• A Rash of Bloody Palestinian Attacks Greets Biden in Israel - William Booth and Ruth Eglash
  Less than a mile from where U.S. Vice President Joe Biden spoke at the Peres Center for Peace in Jaffa, a Palestinian attacker went on a stabbing rampage Tuesday that left an American tourist dead and 11 wounded before the assailant was fatally shot by police. At least 14 Israelis were wounded in terror attacks on Tuesday.
      Israel's intelligence minister, Yisrael Katz, said Israel is "in the midst of a war against ISIS-style Muslim extremist terror." He said Israelis should not "be scolded" by the international community for taking tough countermeasures. (Washington Post)
      See also Biden: U.S. Condemns International Failure to Denounce Palestinian Terror Attacks - Tovah Lazaroff
  U.S. Vice President Joe Biden on Wednesday denounced those in the international community and in the Palestinian Authority who have failed to condemn Palestinian terror attacks against Israel. "The U.S. condemns these acts and condemns the failure to condemn these acts," Biden said at a joint press conference with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem. Biden noted that his wife and his grandchildren, who have joined him on this trip, were having dinner on the beach nearby when a Palestinian terrorist went on a stabbing spree in Jaffa.
      Such violence, he said, "cannot be accepted. This cannot be viewed by civilized leaders as an appropriate way to behave. It is just not tolerable in the 21st century. They are targeting innocent civilians, mothers, pregnant women, grandfathers, American citizens. There can be no justification for this violence and the U.S. stands firmly behind Israel's right to defend itself."  (Jerusalem Post)
• American Stabbing Victim Was West Point Graduate, Served in Iraq and Afghanistan - Erik Ortiz
  Texas native Taylor Force, 28, was on a trip to Israel sponsored by Vanderbilt University's MBA program to see the country's growing startup scene when a Palestinian man went on a stabbing rampage that left Force dead and 11 others wounded. Force graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and served in Iraq and Afghanistan as a platoon leader and fire support officer. (NBC News)

• Palestinian Motorist Wounded by Palestinian Terrorists in Jerusalem Wednesday
  Two Palestinian terrorists carried out two separate shooting attacks in Jerusalem on Wednesday before being shot by security forces. In the Jerusalem neighborhood of Ramot, two men in a car were seen firing shots at a public bus. A citizen exited his car, ran towards the scene and fired his weapon. The terrorists fled.
      An additional shooting attack was reported near the Damascus Gate in Jerusalem's Old City where a Palestinian from the Beit Hanina neighborhood was shot and wounded while driving his car. Two terrorists, Abd al-Malik Abu Kharub, 19, and Muhammad Jamal Al-Kaluti, 21, were killed by security forces. Police found weapons inside their vehicle and suspect the same vehicle was used in both attacks. (Jerusalem Post-Ynet News)
• Palestinian Stabber Kills One, Wounds 11 in Jaffa Tuesday
  An American tourist was murdered and 11 others were wounded in a terror attack in Jaffa on Tuesday. The terrorist, Bashar Masalha, 22, a Palestinian from Kalkilya in the West Bank, stabbed several people at Jaffa Port, then ran hundreds of meters north along the boardwalk, stabbing others as he went, before he was shot to death by police. (Ynet News)
      See also Wounded in Jaffa Attack include Four American Tourists, Two Arabs - Ben Hartman and Daniel K. Eisenbud
  After a Palestinian terrorist went on a stabbing rampage on the Tel Aviv seashore, among the wounded were four American tourists including the critically-injured wife of Taylor Force who was murdered. Two of the victims were Arab men.
      Tel Aviv-Jaffa Mayor Ron Huldai said, "We won't have a reality where there is a cop on every corner on every street. We are in a reality in which a lone attacker can, at any moment and in any situation, surprise us and this is how this happens. This is the reality we live in."  (Jerusalem Post)
• Palestinian Gunman on Motorcycle Wounds Two Israeli Policemen in Jerusalem Tuesday - Judah Ari Gross
  Two Israeli Border Police officers were seriously injured in a drive-by shooting attack near Jerusalem's Damascus Gate on Tuesday, police said. The gunman opened fire at the officers, striking one in the head. Security forces engaged him in a firefight, during which he shot a second officer before he was shot dead. (Times of Israel)
• Israeli Wounded in Petah Tikva Stabbing, Kills Attacker with His Own Knife Tuesday - Raoul Wootliff
  A Palestinian assailant followed an Israeli man into a shop in Petah Tikva and began stabbing him on Tuesday, police said. At one point the victim "regained composure" and turned the knife on the stabber. Police confirmed that the attacker was killed when he was stabbed with his own knife. The Israeli victim, about 40, suffered multiple stab wounds. (Times of Israel)

