During the past four weeks, there has been a rash of violent attacks in Jerusalem and the West Bank. These are not a response to any Israeli actions, nor are they spontaneous outbursts. Rather, as Itamar Marcus and Maurice Hirsch explain, the violence is the result of deliberate incitement by the Palestinian Authority (PA), which began when its president, Mahmoud Abbas, realized he was unlikely to win the upcoming national elections. The violence, write Marcus and Hirsch, was originally a way to win votes, and is now a way to maintain popularity after Abbas’s decision to postpone the elections in definitely:

The intensified incitement started on The Tune of the Homeland, a quiz show broadcasting highly violent, pro-terror songs. To ensure maximum effect, the show was broadcast during the 4:00-5:00 p.m. time slot for children’s programming. From March 13 to March 17, The Tune of the Homeland repeatedly broadcast the song “My Machine Gun Is in My Hand.”

As the holy Muslim month of Ramadan approached, the PA TV’s machine guns were replaced with suicide belts. From April 2 to April 10, The Tune of the Homeland broadcast, on at least twenty occasions, a clip in which Palestinians declared, “I fired my shots, I threw my bomb, I detonated, detonated, detonated my [explosive] belts. . . . My brother, throw my blood on the enemy like bullets.”

Primed by this PA incitement, soon after Ramadan started, Palestinian youth and Jerusalem Arabs started indiscriminately attacking Jews and uploading the videos of the attacks to TikTok, a social-media platform particularly popular with young people. . . . As the violence erupted, Abbas’s Fatah [party] took to social media to fuel the flames.

Not wanting to be upstaged by the new anti-Israel “uprising” coming from Abbas’s Fatah, Hamas realized that it had to compete with Abbas or lose political points. And so, one night without warning, Hamas competed with Fatah in the manner that it knows has the most influence, and launched more than 40 missiles at southern Israel in “defense of Jerusalem.”. . . For Abbas, Fatah and Hamas, violence directed at Israel “in defense of Jerusalem” is just another one of the methods of playing internal Palestinian politics and campaigning before elections. While Hamas fires rockets, Abbas, the PA, and Fatah prefer the more subtle approach of inciting and recruiting Palestinian youth and sending them out to attack Israelis, as part of the PA’s child-terrorist army.

Last week, the New York Times reported, based on unnamed sources within the Trump administration, that the president had asked Israel not to carry out a planned strike on Iranian nuclear facilities. That is, somebody deliberately gave this information to the press, which later tried to confirm it by speaking with other officials. Amit Segal writes that, “according to figures in Israel’s security establishment,” this is “the most serious leak in Israel’s history.” He explains:

As Israel is reportedly planning what may well be one of its most consequential military operations ever, the New York Times lays out for the Iranians what Israel will target, when it will carry out the operation, and how. That’s not just any other leak.

Seth Mandel looks into the leaker’s logic:

The primary purpose of the [Times] article is not as a record of internal deliberations but as an instrument of policy itself. Namely, to obstruct future U.S. and Israeli foreign policy by divulging enough details of Israel’s plans in order to protect Iran’s nuclear sites. The idea is to force Israeli planners back to the drawing board, thus delaying a possible future strike on Iran until Iranian air defenses have been rebuilt.

The leak is the point. It’s a tactical play, more or less, to help Iran torpedo American action.

The leaker, Mandel explains—and the Times itself implies—is likely aligned with the faction in the administration that wants to see the U.S. retreat from the world stage and from its alliance with Israel, a faction that includes Vice-President J.D. Vance, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and the president’s own chief of staff Susie Wiles.

Yet it’s also possible, if less likely, that the plans were leaked in support of administration policy rather than out of factional infighting. Eliezer Marom argues that the leak was “part of the negotiations and serves to clarify to the Iranians that there is a real attack plan that Trump stopped at the last moment to conduct negotiations.”