In the past few weeks, Islamic State-inspired attacks—including multiple shootings last night—have left over a dozen dead in the Jewish state, and several others seriously injured. Yet after meeting with Prime Minister Naftali Bennett in the wake of two deadly attacks, Antony Blinken, the American secretary of state, declared that the way to “foster” peace is to “prevent actions on all sides that could raise tensions, including settlement expansion, settler violence, incitement to violence, demolitions, payments to individuals convicted of terrorism, evictions of families from homes they’ve lived in for decades.” Lahav Harkov comments:

Note that amidst a wave of terror by Palestinians against Israelis, Blinken’s list of the actions to foster peace includes four that fall to Israel and just one that is clearly the responsibility of the Palestinians, with a sixth item—“incitement to violence”—vague enough to belong to either or both.

Someone seeking to interpret Blinken’s remarks charitably might have presumed that he sought to bring up Israel’s faults in Jerusalem and would later stress the Palestinians’ problems in Ramallah, to encourage each side to change. But such a person would have been proven wrong when Blinken presented the exact same litany, almost verbatim, hours later that [same] day after a meeting with the Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas.

Moreover, none of the recent deadly attacks in Israel took place in settlements; they all took place in cities that have been part of Israel from its establishment. They were clearly not about “settlement expansion;” they were motivated by a belief that the state of Israel should not exist.

Meanwhile, there is incitement to violence across Palestinian state-controlled media and on the Facebook pages of Abbas’s Fatah party. Most tragically, Palestinian textbooks are used to promote a violent and delusional agenda. . . . But perhaps the biggest incitement to violence of all is the fact that the Palestinian Authority literally incentivizes it. In 2021, the Palestinian Authority paid over $270 million in salaries to convicted terrorists in Israeli prisons and the families of those killed while committing acts of terror.

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.”