The suicide bombing of a seder in 2002, the arson at the governor’s mansion in 2025, set back the Palestinian cause.
2002 and 2025: On the first night of Passover, Palestinians (or bedfellows) took to violence, murdering Jews in the first incident and trying to murder the governor of Pennsylvania in the second incident.
How did this violence work out for the Palestinians?
2002
At a Passover seder in Netanya, Israel in 2002, a Hamas suicide bomber murdered 30 people and wounded 140. The anguish and horror for the victims and for Israel were clear.
How did that attack work out for the Palestinians? It set back the Palestinian cause in three major ways:
• Three months after the Passover seder bombing in Netanya, Israel Prime Minister Ariel Sharon decided to build the security wall, some 25 feet tall, separating Palestinian communities from Israeli communities. It’s tough for a would be suicide bomber to scale a 25-foot wall. The success rate of Palestinian suicide bombing dropped. The wall worked.
• The wall made it tough for Palestinians to argue for the legitimacy of a Palestinian state, since the wall highlights the determination of Hamas and of the Palestinian Authority for a one state solution: a Palestinian state, minus a Jewish state.
• The wall made (and makes) it tougher for Palestinians to get to travel around the Palestinian territories and to work in Israel.
The 25-foot wall (in some places, a fence) is indeed a barrier — a physical one, a political-moral one and an economic one — a defeat for the Palestinians.
So how did the Passover massacre in 2002 work out for the Palestinians? It set back their cause substantially. Not to mention, Israel tracked down and killed most of the planners of the Passover atrocity and, even more repercussive for the long-run, Israeli public opinion hardened. The political left in Israel weakened and the promoters of peace with the Palestinians found it harder to argue that significant voices on both sides of the Israel-Palestinian divide truly want peace.
2005
Now we come to the Passover seder of the Jewish governor of Pennsylvania in 2025. Again, a perpetrator alleging to fight for the Palestinians. Again, a terrorist expressing pride in what he did. Again, the claim that the Jews had it coming, the claim that it was really their fault, the claim that Palestinian terrorism is justice.
How is this going to work out for the Palestinians? We are not prophets, but it seems that just as the atrocities on Passover in 2002 set back the Palestinian cause substantially, the setting fire to a governor’s mansion in 2025 will have the same effect. Palestinians will lose out.
Terrorism, by some perverse emotional calculus, pleases the Palestinian terrorists and their accomplices. To these evil people, it feels good to kill. It feel wonderful to ruin the lives of unarmed people, it feel heroic to turn children into orphans and parents into embodiments of infinite anguish. For some terrorists it even feels good enough to kill oneself.
But to almost all of the rest of the world, terrorist murders look sick, in the extreme. Severed limbs and severed lives look like Evil Ground Zero. Palestinian terrorists earn the cause more attention, but as for the success of their cause, it only drops. With each Palestinian terrorist act, Israeli public opinion shifts away from a two-state solution and Israeli public policy counters with a new settlement. Why are there so many settlements? In part, because there have been so many terrorists acts.
Drop by drop, Palestinian terrorism reduces the sympathy for the Palestinian cause — except, of course, among those who share in the perverse emotional calculus of terrorism, or among those who are pure anti-Semites to begin with.
Why do significant numbers of Palestinians keep returning to terrorism, as on Oct. 7, 2023, notwithstanding all of their previous failures to move the political and geographic needle through terrorism? The same indifference to humanity that is unmoved by the random murder of innocents renders the perpetrators blind to the political consequences of their barbarism. Evil feeds on evil, not on logic.
© IJN 2025
