saying he was born in Israel. What has been brought by this forbearance — or, for that matter, the forbearance of Israel, which has curbed its housing construction and gone so far as to agree to restrictions that prohibit Jews walking on the Temple Mount from praying, even by moving their lips silently?