The calendar of terror is filled with anniversaries. Wednesday’s attack outside the Houses of Parliament in London, in which two civilians, a police officer and the attacker were killed, took place exactly a year after explosions at Brussels Airport and at a subway station in the Belgian capital, perpetrated by a terrorist cell affiliated with the Islamic State, killed 32 people. This week five years ago, three students and a teacher were murdered outside Otzar Hatorah, a Jewish school in Toulouse, France.

The London attack came a day after the death of Martin McGuinness. This Irish Republican Army commander, who helped lead the Irish nationalist terror campaign against Britain, became an architect of the Good Friday peace accord of 1998, in which the IRA committed to disbanding and continuing its struggle against British rule in Northern Ireland through nonviolent means.

Wednesday’s attack was a sharp reminder that Britain, like the rest of the West, faces a very different terror threat than the one it fought in the last decades of the 20th century. The attacker’s identity has not yet been confirmed, but the circumstances known so far underline once again the difficulty of Western security services in addressing attackers who are inspired, and sometimes operated, by jihadi groups such as Islamic State and Al-Qaida.

Read the full article in Haaretz