On Tuesday, a Bedouin citizen of Israel drove his car into one person and stabbed several others in the Negev city of Be’er Sheva, leaving four dead. The perpetrator was unusual in that he hailed from neither eastern Jerusalem nor the West Bank, and his sympathies lay with Islamic State (IS) rather than Palestinian organizations. But, writes Nadav Shragai, this should not be treated as an isolated event:

[T]his was not the first time an IS sympathizer killed Jews in Israel. [Such] terrorists, however, also do not fit the usual profile of the “lone wolf.” Most of them are over thirty, married with children, and hold respectable jobs, making them more financially secure. Many of them have become radicalized after falling under IS’s spell on social media or in mosques.

However, we should not be fooled by the fact that Tuesday’s terrorist attack was carried out by an IS terrorist. . . . The success of one attack spurs extremists in other organizations to stage similar attacks, known as copycat or inspiration attacks, and this phenomenon is of great concern for the defense establishment.

Israel has experienced seven stabbing attacks over the past three weeks. . . . Waves of terrorism are not created in a vacuum and they have the potential to evolve into a full-blown intifada. This is the terrorist groups’ way of employing the “reap what you sow” method, by which what is sown in terror is reaped in negotiations; and the harder you hit the Israeli home front, the less resolve we can show in negotiations.

We cannot be fooled again. We must remember that no good can come of making goodwill gestures during waves of terrorism and that there is little if any room to show consideration for sectors that breed terrorists, be they from the West Bank or the Negev.

For the past 36 hours, I’ve been reading and listening to analyses of the terms and implications of the recent hostage deal. More will appear in the coming days, and I’ll try to put the best of them in this newsletter. But today I want to share a comment made on Tuesday by the Palestinian analyst Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib. While he and I would probably disagree on numerous points about the current conflict, this analysis is spot on, and goes entirely against most arguments made by those who consider themselves pro-Palestinian, and certainly those chanting for a cease-fire at all costs:

When a cease-fire in Gaza is announced, Hamas’s fascists will do everything they can to frame this as the ultimate victory; they will wear their military uniforms, emerge from their tunnels, stop hiding in schools and displacement centers, and very quickly reassert their control over the coastal enclave. They’ll even get a few Gazans to celebrate and dance for them.

This, I should note, is exactly what has happened. Alkhatib continues:

The reality is that the Islamist terrorism of Hamas, masquerading as “resistance,” has achieved nothing for the Palestinian people except for billions of dollars in wasted resources and tens of thousands of needless deaths, with Gaza in ruins after twenty years following the withdrawal of settlements in 2005. . . . Hamas’s propaganda machine, run by Qatari state media, Al Jazeera Arabic, will work overtime to help the terror group turn a catastrophic disaster into a victory akin to the battles of Stalingrad and Leningrad.

Hamas will also start punishing anyone who criticized or worked against it, and preparing for its next attack. Perhaps Palestinians would have been better off if, instead of granting them a temporary reprieve, the IDF kept fighting until Hamas was utterly defeated.