A Gaza rocket strikes southern Israel. Photo: Tazpit News Agency.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Israel’s 3^rd Biennial Gaza War.

Israelis knows the drill. Stay near a bomb shelter, pray nobody gets hurt, and watch in disbelief as rockets strike closer and closer to major population centers.

Then listen to reports of Air Force strikes against Hamas targets in Gaza, and watch the terror group parade images of dead children, often staged or from different conflicts, on the news. Eventually, international pressure will build and Israel will call it a day.

And this is when Hamas will begin busily preparing for the 4^th Biennial Gaza War.

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It is ironic that just days ago, following the barbaric and utterly reprehensible murder of Arab teen Mohammed Abu Khdair at the hands of Jewish extremists, pundits rushed to assign all manner of societal ills to the Jewish state.

One overzealous writer for The New Republic even went so far as to call back from the dead some alleged “Jewish demons.”

“Our demons are free again,” wrote Yishai Schwartz. “As with the astounding surge in (Rabbi Meir) Kahane’s popularity decades ago, as with the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, and as with Baruch Goldstein’s killing spree at the Tomb of the Patriarchs, there must be a reckoning.”

But here is the thing. Try as one might, the exception simply cannot prove the rule. And the fact is, Jewish terror is a major exception.

As David Weinberg pointed out in Israel Hayom on Monday: “Israeli terrorists are few and far between. Over 100 years of conflict, they comprise a mere handful: Ami Popper, Jack Teitel, Yehuda Etzion, Baruch Goldstein, Yona Avrushmi and several others.”

To assign the need for broad “social reckonings” surely a study or survey with some real findings is called for, or at minimum significantly more substantial anecdotal evidence then a single recent case, as horrific as this one is.

Want to talk about societal problems? Here is one: According to a recent Anti-Defamation League poll, a full 93 percent of Palestinian Arab adults in Gaza and the West Bank hold anti-Semitic views.

Here is another: A recent Washington Institute for Near East Policy poll found that 60 percent of Palestinian Arabs say that their five year national goal should be “to work toward reclaiming all of historic Palestine from the river to the sea.” The destruction of Jewish Israel, that is.

How about the thousands of Palestinian Arab killers of Jewish children and their aides?  What about the masses who cheered and celebrated the abduction and brutal slaying of three Jewish teens last month, and the hordes who roared in jubilation when Hamas rockets from Gaza set of sirens in Jerusalem on Tuesday?

What about the millions of dollars doled out by the Palestinian Authority to its glorified killers, and the imposing multi-storey billboards and murals that bear their faces in celebration of their gory “achievements?”

Here is a society with a pathology that urgently needs to be addressed.

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In truth, if there is a “Jewish demon” that needs to be tackled, it is the general acceptance of this Gaza war repetition. The willingness to lay down arms and leave Hamas, one of the world’s most inhumane terror groups, alive to strike another day.

“He who is merciful to the cruel will become cruel to the merciful,” the Jewish sages said, and it is a fundamental tenet of Jewish morality.

This time around, the Gaza war surely calls for intense social reckoning. What does it say about a society that pays so much heed to the condemnations and pronouncements of other nations so as to allow its own citizens to remain in harm’s way?

Can Israeli society reject its inclination towards placating the international community and deliver the blow that will ensure that this 3^rd Biennial Gaza War is, in fact, the final one?

The author is the Editor-in-Chief of The Algemeiner and director of the GJCF and can be e-mailed at defune@gjcf.com.