Terrorists All

"He was stabbed outside, he was all slashed and bloody. We were in shock. We didn't know what happened and then someone near the door shouted there's a terrorist."
Shimon Vaknin, Tel Aviv

Zaka emergency personnel work at the scene of a Palestinian stabbing attack in Tel Aviv, Israel November 19, 2015.

Reuters/Nir Elias

A Palestinian man wielding a knife stabbed two Israeli men in a building in Tel Aviv, before he was finally apprehended. A shop on the second floor of the office building where a group of Israelis had gathered for afternoon prayers was where the stabbing took place. Shiumon Vakin described seeing a bloodied man stumble into the room.

Then what followed was a standoff with the worshippers huddling tight against the closed shop door while the attacker  tried to force his way into the  place. Luba Samri, a spokeswoman for the Israeli police, identified one of the dead men, in his 20s. The second man died in hospital, while a third Israeli who was wounded is expected to recover.

The attacker was identified as 36-year-old Raed Khalil bin Mahmoud, a father of five from the village of Dura, near Hebron in the West Bank. He had been apprehended by civilians, then turned over to the police. There was also another West Bank attack south of Jerusalem, where a Palestinian driver sprayed a line of cars with bullets, killing an 18-year-old American-Jewish student, an Israeli and an Arab.

The scene of the attack in the Alon Shvut settlement, West Bank, November 19, 2015.  Photo: Tomer Applebaum

A group of pedestrians was then targeted, with the Palestinian ramming his vehicle into them. Military forces at the scene shot the attacker. This, though Israel has increased its security across the country, with soldiers patrolling cities alongside thousands of police. Checkpoints and concrete barriers have been erected in Arab areas of east Jerusalem since this is where many of the attackers come from.

Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, al-Qaeda, Islamic State are all terrorist militias whose founding purpose it is to commit atrocities against whoever they perceive as their enemies. Jews are not beloved by Arabs. These groups make no secret of their viral and vicious antipathy to the presence of Jews in the Middle East, a geography that Palestinians deride as never having been the birthplace of Jews, only Arabs.

Differentiating Palestinians who plot and engage in terrorism from terrorist groups may suit the opinion of the sympathetic in the global community who consider the Palestinians 'underdogs' in the battle of a nation to defend itself and its people from the deadly predations of an enemy that considers it an 'occupying power' because of its need to defend itself, but the truth is there to be seen, albeit an inconvenient one to many in the West.