On Sunday, the Shin Bet reported a decline in attempted and actual terrorist attacks on Israeli citizens; not coincidentally, Mahmoud Abbas has appeared on Israeli television and spoken of his interest in peace and his efforts to curb the violence. Yossi Kuperwasser believes that the PA president is genuinely trying to rein in the wave of terror he himself unleashed, and explains Abbas’s rationale:

At least for the time being, the knife terror has more or less exhausted its capacity to return the spotlight to the Palestinian issue. The terror attack in Brussels has again pushed the Palestinian issue to the margins of the international system, and the association being made between the anti-Western terror and the anti-Jewish terror in Israel is not to the Palestinians’ benefit.

Second, the terror has only reconfirmed the Israeli Jewish public’s sobriety about the chances of real peace in this generation, along with their opposition to a settlement based on the core Palestinian positions—that is, granting the Palestinians a state without having to renounce their committed goal of eventually ruling the rest of historical Palestine and vanquishing Zionism.

Third, the international attitude toward boycotting Israel is beginning to change dramatically. There is now more of an inclination to condemn BDS for its fundamentally anti-Semitic stance which denies the Jewish nation-state’s right to exist than to justify the ongoing demonization of Israel.

Analyzing the recent direct Iranian attack on Israel, and Israel’s security situation more generally, Michael Oren looks to the 2015 agreement to restrain Iran’s nuclear program. That, and President Biden’s efforts to resurrect the deal after Donald Trump left it, are in his view the source of the current crisis:

Of the original motivations for the deal—blocking Iran’s path to the bomb and transforming Iran into a peaceful nation—neither remained. All Biden was left with was the ability to kick the can down the road and to uphold Barack Obama’s singular foreign-policy achievement.

In order to achieve that result, the administration has repeatedly refused to punish Iran for its malign actions:

Historians will survey this inexplicable record and wonder how the United States not only allowed Iran repeatedly to assault its citizens, soldiers, and allies but consistently rewarded it for doing so. They may well conclude that in a desperate effort to avoid getting dragged into a regional Middle Eastern war, the U.S. might well have precipitated one.

While America’s friends in the Middle East, especially Israel, have every reason to feel grateful for the vital assistance they received in intercepting Iran’s missile and drone onslaught, they might also ask what the U.S. can now do differently to deter Iran from further aggression. . . . Tehran will see this weekend’s direct attack on Israel as a victory—their own—for their ability to continue threatening Israel and destabilizing the Middle East with impunity.

Israel, of course, must respond differently. Our target cannot simply be the Iranian proxies that surround our country and that have waged war on us since October 7, but, as the Saudis call it, “the head of the snake.”