In a tragic end to a week marked by increasing discussion of settler violence, Israelis woke up to reports of another terrorist attack in Judea and Samaria. Early this morning, two gunmen pulled up near Judea Junction on Route 35, just outside Hebron, and opened fire on an IDF pillbox. For more than 20 minutes, the junction was a firefight. A medic filmed himself shouting that the shooting hadn’t stopped and the wounded couldn’t be reached. Others took cover behind an armored ambulance. Five people were hurt, two of them critically. Both attackers were killed as they tried to escape, and troops discovered a large stock of ammunition in their car. A far worse attack, said Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir, had been averted. The families whose Shabbat preparations turned into hospital vigils already know how this story ends: quietly. New York politician Brad Lander will not jump halfway across the world to escort Israelis to work and back. No delegation of diplomats will tour the junction or express outrage over constant Palestinian violence. Those families also are all too familiar with what Lander himself observed this week: “violence unfortunately is never far away.” The reasoning for this blindness is simple, if morally bankrupt. Israeli presence in the area is seen as illegitimate, and so violence against Israelis is treated as justified, though such things are not said in polite society, merely implied. Never mind that men who intended to bypass the checkpoint are unlikely to be fussy about where the international community draws its borders. Ironically, that justification is the same logic that drives the nationalist violence those same voices are so fond of condemning. If it was not entirely self-evident, I will state it clearly: You do not discourage violence by deciding whose lives are expendable.