Israel on Monday is enduring yet another day of incessant terror attacks. The death of an 18-year-old Israeli, stabbed in the stomach as he stood with friends at a gas station on Road 443 between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, has just been confirmed. A few hours ago, two teenage Palestinian girls pulled out scissors in an attempt to kill Israelis in Jerusalem’s main Mahane Yehuda fruit and vegetable market, and wound up injuring a 70-year-old Palestinian man from Bethlehem.

And those were only the two worst attacks so far today — on a day that also saw the funeral of yesterday’s terror fatality, Hadar Buchris, 21, a young Israeli woman who was murdered at the Gush Etzion junction south of Jerusalem just hours before yet another terror fatality from the self-same spot, American yeshiva student Ezra Schwartz, 18, was laid to rest in Boston.

The national mood is grim. The fear of attack is relentless.

Critics say the government, the army, should be doing a better job of preventing the attacks. There’s some basis to the complaint that the Gush Etzion junction should be more effectively protected; it’s been the site of numerous attacks, and the IDF is again now looking at ways to safeguard those who use it.

But the fact is that Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians live in intimate proximity in our part of the world. And when much of the Palestinians’ political leadership, spiritual leadership, educational system, mainstream media and social media relentlessly preach the hatred of Jews, the fundamental illegitimacy of the Jewish state, and the ostensible religious requirement to kill and be killed, the murderous consequences are difficult to defend against hermetically.

Read the article in full at Times of Israel.