You can tell a great deal about countries and people by how they react to a horrific act of terror. And this morning’s massacre at the Ramot junction in Jerusalem came at a moment heavy with symbolism: just as the world was waking up to reports of Donald Trump floating a new plan for the release of Israeli hostages held in Gaza, the illusion of a negotiated, civilised discussion with the Palestinian movement was shattered. The gunfire in Jerusalem was a brutal reminder that such fantasies collapse the moment they are tested against reality.
To speak of ‘bringing back peace’ in this context is not only ahistorical, it is delusional
The official reaction of Hamas was to describe the killings as a ‘heroic operation’. In their statement, the gunmen’s slaughter of men and women waiting at a bus stop was described as a ‘natural response’ to alleged Israeli crimes, a ‘message’ that Israel’s plans will not go unpunished. It was Al Jazeera, as ever, which carried the statement first. The Qatari channel, lavishly funded by Doha, has long acted as Hamas’s official megaphone, amplifying every word of their propaganda.
And yet Qatar continues to be treated as though it were a neutral mediator, even by the United States and Israel itself. This pretence is dangerous. Qatar is not a broker of peace but Hamas’s survival mechanism, its banker and broadcaster. To indulge Doha is to indulge Hamas itself.
The facts are brutally simple. Two Palestinian terrorists, residents of the Ramallah area, were driven to the Ramot junction, stepped out armed with rifles, ammunition and a knife, and opened fire at a crowded bus stop and vehicles trapped in traffic. They were shot dead by a security officer and an armed civilian. But their work was already done.
Six people were murdered: Rabbi Levi Yitzhak Pash, a staff member at the Kol Torah yeshiva; Yaakov Pinto, a 25-year-old immigrant from Spain; Israel Mantzer, 28, from Jerusalem; Sarah Mendelson, 60, from Ramat Shlomo in Jerusalem; Rabbi Mordechai Steintzag, 79, from Jerusalem; and one other whose name has not yet been released. More than a dozen others were injured, including a woman in the final month of pregnancy.
The terrorists were neutralised by two ultra-Orthodox men: one, a platoon commander in the IDF’s Haredi Hasmonean Brigade, and the other an armed civilian.
This attack is reminiscent of the Second Intifada, when Palestinians carried out such assaults with grim regularity, targeting buses and bus stops and murdering large numbers of people. Then as now, the goal was the mass killing of civilians in the heart of Israel’s capital. This was not an indiscriminate assault, it was targeted violence against ordinary Jews on the streets of their capital city.
International reactions followed swiftly, and they reveal much. President Emmanuel Macron condemned the attack, but spoke of the need for a ‘political solution’ that alone could ‘bring back peace.’ His words ring hollow. What peace is he referring to? There has been no peace to return to. For decades Palestinian terrorism has murdered Jews through shootings, suicide bombings, rockets, kidnappings and invasions.
To speak of ‘bringing back peace’ in this context is not only ahistorical, it is delusional. Macron imagines that some political arrangement will dissolve what is in fact a religiously charged, maximalist campaign against the existence of the Jewish state. He fails to grasp that these murders are not random acts of desperation but deliberate executions of civilians because they are Jews, motivated by an ideology which sanctifies their killing. To respond with bromides about political solutions is to indulge the fantasy that appeasement can pacify jihadism.
If France’s reaction was weak, Spain’s is absurd. Among the dead in Jerusalem was a Spaniard, a young immigrant who came to build his life in Israel. One might expect Madrid to express outrage and solidarity. Instead, Spain has taken the opposite path. Only yesterday Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez announced punitive measures against Israel: closing Spanish ports and airspace to the transport of defensive weapons, blocking fuel shipments for the Israeli military and promoting an arms embargo.
This at the very moment Israel is fighting an existential war against Islamist violence – the same violence that murdered a Spanish citizen in Jerusalem today. The sheer ridiculousness of such a response should be obvious. Rather than standing with the victims, Spain punishes them, while giving comfort to the cause of their killers.
Nor is this surprising in light of recent Spanish politics. Deputy Prime Minister Yolanda Díaz, leader of the Somar party, was quick to accuse Israel of ‘war crimes’ only days after the Hamas massacre of 7 October 2023. She has since spoken of Palestine ‘from the river to the sea,’ rhetoric outlawed even in Germany as a call for Israel’s destruction. Spain, far from resisting such extremism, has allowed it to shape government policy. The result is that even the murder of a Spaniard by Palestinian gunmen does not move Madrid from its chosen path of appeasement.
For Israel, the lesson is harsh but familiar. The war now being fought in Gaza against Hamas is not a separate conflict. It is the same war that erupts, again and again, in different forms: a war waged by Palestinians animated by Islamist ideology against the very existence of the Jewish state. At times the world can see it clearly in the form of Hamas rockets and massacres. At other times it appears in Jerusalem itself, when so-called ordinary Palestinians emerge with guns, knives and bombs to kill civilians in small or large numbers.
This is not confined to Gaza, nor to Judea and Samaria, nor even to the organised structures of Hamas or Islamic Jihad. It can come from any quarter of Palestinian society, and indeed from wider Arab society too. That is the painful reality: the violence is not an aberration but a recurring manifestation of a deeper war.
Every decent person wishes to believe in the possibility of peace, to find those with whom life can be shared. Israel has tried. But the truth it must now face, and which the world must also confront, is that the battle is not with extremists on the margins alone. It is with a movement rooted in Islamist rejectionism, dedicated to the erasure of the Jewish state, and willing to murder Spaniards, Frenchmen, and above all Israelis in pursuit of that goal. Until that truth is acknowledged, there will be no peace to bring back.
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