Truck Terror Attack in Jerusalem Follows Mounting International Pressure on Israel

TEL AVIV – The timing of today’s deadly truck-ramming terrorist attack in Jerusalem may be instructive.

The attack, carried out in the eastern Jerusalem neighborhood of Armon Hanatziv, also known as Eastern Talpiot, comes less than three weeks after the United Nations Security Council declared eastern Jerusalem to be “occupied Palestinian territory.”

It follows lame-duck Secretary of State John Kerry’s Mideast policy speech in which he largely blamed Israel for the absence of negotiations (while the Palestinians have refused multiple statehood offers as well as attempts by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to jumpstart talks), and he repeatedly slammed Israeli settlement construction, including in eastern Jerusalem.  Notably, the State Department’s condemnation of today’s attack referred to the location of the terrorist onslaught as “Jerusalem” instead of “East Jerusalem.”

Today’s eastern Jerusalem truck terror comes one week before the Palestinians are scheduled to attend a farcical Paris “peace” conference at which the international community, minus Israel, is slated to get together to set the future parameters of a Palestinian state.

Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely was right to link today’s carnage to the Paris summit. “The world has received a clear answer from the Palestinians to the peace conference coming up in Paris: More terror,” Hotovely said. “I again call on the international community to demand an end to terror and the industry of education toward it.”

The Palestinians have a long and sordid history of responding to peace talks or international pressure on Israel with a terror campaign targeting Israelis. Arch Terrorist Yasser Arafat personified that tactic when he responded to generous Israeli statehood offers in September 2000 by launching the deadly Second Intifada instead of accepting a Palestinian state or even making a counter offer.

Within less than forty-eight hours of last month’s anti-Israel UN resolution, I noticed an immediate uptick in Palestinian terrorist attacks targeting Jews in the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem, the very areas where Israeli construction was singled out in the UN document.

I wrote at the time it was too early to tell whether the violence represented a spike in Palestinian terrorism following the UN vote or whether the incidents were part of the year-and-a-half-long trend known as the so-called Palestinian wave of terror that seems to escalate and then slow down.

With today’s truck terror, we may be more clearly seeing the Palestinian response to the mounting international pressure on Israel.

Aaron Klein is Breitbart’s Jerusalem bureau chief and senior investigative reporter. He is a New York Times bestselling author and hosts the popular weekend talk radio program, “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio.” Follow him on Twitter @AaronKleinShow. Follow him on Facebook.