On Saturday, a sixty-seven-year-old Israeli named Amnon Muchtar was shot in the West Bank city of Qalqilya, in what authorities are treating as a terrorist attack. Although Israelis are officially banned from entering this Palestinian city (a regulation I have never heard compared to apartheid), Muchtar regularly visited to buy vegetables and visit friends. This incident should cause some Westerners to reconsider their assumptions about the West Bank. Even more significant, although less deadly, is an attack that happened previously. Moshe Phillips writes:

Hamas terrorists standing within the municipal boundaries of Tulkarm, a Palestinian Authority-governed city, unleashed a barrage of gunfire aimed at the nearby Israeli town of Bat Hefer. Then they posted a video of the shooting on social media. It was the third such shooting attack on Bat Hefer in two weeks; . . . there have been similar attacks targeting Kibbutz Meirav, which is next to the PA city of Jenin. Once again, terrorists within the boundaries of the city were able to shoot into an Israeli community without ever having to go beyond the borders of their PA-ruled city.

The PA has a huge police and security force. . . . Yet the PA refuses to use its forces against terrorists. It treats Hamas like its brothers, not its enemies. So the shooters in Tulkarm and Jenin went on their merry way.

Right now, when the PA is not a sovereign state, the entry of Israeli forces into PA areas results in angry UN resolutions and angry articles by Thomas Friedman in the New York Times, but nothing worse than that. But things would be very, very different if . . . the terrorists shooting at Bat Hefer or Kibbutz Meirav would be shooting from within sovereign Palestinian territory: Israel would be crossing an international border if it tried to chase the shooters.

Stephen Daisley writes about the slaying of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim:

Yaron and Sarah were murdered in a climate of lies and vilification and hatred. . . . The more institutions participate in this collective madness, the more madness there will be. The more elected officials and NGOs misrepresent the predictable consequences of asymmetric warfare in densely populated territories, where much of the infrastructure of everyday life has a dual civilian/terrorist purpose, the more the citizenries of North America and Europe will come to regard Israelis and Jews as a people who lust unquenchably after blood.

The most intolerant anti-Zionism is becoming a mainstream view, indulged by liberal societies, more concerned with not conflating irrational hatred of Israel with irrational hatred of Jews—as though the distinction between the two is all that well defined anymore.

For years now, and especially after the October 7 massacre, the call has gone up from the pro-Palestinian movement to put Palestine at the heart of Western politics. To pursue the struggle against Zionism in every country, on every platform, and in every setting. To wage worldwide resistance to Israel, not only in Wadi al-Far’a but in Washington, DC. “Globalize the intifada,” they chanted. This is what it looks like.