Palestinian terrorism has names when it is organized. Hamas. Palestinian Islamic Jihad. There is a long list of U.S.-designated foreign terrorist groups under the Palestinian banner. Yet the most persistent form of Palestinian terrorism over the last two decades carries no collective name at all.
More than a thousand Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) have carried out individual fatal terrorist attacks—stabbings, shootings, vehicle rammings, ambushes at bus stops and junctions. The numbers recur year after year. The pattern holds. The vast majority originate in the land east of the 1949 Armistice Lines (E49AL) / “West Bank”.
Calling these attackers “Palestinian lone wolves” obscures reality. Calling them Palestinian residents either creates a country of Palestine or integrates them into a historic landscape. The term “lone wolves” suggests isolation, desperation, a last act. The record shows the opposite. These young attackers are recognized, rewarded, and revered. Their names and faces appear on posters. Schools and streets carry their memory. Their families receive honor and money. The murderers are beatified as “martyrs.”
Civil societies do not ritualize acts they consider shameful or marginal.
Now consider how language works in parallel. Jewish civilians beyond the Green Line are routinely grouped under a single brand: “settlers.” The word does not describe residence; it passes judgment. It frames their presence as inherently illegitimate before any act occurs. When they are attacked, their civilian identity is eclipsed by a political label.
Branding does the moral work in advance.
The empirical comparison is stark. Jewish extremist violence exists and must be prosecuted. Its character is overwhelmingly vandalism and property damage—graffiti, burned fields, slashed tires. Criminal acts that generate repairs, arrests, and charges.
By contrast, the murders committed by individual SAPs, dwarf Jewish extremist killings by orders of magnitude. Funerals versus invoices. Deaths versus damage. Yet language reverses scale: property crimes are collectivized and politicized, while a long ledger of killings is broken into nameless “incidents.”
The cultural backdrop makes this impossible to dismiss as fringe behavior. Polling by Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR) consistently shows that SAPs in the West Bank express higher levels of support for violent attacks—including October 7—than Arabs in Gaza.
Repetition is evidence.
Veneration is evidence.
Polling is evidence.
Together they point to a culture of violent jihad in the West Bank, sustained socially even when it is executed individually.
Terror does not require a logo to qualify. It requires intent, repetition, and outcome. What persists in the West Bank is a durable campaign of individual terrorism, encouraged by culture and rewarded by society, while its victims are linguistically transformed into abstractions called “settlers,” not innocent Jewish civilians.
This is absolution via euphemism. Turning Jewish civilians into perpetrators for existing, while shielding Arab murderers under a cloak of topography.
It is plainly wrong. It is evil. It persists.
First One Through 