The left-wing organization Peace Now has manufactured a crisis out of a symbolic order, signed by the mayor of Jerusalem, authorizing continued construction of homes in eastern Jerusalem. The housing project had been approved in 2012, and half of the new units had been set aside for Jerusalem Arabs. Why should the White House, the State Department, and the media have pounced on it as evidence of of Israeli bad faith? Elliott Abrams speculates:

The administration reaction is curious given that this is not new news, given that Arabs and Jews will live in the housing, and given the remarkably negative speech that Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas gave to the UN last week. The State Department rejected Abbas’s speech as “offensive” and “deeply disappointing.” I suppose it’s possible that the President now wanted to “balance” things by adding tough words for Israel.

But if this was a victory of sorts for Peace Now, it was no victory for the Obama administration or for those who seek peace negotiations. Building new housing for Arabs and Jews in Jerusalem does not in fact “call into question Israel’s ultimate commitment to a peaceful negotiated settlement with the Palestinians,” the foolish and extreme phrase of both the White House spokesman and the State Department.

On Wednesday, a double bombing in Jerusalem left two dead, and many others injured—an attack the likes of which has not been seen since 2016. In a Jenin hospital, meanwhile, armed Palestinians removed an Israeli who had been injured in a car accident, reportedly murdering him in the process, and held his body hostage for two days. All this comes as a year that has seen numerous stabbings, shootings, and other terrorist attacks is drawing to a close. Yaakov Lappin comments:

Unlike the individual or small groups of terrorists who, acting on radical ideology and incitement to violence, picked up a gun, a knife, or embarked on a car-ramming attack, this time a better organized terrorist cell detonated two bombs—apparently by remote control—at bus stops in the capital. Police and the Shin Bet have exhausted their immediate physical searches, and the hunt for the perpetrators will now move to the intelligence front.

It is too soon to know who, or which organization, conducted the attack, but it is possible to note that in recent years, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) has taken a lead in remote-control-bombing terrorism. Last week, a car bomb that likely contained explosives detonated by remote control was discovered by the Israel Defense Forces in Samaria, after it caught fire prematurely. In August 2019, a PFLP cell detonated a remote-control bomb in Dolev, seventeen miles northwest of Jerusalem, killing a seventeen-year-old Israeli girl and seriously wounding her father and brother. Members of that terror cell were later arrested.

With the Palestinian Authority (PA) losing its grip in parts of Samaria to armed terror gangs, and the image of the PA at an all-time low among Palestinians, in no small part due to corruption, nepotism, and its violation of human rights . . . the current situation does not look promising.