On Saturday, a sixty-seven-year-old Israeli named Amnon Muchtar was shot in the West Bank city of Qalqilya, in what authorities are treating as a terrorist attack. Although Israelis are officially banned from entering this Palestinian city (a regulation I have never heard compared to apartheid), Muchtar regularly visited to buy vegetables and visit friends. This incident should cause some Westerners to reconsider their assumptions about the West Bank. Even more significant, although less deadly, is an attack that happened previously. Moshe Phillips writes:

Hamas terrorists standing within the municipal boundaries of Tulkarm, a Palestinian Authority-governed city, unleashed a barrage of gunfire aimed at the nearby Israeli town of Bat Hefer. Then they posted a video of the shooting on social media. It was the third such shooting attack on Bat Hefer in two weeks; . . . there have been similar attacks targeting Kibbutz Meirav, which is next to the PA city of Jenin. Once again, terrorists within the boundaries of the city were able to shoot into an Israeli community without ever having to go beyond the borders of their PA-ruled city.

The PA has a huge police and security force. . . . Yet the PA refuses to use its forces against terrorists. It treats Hamas like its brothers, not its enemies. So the shooters in Tulkarm and Jenin went on their merry way.

Right now, when the PA is not a sovereign state, the entry of Israeli forces into PA areas results in angry UN resolutions and angry articles by Thomas Friedman in the New York Times, but nothing worse than that. But things would be very, very different if . . . the terrorists shooting at Bat Hefer or Kibbutz Meirav would be shooting from within sovereign Palestinian territory: Israel would be crossing an international border if it tried to chase the shooters.

Recent reports suggest that the White House has at last acted to allow the shipments of weapons that had been withheld from Israel and to end further the delays. On this topic, Elliott Abrams comments, “I don’t know what and how much has been held up, but it shouldn’t have happened. The level of delay should be zero.”

In this interview with Ariel Kahana, Abrams also comments on the failings of U.S. policy toward Iran, and the Biden administration’s refusal to enforce existing sanctions:

According to Abrams, Iran has indeed halted the advancement of its nuclear program on rare occasions. “This happened when Bush invaded Iraq in 2003, and when [President] Trump eliminated Qassem Suleimani in 2020. The U.S. needs to be ready to use force in Iran, but credibility is critical here. Only if [Iran’s leaders] are convinced that the U.S. is willing to act will they stop.”

Abrams claims that the U.S. president tried for two-and-a-half years to revive the nuclear deal with Iran until he realized it wasn’t interested. “Iran has benefited from this situation, and everyone outside the administration sees it as a failure.”