Too many people still don't understand Palestinian culture.

Until the international community confronts this culture of celebrating violence and death, they will never understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

photo: Ahmed Abu Hameeda/Unsplash

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Six Israelis were murdered on Monday and 12 more were wounded, six of them seriously, when a pair of Palestinian terrorists opened fire on vehicles and pedestrians in Jerusalem.

The two gunmen, residents of the West Bank, arrived at the junction shortly after 10 a.m. and opened fire at people waiting at a bus stop, as well at a bus that had just stopped there.

Of course, Hamas praised the deadly attack, calling it a “heroic operation.”

Such incidents are part of a grim escalation since the Israel-Hamas war began on October 7, 2023, when thousands of Hamas-led terrorists invaded southern Israel, murdering some 1,200 people and abducting 251. Since then, more than 50 Israelis have been killed in terror attacks across Israel and the West Bank.

In January 2024, Israel faced an attempted infiltration near Hebron, as well as a deadly vehicle-ramming in Ra’anana that left one person dead and many others injured. Just a month later, in February, gunmen opened fire at a gas station near Eli, killing at least two Israelis.

In March, three Israelis were stabbed at a Gan Yavne mall by a Palestinian employed there illegally; one later died of his wounds. By mid-2024, the toll mounted further with a fatal shooting in Qalqilya, injuries near Nablus, and other targeted assaults on individuals simply going about their daily lives.

The violence reached a particularly gruesome peak in August 2024, when a Jewish settler was beaten to death with a hammer near Kedumim. That same month saw a drive-by shooting on Route 90, a series of car bombs near Hebron, and the killing of Israeli police officers in yet another attack. In October, seven Israelis were murdered — including a mother shielding her infant son — in a stabbing and shooting rampage in Tel Aviv.

In November and December, terrorists opened fire on a bus near Ariel, wounding eight, while additional car-ramming and shooting incidents near Hebron and al-Khader left multiple casualties, including the death of a child.

In January 2025, three Palestinian gunmen linked to Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad ambushed a bus and two cars on Highway 55 in the northern West Bank. Their coordinated assault left three Israelis dead and eight wounded. In February, multiple buses in central Israel were found rigged with explosives, but failed to detonate. One device carried the message “Revenge from Tulkarem” — a city in the West Bank.

In May, a pregnant Israeli woman was shot en route to the hospital; she died, though her baby survived via emergency C-section. And in July, two Palestinian Authority officers carried out a combined shooting and stabbing in Gush Etzion, killing one Israeli.

The truth is, these examples could go on endlessly. In Israel, terrorism is not an exception but a constant — buses, synagogues, restaurants, sidewalks: the everyday spaces of Jewish life are turned into theaters of bloodshed.

And yet, outside Israel, these horrors barely register. They flicker across the local press and then vanish. The world moves on as though Israelis possess a strange superhuman capacity to absorb the unbearable. This erasure is not accidental. It is the product of selective perception.

When a Palestinian drives his car into civilians at a bus stop or when a teenager pulls a knife on Jewish pedestrians, it is rarely described as terrorism. Instead, the world is fed euphemisms: a “lone wolf,” a “response to occupation” — as though stabbing strangers were a form of political dialogue. In such coverage, Jewish victims are reduced to footnotes, their humanity erased by framing that turns killers into “resistance fighters” and the dead into mere consequences.

But this pattern is not new. Palestinian terrorism against Jews is part of a long, unbroken continuum of violence that stretches back more than a century. Before the modern State of Israel was even founded, Jews were murdered in the Hebron massacre of 1929, targeted in pogroms across Europe, and attacked during the Arab riots of the 1930s. The decades that followed saw airplane hijackings, suicide bombings in buses and cafes during the Second Intifada, and knife intifadas in the 2010s.

Under longtime dictator Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority’s “Martyr Fund” will now pay $400 per month, for life, to each family of the terrorists who perpetrated today’s Jerusalem attack.¹

We are often told to distinguish between “ordinary Palestinians” and the terrorists who carry out attacks. But how much of that distinction holds up to scrutiny? Terrorism does not grow in a vacuum. It requires infrastructure: communities that shelter the perpetrators, celebrate their “martyrdom,” and raise children on a steady diet of glorified violence.

When someone carries out a school shooting in the United States, mainstream American society does not glorify the shooter. But when a Palestinian terrorist carries out an attack, the killer’s face is plastered on posters, their name is given to public squares, their families receive stipends, and their funerals are celebrated like national holidays. Instead of being treated as pariahs, they are elevated as martyrs and role models for the next generation.

Is this the behavior of a society fundamentally opposed to terrorism, or one complicit in sustaining it? Does this kind of culture make terror an aberration, or an aspiration?

It is not simply Hamas or Islamic Jihad that perpetuate this cycle; it is the cultural ecosystem that normalizes them. Polls routinely show large segments of the Palestinian population supporting attacks on Israeli civilians. Streets, schools, and sports tournaments are named after men who blew up buses or stabbed children. In living rooms, attacks are sometimes celebrated with sweets. These are not fringe behaviors; they are woven into daily life, creating an atmosphere where murderers are heroes and victims are afterthoughts.

So, when analysts reassure us that the “ordinary Palestinian” is different from the terrorist, what they really mean is that the ordinary Palestinian is not holding the weapon, at least not today. But if that same “ordinary” person condones the knife, cheers the bloodshed, and supports those who orchestrate it, the moral distinction becomes much harder to maintain. Terrorism is not just the act of the few; it is the tolerance, silence, and approval of the many.