• Israel Calls on UN Security Council to Condemn Palestinian Terror Attacks - Danielle Ziri
  Following the terror attacks in Israel on Tuesday, Israeli UN Ambassador Danny Danon sent an urgent letter to the UN Security Council demanding they condemn the stabbings. Since the onset of the current wave of violence, Palestinians have committed 317 attacks against Israelis. "This ongoing wave of terror has claimed the lives of 34 victims - 34 fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, husbands and wives, buried by their loved ones. Yet, the Security Council has not condemned Palestinian terror even once."
      Chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations Stephen M. Greenberg and Executive Vice-Chairman Malcolm Hoenlein extended their condolences to the family of the slain American, Taylor Force, on Tuesday and said: "We condemn the attacks in Jaffa, Jerusalem, and Petah Tikva and call on the international community, especially the Palestinian Authority, to take action to end these outrages by holding to account those engaging in incitement or who otherwise encourage or aid these attacks. There can be no compromise or excuses for terrorism."
      "We support the government of Israel's efforts to take whatever measures are necessary to stop these outrages and stand in solidarity with the people of Israel."  (Jerusalem Post)
• Terror Shouldn't Be Rewarded - Micah Lakin Avni
  Four months having passed since the brutal murder of my father, Richard Lakin, a dual citizen of Israel and the U.S. You would be hard-pressed to find a greater advocate for peace and coexistence than my father. As a young man in Connecticut, he pioneered the integration of the school at which he served as principal, and marched alongside the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil rights struggle.
      In Israel, as an active member of several coexistence movements, he dedicated his professional life to teaching English to children of all races and religions. Jewish, Muslim and Christian children visited his hospital bedside after he had been shot and stabbed on a bus in Jerusalem.
      PA President Mahmoud Abbas must shoulder much of the blame. He has shamelessly endorsed the actions of countless terrorists, praising their "martyrdom." He even made a condolence call to the family of Bahaa Allyan, one of the two terrorists who murdered my father. (Boston Herald)

Anti-Semitic Anti-Zionism - Simon Schama (Financial Times-UK)

• Criticism of Israeli government policies has mutated into a rejection of Israel's right to exist. What we are dealing with is, in Professor Alan Johnson's accurate coinage, "anti-Semitic anti-Zionism."
• When the international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement singles out Israel as the perpetrator of the world's worst iniquities, notwithstanding its right of self-defense, it is legitimate to ask why the critics' wrath does not extend, for example, to Russia which rains down destruction on civilian populations in Syria?
• Why is it somehow proper to boycott Israeli academics and cultural institutions, many of which are critical of government policy, but to remain passive in the face of Saudi Arabia's brutal punishment of anyone whose exercise of freedom of conscience can be judged sacrilegious? Why is the rage so conspicuously selective? Or, to put it another way, why is it so much easier to hate the Jews?
• We have to worry about those who, in their indignation at the sufferings visited on the Palestinians, and their indifference to almost-daily stabbings in the streets of Israel, have discovered the excitement of saying the unspeakable, making hay with history, so Israel is the new reich, and a military attack on Gaza indistinguishable from the industrially processed incineration of millions.
• Enter the historian. And history says this: anti-Semitism has not been caused by Zionism; it is precisely the other way round. Israel was caused by the centuries-long dehumanization of the Jews. For the Jews, the modern world turned out to be a lose-lose proposition.
• To characterize the country in which the language, the religion and the cultural identity of the Jews was formed as purely a colonial anomaly is the product of historical innocence.
  
  The writer, an English historian, is Professor of History and Art History at Columbia University in New York.
  
      See also The Left and the Jews - Alan Johnson
  I am not Jewish. But I am a person of the Left and have been since the late 70s. We left-wingers must rethink our refusal of the right to national self-determination of just one people, the Jewish people. We must rethink our commitment to boycott just one state in the whole wide world, the Jewish one. That singling-out is anti-Semitic in consequence, I am afraid, whatever the motivations of individual boycotters.
      Our task is huge: to build an intellectual firewall separating sharp criticism of Israeli policy from the spreading demonology of Zionism and Israel which is not legitimate and which can be lethal.
      Peace will only come through engagement and deep mutual recognition between the two peoples, and there is no alternative to negotiations and mutual compromise. The writer, editor of Fathom and Senior Research Fellow at BICOM, was professor of democratic theory and practice at Edge Hill University in England. (Fathom-BICOM)