I live 15 minutes from where a Palestinian gunman opened fire on Israeli civilians in Tel Aviv Thursday night, killing three and wounding several more. But this does not make me special. We are a tiny country, and as a result, all Israelis live close to terror.

We have learned a few things from this, one of them being that, to a certain degree, terrorism works — it is terrifying, and one must accept that and try to get on with life. I have sometimes told people that when it’s good, Israel is the greatest country in the world; when it’s bad, well, it’s hard. We are in a hard moment right now. The best we can do is to put our faith in the security services, be vigilant, and try not to jump every time we hear a loud bang or something that sounds like an air raid or police siren.

Three reasons

Why we are in a hard moment is a more difficult question. Certainly, the arrival of Ramadan inherently brings with it heightened tensions. Yet with more than a dozen Israelis dead in terror attacks over the past few weeks, the situation does feel more severe than usual. Something else is going on. Let’s hope it’s something that can be contained.

There are probably three major reasons for the current wave of violence. 

First, it may have been caused, ironically, by peace. The Abraham Accords and the growing official and unofficial acceptance of Israel on the part of many Arab states have, unquestionably, changed the face of the region. But they are definitely not to everyone’s liking. There are powerful forces — Iran not least among them — who do not want to see Israel accepted because it would mean that Israel is permanent. And they do not want to see Arab nations cooperate with Israel because they view it as treason. 

Launching a wave of violence, even an unorganized and spontaneous one, is a way to keep tensions high, register discontent, and place Israel’s new Arab allies in a difficult position should Israel be forced to undertake retaliatory action.

Second, there is the Palestinians’ desire to somehow deal themselves back into the game. A neighbor of mine told me recently that due to the Abraham Accords, “the Palestinians understand that they are becoming irrelevant.” This likely had the opposite effect of what he intended because my first thought was that the Palestinians were very unlikely to allow themselves to become irrelevant without a fight. 

While this wave of terror appears to be, at best, loosely organized, it does seem to be driven by a desire to push the anti-Israel cause back to the front of the line, to assert relevancy via barbarism.

Third, there is the dilemma of the current political impasse. A few months ago, a former top Israeli security official said that today’s Palestinian youth represent a “lost generation” and warned that this could lead to unfortunate consequences. He is not wrong. The Palestinians, at the moment, have little or no political horizon. The peace process has been frozen for years, and the Israeli government — which may be about to fall — is too weak to take any significant action on the issue. The “status quo” shows no signs of changing any time soon.

Nihilistic violence

A great deal of this, ironically, is the Palestinians’ own fault. Had they accepted Ehud Barak’s peace offer in 2000, they would have already had a state for 22 years. Instead, they chose a campaign of terrorist atrocities that mortally wounded the peace process. 

Two decades of low-intensity conflict, missile fire and periodic mayhem have not changed this. Israelis today are, if anything, even less likely to give up on what little strategic depth they have in hopes of peace with an enemy they do not trust. Nonetheless, in the face of such an impasse, an eruption of nihilistic violence is morally reprehensible but not necessarily surprising. 

How long this eruption will last and how bad it could get are currently unknown — let’s hope not much longer and not much worse. But I am not sorry I am traveling to the United States two days after the latest attack for an extended vacation, and I am wondering whether I really ought to allow my mother to visit me in Tel Aviv at the end of the month. It is a hard moment right now.

Benjamin Kerstein is the Israel correspondent for The Algemeiner. He lives in Tel Aviv.