Middle East moral one-upmanship dangerous (Opinion) Tuesday's horrific attack in Jerusalem not unprecedented, says Lisa Goldman Jerusalem tensions have been simmering since June, Goldman says Rush to engage in moral one-upmanship unhelpful, she says Editor's note: Lisa Goldman is the director of the Israel-Palestine Initiative at the New America Foundation. (CNN) -- Israelis woke up on Tuesday to horrifying news: four men, three of them in their 50s, had been slain while they were chanting their morning prayers at a synagogue in the West Jerusalem neighborhood of Har Nof. The perpetrators were two young Palestinian men from East Jerusalem, who attacked with butcher knives and guns. The extensive media coverage included gruesome images of a synagogue chapel with blood splattered on the walls, pooled and streaked on the floor. And sprawled on those blood-pooled floors were the corpses of gray-haired men covered in their blood-stained prayer shawls, the leather straps of their phylacteries still wound around their lifeless arms. Lisa Goldman Several public figures, from prominent politicians and commentators to the founder of a volunteer rescue service, said the images reminded them of the Holocaust. The subtext seemed to be that murder was bad enough, but murdering people at prayer was an act of unprecedented barbarity. Unfortunately, though, Tuesday's horror was not unprecedented. Political violence is a grim fact of life in this part of the world, and it is committed by both Jews and Arabs. In 1994, for example, a Jewish Israeli man named Baruch Goldstein entered a Hebron mosque armed with a machine gun. He opened fire on a room full of men at prayer, killing 29 of them. In recent months and years, Jewish settlers have vandalized several mosques by setting them alight or tagging them with nationalist slogans in spray paint. Jerusalem has been simmering since June, with one act of horrific political violence followed by another. First three Jewish teenage boys were abducted and killed by Hebron-area men affiliated with Hamas. Then three Israeli Jews were charged with abducting a teenage Palestinian boy from East Jerusalem and killing him by burning him alive in a nearby forest. In response, there were Palestinian street protests, which Israeli paramilitary police answered with tear gas, rubber-coated bullets, beatings and predawn arrests. Then came a series of so-called "lone wolf" attacks, committed by individual Palestinians who attacked random Israelis by stabbing them or ramming them with vehicles in deliberate hit-and-runs. For weeks, friends who live in neighborhoods abutting East Jerusalem, a primarily Palestinian area, have reported via social media that the sound of gunfire has become a nocturnal experience. One of the many depressing aspects of the endless Jewish-Palestinian conflict is the rush to engage in moral one-upmanship. While it is absolutely undeniable that only one party in this conflict has a powerful army and heavy-hitting diplomatic allies (that would be Israel), neither side has superior morality or redder blood. Yes, there is context to the violence. But no, it is not the Holocaust, and we must resist the populist politicians and commentators who frame the latest deaths as having been committed in the name of hatred of Jews, rather than as an outrageous act of politically motivated violence. Of course, the fact that this attack has both context and precedent does not make it any less horrifying. But those who ignore the context of this violence are also denying an essential element of this: that Palestinians in East Jerusalem are in a state of despair and hopelessness as a result of Israel's policies. The reality is that if the Israeli government fails to address legitimate Palestinian grievances while portraying them simply as monsters rather than human beings, the situation in the world's most contested city will continue to deteriorate.