In the past two weeks, a rash of terrorist attacks on Jews in Israel has left several seriously injured. The Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, meanwhile, has called upon his people to take to the streets, and has threatened to end security cooperation with Israel. Much like the wave of stabbings, car-rammings, and other low-grade attacks in 2015 and 2016, this outbreak of violence has led to speculation in the Israeli press that another intifada could be in the making. Moshe Elad argues that such a development is as unlikely as it was four years ago:

During every crisis in recent years—the eruption over the metal detectors at the entrance to Temple Mount, the relocation of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, [and so forth]— Mahmoud Abbas has issued a call to “take to the streets.” And every time it bounced back like an echo in an empty chamber. The Palestinians in the West Bank don’t flood the streets anymore. They have lost all energy and are disdainful toward the corrupt leadership of the Palestinian Authority.

Whenever Abbas is displeased at some international decision or other, he takes to his balcony and declares an end to security cooperation with Israel. But since the mechanism was [created] in 1995, it has ceased its activities only once, following the riots over the Western Wall tunnels in September 1996, and only then at Israel’s initiative. Hundreds of threats later, the cooperation is business as usual.

Abbas and his people know very well that the Israeli army is present in the West Bank mainly to protect the roads and the settlements within it, but as a byproduct, it also protects the Palestinian Authority. Every Palestinian security officer knows that without the IDF, Abbas would have been forced to escape underground, just as his men did when Hamas seized power in the Gaza Strip in June 2007.

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.”