Attacks by Palestinian assailants, including the latest on Tuesday night, have killed 11 people in the deadliest wave Israel has seen in years. They come as peace talks on ending Israeli sovereignty over the Palestinians and establishing a Palestinian state in the occupied territories are a distant memory. Israel, meanwhile, has shifted its priorities to curbing Iran’s main enemy and building regional Arab alliances. The Israeli government, backed by the Biden government, has tried to do what leaders describe as a “shrinkage” of the conflict. Instead of pursuing a partition agreement with the Palestinians, it aims to keep things quiet by taking steps to improve the Palestinian economy and reduce friction. But now, as Israel faces the possibility of another round of violence less than a year after the war with Hamas fighters in Gaza, the Palestinian issue is coming back to the fore and revealing the weaknesses of this approach. It was a message sent by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas condemning the shootings in the central city of Bnei Brak on Tuesday night. “Permanent, comprehensive and just peace is the quickest way to provide security and stability for the Palestinian and Israeli peoples and the peoples of the region,” he said. Israel has long sidelined Abbas, calling him an unacceptable partner in peace talks. Israel sees the current wave as another round of extremist violence aimed at its very existence. He blamed the incitement on Palestinian social media, saying Hamas was encouraging violence and pointing to a flood of weapons available to Palestinian communities. In Tuesday’s attack, a 27-year-old Palestinian from the West Bank methodically shot dead, killing five. On Sunday night, an attack by gunmen from two Islamic State supporters in the central city of Khandera killed two police officers. Last week, a combined car and knife attack in the southern city of Beersheba – also by an Islamic State-inspired assailant – killed four people. The previous two attacks were carried out by Palestinian civilians in Israel. in all three incidents the perpetrators were killed by police or bystanders. The violence has come as a surprise to Israelis, who have enjoyed relative calm since last year’s 11-day war with Hamas. It has also overshadowed a historic rally in the Negev desert this week, where the foreign ministers of the four Arab states met for the first time with their Israeli and US counterparts on Israeli soil. And while the foreign ministers — from Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Morocco — spoke on the Palestinian issue, the meeting focused on the emerging nuclear deal between Iran and world powers. The Palestinians were not invited. In response to the violence, Israel has increased its security presence in Israeli cities and the occupied West Bank. Arrests were made in Arab communities and they raided the home of the man who carried out Tuesday’s attack in the West Bank. “We are dealing with a new wave of terror,” said Prime Minister Naftali Bennett. “As in other waves, we will prevail.” But there is no indication that Bennett is ready to address the deeper issues that fuel the conflict. Bennett leads a cumbersome coalition of ideologically diverse parties – including an Islamist Arab faction – that has joined forces to oust former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. To survive, the coalition agreed to put aside divisive issues, most notably the conflict with the Palestinians, and instead focus on issues of Israeli consensus, such as the pandemic and the economy. The US ambassador to Israel, Tom Naides, has repeatedly called the new government “a beautiful thing.” Focusing on the war in Ukraine and tensions with China, Washington has said it has no plans to implement a peace plan and instead wants to lay the groundwork for future talks one day. With his tact, Bennett and his government did not deviate from Netanyahu, who reluctantly accepted the notion of a Palestinian state under strong American pressure, but did little to promote the idea. The Palestinians, in turn, have made disappointing parallels with the war in Ukraine, lamenting that the West has rallied quickly against Russian aggression and has not yet gone ahead with imposing sanctions on Israel over its 55-year occupation. Meanwhile, Israel has deepened its control of the West Bank with its web of checkpoints and barricades, and hundreds of thousands of Israelis living in Jewish settlements. The Israeli-Egyptian blockade of Gaza continues. The last substantive peace talks took place a decade and a half ago. The Palestinians are looking for the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, which was occupied by Israel in the 1967 war in the Middle East, for a future state. The Bennett government seems to have learned some lessons from last year, when a series of mistakes before the Muslim holy month of Ramadan boiled over in the Gaza war. This year, as the major Muslim, Jewish and Christian holidays converge, Israel has offered to ease a series of restrictions on Palestinians ahead of Ramadan, which begins this weekend. Israel has issued thousands of work permits for Gaza workers, lifted the ban on family visits to Palestinian Gaza detainees and said it would not restrict Palestinian rallies around Jerusalem’s Old City as it did last year. A rare visit by the Jordanian king to Palestinian leaders in the West Bank this week, followed by visits to the king by the defense minister and the Israeli president on Wednesday, was aimed at establishing calm. The increase in violence could derail the new measures. King Abdullah II has told the Israeli president visiting Israel that he condemns the bloodshed, but that any regional progress “must include our Palestinian brothers.” Many Palestinians say the real goal of Israeli measures is to maintain the status quo, in which millions live under endless decades of military occupation. “They are giving small privileges through a dropper,” said Diana Bhutto, a former legal adviser to the Palestinian Authority. “The Israelis have long held the position that the Palestinians do not deserve rights, that we do not want rights, that it is just a matter of being able to redeem us, of getting small permits here and there.” Any solution to the Palestinian conflict is complicated by a chronic rift between Abbas’s Fatah movement and Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip and calls for the destruction of Israel. With both of the last three attacks being carried out by Israeli civilians, Israel may now be forced to reckon with a minority population that has been ravaged by violent crime and has long suffered from discrimination. In Israel, some argue that even the Palestinian state would not end the conflict. The Palestinians “will never accept Israel as a Jewish state. “The fight for them is for all of Israel,” Yitzhak Gershon, a retired military general, told Israeli army radio. Meanwhile, several rights groups have described Israeli sovereignty between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean as an apartheid system. Omar Shakir of the international group Human Rights Watch stressed that no complaint justifies the killing of innocent people. He added: “The reality is that it is not viable to continue to rule millions of people who are deprived of their fundamental rights.”
The Associated Press writer Joseph Krauss in Jerusalem contributed to this report.
