How to Understand the Spike in Palestinian Arab Terror (in less than 500 words)

This week’s wave of Arab terror against the Zionist enterprise is part of a 100-year-plus war to uproot the national homeland of the Jewish people everywhere in Palestine.

It is not about “occupation” or “apartheid” or “settlements.” Antony Blinken is wrong. The progressive media is wrong. 

The attackers are incited by messages of hate they’ve learned in school, at mosques, and, more lately, on social media. The hate is taught by the Palestinian Authority, in UN-funded schools around the Middle East, by Hamas, and other Islamist organizations. The messages of hate are contemporized for each generation but fundamentally they restate the line of Haj Amin al-Husseini: I declare a holy war, my Muslim brothers! Murder the Jews! Murder them all.

International diplomatic, military and financial support comes from Iran (for Hamas, Hezbollah, and Islamic Jihad) and elsewhere. Turkey offers Hamas a base, for example. The EU and the US fund the PA and since money is fungible this largesse allows the PA to subsidize terrorism.

We always ask where the Arab moderates are. Over the past 100 years plus, there have been Arab moderates; they’ve been silenced, intimidated, or killed. That is the perspective for understanding that as Arab regimes normalize relations with Israel, as some Israeli Arab leaders join an Israeli government, the formidable agitated rejectionist camp (led by Palestinian Arab players and Iran) will intensify their efforts to strangle normalization.

Their tools to stifle normalization range from BDS to bullets. "Useful idiot" Jews and others think BDS is something new -- but it is a follow-on of the Arab Boycott initiated in 1945 by the Arab League.

The only genuine denunciation of this week's terrorism from a significant Palestinian Israeli figure came from Mansour Abbas. He heads the United Arab List in the Knesset and serves in the Israeli cabinet.

The censures mumbled from Ramallah’s Muakta --  the headquarters of PLO/PA leader Mahmoud Abbas -- were scripted at Foggy Bottom and are vacuous as the PA will now – as it has done in the past – pay lifetime pensions to this week’s killers and their families.

The condemnation from the Joint List faction (a six-seat Knesset alliance of four radical anti-Zionist parties) was even more half-hearted, conditional, and hollow.

Those on our side who offer easy answers or magic solutions do not know what they are talking about. This wave of terror has no headquarters and no command and control, so it will take time to uproot. And this requires upping our game in intelligence (human and cyber).

Retaliation against innocent Arab civilians anywhere in the Land of Israel is unethical and without value. It “deters” people who do not need deterring and it may incite those sitting on the sidelines.

There is never a good time for Israeli demagogues to inflame the arena. But now, especially with the approach of Ramadan (always a violent period often involving internecine Muslim bloodletting from Pakistan to Yemen), is decidedly not the time for Religious Jewish ultra-nationalist (Hardel) lunatics (several of whom are Knesset members) to parade on the Temple Mount.

Like all religious fanatics, Jewish extremists think they are soldiers of the Party of God.  

Religious Jewish ultra-nationalist (Hardal) fanaticism from the street theatre in Jerusalem’s Shiekh Jarrah to illegal activities in Judea and Samaria has not helped the atmosphere. “Settler violence” did not ignite these attacks, yet that doesn’t mean brutality from our side is moral or acceptable. It is indeed illegal. It surely undermines Zionist sovereignty in Eretz Israel.

This is a time for self-discipline and for fortitude.

We will not be uprooted from this Land.