Bus stop killings embolden the extremists on both sides

Overweight and middle-aged, a taxi driver calmly opens the door for his passenger as bullets fly from a militant attack on a bus just down the road.

- SAM KILEY WORLD AFFAIRS EDITOR

He doesn’t flinch when the window of the coach behind his right ear explodes with the impact of two rounds. He quietly escorts his passenger to safety - placing his body in the firing line.

Caught on dashcam during yesterday’s assault on a civilian Israeli bus on the outskirts of Jerusalem - in which four people and two gunmen were killed - the taxi driver’s calm under fire echoes the extraordinary stoicism of Palestinians in Gaza who have endured relentless targeting for many months.

That people on both sides have become so inured to ultraviolence, and dig so deep to survive and do so with dignity, is an indictment of the extremists who are leading the conflict. But it is no surprise.

It is also no surprise that just as the Palestinian cause has galvanised world support and been inflamed by Israel’s atrocities and war crimes in Gaza, a group of Palestinians spray indiscriminate gunfire into a busload of civilians and undermine their own agenda.

There’s an old racist cliche often used by Israel and its supporters that the “Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity” in dealing with Israel.

The truth is that while Israel has concreted over the West Bank and international law by building settlements that its own ministers now proudly declare are intended to prevent the Palestinians ever having their own state, groups like Hamas have torpedoed every effort to allow a two-state solution. That is the creation of a Palestinian state next to an unmolested Israel.

Gaza and Israel are currently ruled, or governed, by two leaderships that believe that there can only be one state between the River Jordan and the sea. For both extremists, a two-state dispensation is off the cards.