ANALYSIS: East Jerusalem Terror Cannot Be Defeated With ‘Defensive Shield’ Operations

JERUSALEM (VINnews) — With all of the good intentions of the new government in Israel, and even if it does succeed in curtailing the immoderate power of the courts, the litmus test of its success will be if it provides Israelis with a sense of security.

In this task it has so far failed, due to an inability to understand the nature of the current wave of terror attacks in Jerusalem. In the past, the terrorists were members of a particular group, affiliated with Hamas or the Fatah group of the PA. Most of them came from Judea and Samaria, regions which are fueled with hatred for Israelis and where the terror cells are easier to identify. This was the primary impetus for the “Breakwave” campaign, an effort to eradicate the existing cells in Jenin, Shechem and Hevron, which were responsible for a large number of attacks and attempted attacks on Israelis in 2022. The cells were identified, arrests were made and terrorists eliminated in firefights with the vastly superior IDF.

However a new trend started during the past year. Israeli Arabs with Israeli ID, people who are not affiliated with any particular terror group and do not have any previous security records, decided to commit suicidal and horrendous terrorist attacks. In Beersheva, a Bedouin terrorist murdered four civilians last March, stabbing them to death. In Shuafat, a town which is part of Greater Jerusalem, a terrorist fired at a checkpoint, killing one soldier and injuring another seriously. Another terrorist opened fire at police in Kafr Qassem, an Israeli Arab town.

All these were attacks by Israeli Arabs in 2022. In the first months of the current year, there were 3 terror attacks in Jerusalem, all perpetrated by lone East Jerusalem Arabs, unassociated with any terror group, unknown to security forces, with no security records. Two of them used weapons, which are apparently rife in East Jerusalem, but one of them simply took a car and drove into a crowd – a relatively simple but brutally effective measure.

There are 350,000 Arabs in East Jerusalem, all with the same mobility as these three terrorists. Many have access to weapons, and in theory could perform copycat attacks. There is no way to arrest all of the potential terrorists, no way to confiscate all of the weapons. The only way, even a hardline right-wing government will soon discover, is to address the grievances and needs of the “good” Arab citizens, while catching the inciters and rabble-rousers both online and offline through exhaustive intelligence work. There are no short cuts, no easy solutions when people live in such close proximity to one another, working in the same supermarkets, factories and offices, mingling in the same parks and train stations. There is no shortcut to coexistence.