Internationally, Palestinian terrorism is often framed as a desperate bid for “liberation,” as though every bullet fired at a Jewish child or every bus bombing is a cry for freedom. But if the goal were truly liberation, the pattern of Palestinian violence outside Israel makes no sense. For decades, Palestinian groups have turned their weapons not only on Israelis but also on the very Arab countries that hosted them.

Take Jordan, for example. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Palestinians expanded into a parallel war against the Jordanian monarchy itself. They hijacked planes, assassinated officials, and even attempted to overthrow King Hussein’s government. The result was Black September in 1970, when the Jordanian army expelled the Palestine Liberation Organization after a bloody civil war that left thousands of Palestinians and Jordanians dead.

Or look at Lebanon. When the Palestine Liberation Organization was driven out of Jordan, it moved into southern Lebanon, where it set up a mini-state and waged war not only against Israel but also against Lebanese Christians, Muslims, and Druze. Palestinian militias became a central driver of the Lebanese Civil War, dragging the country into chaos, igniting sectarian bloodshed, and devastating the society.

In 1992, Denmark took in 321 Palestinian refugees. When the government reviewed their status in 2019, it found that nearly two-thirds — 64 percent — had criminal records.

If Palestinian terrorism was purely about “liberation,” it would target only Israel. But history shows a different reality. Mainstream Palestinian society carries an ideology of perpetual struggle, turning even their allies into enemies the moment they refuse to submit. The truth is uncomfortable: Palestinian terrorism has less to do with building a free state and more to do with sustaining a culture of destruction.

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What we are witnessing today is, unfortunately, not unprecedented. Rather, it is the latest chapter in a history where Jewish life is treated as expendable.

This continuity has produced something even more sinister: the normalization of Jewish death. Terror attacks against Israelis have been turned into background noise — tragedies absorbed into the daily rhythm of the conflict, as though they were inevitable and unworthy of shock. The same act of terror that would paralyze London, New York, or Paris for weeks is treated as “just another day” in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv.

When a bombing happens in Europe, landmarks light up with colors of solidarity, hashtags trend, and global leaders declare their unity against extremism. But when Jews are murdered in Israel, the silence is deafening, broken only by vague mentions of “cycles of violence” that imply moral equivalence between victim and attacker.

The language of the media fuels this erasure. The words chosen — “militants,” “clashes,” “escalations” — rob the events of moral clarity. Terrorism becomes politics, murder becomes grievance. Reporters and analysts devote more space to explaining the supposed motivations of attackers than to memorializing the lives of their victims. The result is a narrative that subtly recasts killers as actors in a struggle and victims as unfortunate props in someone else’s story.

This distortion is made worse by the double standard of human rights. Palestinian suffering is described in the language of universal justice, while Jewish suffering is treated as a byproduct of conflict. Human rights for Palestinians are endlessly championed; human rights for Jews are invisible. The refusal to call Jewish victims “victims” is not just semantic; it is dehumanization dressed up as empathy.

Meanwhile, the psychological toll on Israelis is profound. Parents put their children on school buses knowing those very buses are targets. Families walk through markets or board trains with the quiet calculation of where to run if gunfire erupts. Soldiers, teachers, shopkeepers, and students all live with the unspoken awareness that daily routines take place under the shadow of terrorism. This is the human cost behind the headlines that never make it beyond Israel’s borders: not just deaths, but the quiet terror of life lived in anticipation of the next attack.

And yet, the world refuses to learn a simple truth: What begins with Jews never ends with Jews. The terror tactics pioneered in Israel (suicide bombings, knife attacks, car rammings) have been exported and copied across the globe. To ignore them in Israel is to allow them to metastasize elsewhere. Israel is the front line in a broader war against terrorism, and those who dismiss Israeli suffering are not just indifferent to Jews but blind to the dangers facing themselves.

The irony is chilling: The Jewish People, history’s perennial scapegoats, are again treated as the exception. We are the only victims whose tragedies are rationalized, whose deaths are explained away as deserved. Some argue this is not deliberate, just the byproduct of fatigue or competing headlines.

But ask yourself: How often do you see headlines about Israelis stabbed, shot, or blown apart on their way to synagogue, school, or work? How often do these stories receive the same urgency, the same empathy, as similar attacks in the West? Why do “human rights” apply everywhere, except when Jews are the victims?

The answer is uncomfortable. Acknowledging Jewish suffering would require reckoning with centuries of double standards. It is easier to dismiss Jews as privileged or powerful than to admit they remain vulnerable targets of hate. It is easier to redefine terrorism in Israel as something less than terror than to confront what it says about our moral compass. Silence is not neutrality. Silence is complicity.

There is an old thought experiment: “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” Today, we might reframe it: “If a terrorist attack happens in Israel and the world does not cover it, did it really happen?”

It is rhetorical, of course, but it captures the paradox of our information age: a time when everything is recorded, streamed, and shared, and yet entire tragedies can vanish into the abyss of selective reporting.

When a bus is riddled with bullets, a family gunned down, or a bomb explodes outside a synagogue, the absence of coverage is more than omission. It robs the dead of dignity and the living of solidarity. It tells the world that some lives matter less, some victims are unworthy of empathy. This is not merely a failure of journalism. It is a failure of morality. By choosing silence, people do not just overlook the violence; they normalize it.

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1. Open Source Intel on X