Israel has now faced three terrorist attacks over the past week. There have been at least eleven murders. Today’s attacks happened in the suburbs of Ramat Gan and B’nei Brak, both well inside the ’67 boundaries. This isn’t about “occupied territories.” This isn’t some ginned-up Fatah claim regarding the Temple Mount. It’s old-fashioned random terror, meant, I guess, to scare Jews out of the Middle East. It’s the same as it was in 1950s, when fedayeen would sneak into Israel and murder civilians (before any “occupied territories” existed); same as it when Arafat formed the PLO (also before 1967) and started terrorizing the air; same as it was when Fatah refused to make peace in 2001 and launched the bloody Intifada; and same as it was when Arab nationalist violence evolved into Islamist violence and missiles began raining down missiles on southern Israel.
Even as Sunni Arab nations make peace, open trade, and enter security arrangements with Israel, Palestinians refuse to lift themselves from the destitution of their own creation. The government of Gaza, given autonomy by Israel in 2005, will extol the killers. If the murderer, brainwashed by a lifetime of state-sponsored hate, hails from the West Bank, the PA will pay his family a bounty (using, in part, American tax dollars). Many Palestinians will hand out candy and celebrate the murders. They always do. And later today, some Brookings type will take to Twitter, condemn the murders, and then stress the importance of a two-state solution. But no rational people would hand a new country — or share a city or bestow a “right to return” — to those who might randomly murder them or launch missiles at their schools. And yet, Palestinians continue, for more than a century now, to engage in this self-destructive strategy.