‘The dread is back; this is an awful moment – but also an opportunity”

EETTA PRINCE-GIBSON: The government is led by a right-wing religious prime minister and a Palestinian Islamist, who could make a historic choice to create a more cohesive society

SINCE THE KILLINGS in Bnei Brak earlier this week, I've been waking up with a horribly familiar feeling of dread. It's the dread I felt during the five years of the Second Intifada.

Between 2000 and 2005, there were 1,048 suicide attacks against Israel, of which 903 were thwarted by Israeli security forces. In those attacks, and in Israeli operations, 6,651 people were killed — 5,524 Palestinians, 1,053 Israelis and 64 foreign citizens. More than 10,000 people were wounded.

The Second Intifada never ended; the violence just somehow ebbed, then subsided, and we pretended we were over it. Sure, we told ourselves, there might be some scars, but the wounds healed. I am resilient, I told myself.

And now the dread has come back.

In the first three weeks of March, there were five knife attacks by Arab Israelis, one of them less than 300 meters from my house; no one was killed. In the last week of March, there were four terrorist attacks, and 11 people were killed. Our intelligence leaders are telling us to expect a wave of terror over the next few months.

I am filled again with all the awful memories and emotions that I never really forgot. I remember, viscerally, not riding on buses. Not going to out malls or supermarkets or restaurants. Trying not to go out at all.

How we pretended we could calculate magic formulas that could predict when it would be safe to be there, or that we could compute imaginary algorithms to tell us when it would be safe to be here.