Yesterday, an Israeli woman was murdered, and an Israeli man severely wounded, in a drive-by shooting outside of Hebron. On Saturday, another terrorist killed a father and son at a carwash. The Israeli media has described these as lone-wolf attacks, since the perpetrators do not appear to be acting on direct orders from any known jihadist group. Nadav Shragai rejects this characterization:

The attackers may decide on their own where to strike and they do it on their own, but they drink from the same poisonous well that makes the killing of Jews kosher, be it because “al-Aqsa Mosque is being desecrated” or just in the name of Islam or the Palestinian cause. The incitement and hatred have no organizational affiliation.

The Palestinian Authority (PA), for its own reasons, may be assisting Israel in capturing dozens of killers but it has not lifted a finger in an effort to stop the worshiping of death and martyrdom. It has not stopped the explicit incitement to kill Jews for being Jews. It has allowed the continuation of terrorist glorification; it continues paying families of terrorists and has been memorializing them upon their death. Perceptually, it has been breeding terrorists and helping them grow, while occasionally helping Israel detain them in extreme cases.

Just last week, the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center published a study showing that in the Palestinian textbooks issued by the PA, Israel doesn’t even exist. The study noted that the Palestinian prime minister recently took part in a ceremony honoring parents of “martyrs,” [i.e., Palestinians who lost their lives committing acts of terror], who were killed during the past year, and vowed that the PA would not bow to pressure by altering its subject matter, regardless of whether the donor countries will stop the funding spigot.

During the ceremony, there was even a picture shown of a “lone-wolf terrorist.”

While I’ve seen much speculation—some reasonable and well informed, some quite the opposite—about why Jerusalem chose Friday morning to begin its campaign against Iran, the most obvious explanation seems to be the most convincing. First, 60 days had passed since President Trump warned that Tehran had 60 days to reach an agreement with the U.S. over its nuclear program. Second, Israeli intelligence was convinced that Iran was too close to developing nuclear weapons to delay military action any longer. Edward Luttwak explains why Israel was wise to attack:

Iran was adding more and more centrifuges in increasingly vast facilities at enormous expense, which made no sense at all if the aim was to generate energy. . . . It might be hoped that Israel’s own nuclear weapons could deter an Iranian nuclear attack against its own territory. But a nuclear Iran would dominate the entire Middle East, including Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain, with which Israel has full diplomatic relations, as well as Saudi Arabia with which Israel hopes to have full relations in the near future.

Luttwak also considers the military feats the IDF and Mossad have accomplished in the past few days:

To reach all [its] targets, Israel had to deal with the range-payload problem that its air force first overcame in 1967, when it destroyed the air forces of three Arab states in a single day. . . . This time, too, impossible solutions were found for the range problem, including the use of 65-year-old airliners converted into tankers (Boeing is years later in delivering its own). To be able to use its short-range F-16s, Israel developed the “Rampage” air-launched missile, which flies upward on a ballistic trajectory, gaining range by gliding down to the target. That should make accuracy impossible—but once again, Israeli developers overcame the odds.