On Passover eve, a 15-year-old Arab girl from Haifa left her home and set out to stab a Jew. And indeed, the teenager managed to stab and moderately hurt a 47-year-old man at a park in the northern city.
Some among us may excuse this attack with the far too familiar motto - 'it is all because of the occupation'.
But those motives cannot be applied to a young girl from Haifa, whose family was originally from the West Bank and had to be moved after her father cooperated with the Israeli security forces.
This should not come as a surprise. Several fanatic followers of Arab leaders in Israel, including of Raed Salah - the leader of the Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement in Israel - have already carried out terror attacks egged on by hateful rhetoric. And Salah's "magic touch" was probably at play during the Friday riots at the Temple Mount, at the exact time the Haifa teen perpetrated her attack.
But none is more inciting than the Palestinian Authority itself.
A study done by IMPACT-se, an organization that analyzes schoolbooks and curricula for compliance with UNESCO, found that new Palestinian textbooks in the West Bank contain content that is borderline antisemitic.
There is no longer any need for incitement to be voiced by Muslim preachers who sympathize with Hamas or the Islamic Jihad. It is all in the schoolbooks that children use to study.
The content in those books does not make due with resistance to the occupation, or the call for a Palestinian state alongside an Israeli one. To the contrary.
Take for example an assignment given to 10th grade students, asking them to describe "Jewish characteristics". To find the answer, the students are instructed to analyze an illustration that shows a Star of David on a hand that holds the globe.
The text under the illustration reads: "cultural colonialism is the most dangerous kind, because it attacks the spirit of the nation and its beliefs".
Am excerpt from a different book reads: "The sons of Israel are corrupt, and that was and will be the reason a for their destruction." Was this not the justification the Nazis fed their children?
These ideas line up with the messages spread by Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini and Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, the highest-profile Sunni clerics - who preached their admiration for Adolf Hitler's policies - and with the words of the current Mufti of Jerusalem, who calls for the same, justifying the extermination of Jews in the past and in the future.
We can continue to claim that the occupation is to blame. The occupation is indeed bad, and no one wants to live under foreign rule. History is full of violent revolutions and even acts of terror.
Even the establishment of the Jewish state while under the British mandate included terror attacks carried out by Jews against - sometimes - innocent people. But those were rejected by the Jewish leadership.
The Palestinian battle, however, is different. They are not fighting for political emancipation or independence.
There are those who tell themselves that because the Palestinians were offered only 96% of the West Bank - as opposed to 98% - their resistance is justified. This is foolishness.
There are also those who would rather ignore the outright refusal of Palestinian leaders to accept any proposal of sovereignty over land - since 1937 and up until this day. The Palestinians even rejected the Saudi peace plan, which saw a return to the 1967 borders.
They do not fight for an independent state or for themselves, their fight is against Israel and their rhetoric is against Jews. Anyone who schools children in the hatred of Jews is the source of evil, and those who eliminate any mention of peace from textbooks is in search of something very sinister.
It's not just Hamas and the Islamic Jihad who incite to violence. It is also the PA, that when forced to choose between building a national home on one hand, and antisemitic incitement on the other - they always prefer the latter.
In fact, it's not the occupation, which could have ended by now, that paves the way for violence among Palestinian youth. It is the incitement - in their schoolbooks and the words of the religious influencers inside Israel and in the Palestinian territories.
There is not much good news to report on the matter of altering these textbooks, but there is at least some movement.
Researchers from IMPACT-se presented their findings to EU representatives, European governments, and the American Congress, and they're doing God's work.
As a result, €200 million in aid have been delayed. Palestinian Foreign Affairs Minister Riyad al-Maliki admitted the PA has so far rejected the EU's demands to halt incitement before they unfreeze the aid. Clearly, they prioritize hate more than welfare.
Even before, members of U.S. Congress, led by Democratic representatives, voted to halt the aid to the PA for as long as incitement continues.
For some reason, Israel seems to be lagging behind. It does not condition financial aid to the PA with the end of incitement, just as it does not implement a law that would cut out of the transfer of taxes collected on behalf of the PA, some of which is given as stipends to the terrorists who committed attacks against Israelis and their families.
Meanwhile, all the incitement translates into terror. And that is what prompted a 15-year-old girl to become a bloodthirsty terrorist. Not the occupation.