On May 30, two terrorists shot and killed Meir Tamari, a father of two, as he was driving. He was the twentieth person to die in a terrorist attack this year. Yoni Ben Menachem comments:

The attack was carried out by the “rapid-reaction unit” of the “Tulkarm Battalion,” a joint terrorist body of the [Iran-backed] Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah movement. . . .  Islamic Jihad sources say that the murder of the Israeli citizen Meir Tamari is part of the organization’s revenge response to IDF activity in [the village of] Nur Shams and to the targeted killing of its military elite in Gaza in May.

The Israeli security establishment is concerned about the spread of armed terrorist groups throughout Judea and Samaria equipped with large stockpiles of weapons and ammunition. There are about twenty armed terrorist groups carrying out attacks. The weapons flow through the border with Jordan, with the purchases financed by Iran. The strategy of the armed terrorist groups is to conduct a war of attrition against the IDF in all of Judea and Samaria and to draw in as many soldiers as possible. Iran sees Judea and Samaria as another front against Israel as part of its strategy of “uniting the fronts.”

Mahmoud Abbas has a Palestinian security force numbering 30,000 armed men under his command. But Abbas continues the policy he started in 2021 of avoiding conflict with the armed terrorist groups so long as they do not directly threaten his Muqata headquarters in Ramallah. According to senior officials in the Fatah movement, Abbas rejected the security plan offered to him by the Biden administration.

The Mossad’s heist of a vast Iranian nuclear archive in 2018 provided abundant evidence that Tehran was not adhering to its commitments; it also provided an enormous amount of actionable intelligence. Two years later, Israel responded to international inspectors’ condemnation of the Islamic Republic’s violations by using this intelligence to launch a spectacular campaign of sabotage—a campaign that is the subject of Target Tehran, by Yonah Jeremy Bob and Ilan Evyatar. David Adesnik writes:

The question that remains open at the conclusion of Target Tehran is whether the Mossad’s tactical wizardry adds up to strategic success in the shadow war with Iran. The authors give a very respectful hearing to skeptics—such as the former Mossad director Tamir Pardo—who believe the country should have embraced the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran. Bob and Evyatar reject that position, arguing that covert action has proven itself the best way to slow down the nuclear program. They acknowledge, however, that the clerical regime remains fully determined to reach the nuclear threshold. “The Mossad’s secret war, in other words, is not over. Indeed, it may never end,” they write.

Which brings us back to Joe Biden. The clerical regime was headed over a financial cliff when Biden took office, thanks to the reimposition of sanctions after Washington withdrew from the nuclear deal. The billions flowing into Iran on Biden’s watch have made it that much easier for the regime to rebuild whatever Mossad destroys in addition to weathering nationwide protests on behalf of women, life, and freedom. Until Washington and Jerusalem get on the same page—and stay there—Tehran’s nuclear ambitions will remain an affordable luxury for a dictatorship at war with its citizens.