On Wednesday, a shoot-out between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian guerrillas in the West Bank city of Jenin resulted in the death of the journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. Her employer, Al Jazeera—the anti-Semitic and anti-American network owned by Qatar, a major financial and diplomatic sponsor of Hamas—immediately declared that she was “assassinated” by the IDF, a claim echoed on the House floor by Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib. Israeli officials have released evidence suggesting that the bullet that killed Al Akleh came from a Palestinian rifle, while acknowledging that it is impossible to arrive at forensic certainty without further investigation. But the Palestinian Authority has rejected Jerusalem’s call for a joint investigation, and it refuses to hand over any of the evidence in its possession. Ron Ben-Yishai comments:

In the past several years, Israeli Arabs have attained rising wages and standards of living as well as greater levels of education; they have also become more likely to learn Hebrew and to join the IDF. Mansour Abbas has led his Islamist Ra’am party into the governing coalition, and shifted attention away from the Palestinian cause—long the centerpiece of Israeli Arab politics—and toward the bread-and-butter issues facing his constituents. Yet there have also been less encouraging signs, particularly the riots that took place last year in cities with mixed Arab and Jewish populations, and the participation of Israeli Arabs in the recent wave of terror. Efraim Karsh sees in these last developments a disturbing trend that began with the Oslo Accords: