ON NOVEMBER 24th a Palestinian man drove his car into a group of Jewish Israelis at a road junction north of Ramallah in the West Bank, injuring four of them and in turn being gravely wounded by police gunfire. By the standards of the West Bank, let alone those of Israel’s neighbours, in particular Libya and Syria, it was a minor incident. But it is part of a pattern of violence that has developed since late September, when Israeli police and Palestinian worshippers clashed on the Temple Mount (the site of the al-Aqsa mosque) in Jerusalem. Since October 1st 23 Israelis and more than 80 Palestinians have died. Road-rammings and stabbings are the methods of choice for the Palestinian assailants, who then often lose their lives to Israeli bullets. Day after day the pattern is repeated, neither escalating nor petering out.

The “stabbing intifada”

Some call this a third intifada, or uprising, succeeding those that started in 1987 and 2000. Others reject that label, at least for now, though the situation may still deteriorate. The earlier outbreaks of violence were larger and bloodier; the second intifada lasted for more than four years and took around 1,000 Israeli and 3,000 Palestinian lives, though the weekly death toll was not much higher than now.

Israeli security officials talk down the danger. They regard the attacks as manageable and stress that the Palestinian Authority (PA), which has security and civil jurisdiction over the areas of the West Bank where most Palestinians live, is as keen as Israel to keep the violence low-level and unco-ordinated. On the Israeli side of the separation barrier—a fortified line which in places follows the UN-drawn “green line” that ended Israel-Arab hostilities in 1949, but which also strays widely into Palestinian territory, including all of East Jerusalem—security is watchful but not intrusive. Although there have been a few attacks deep inside Israel, almost all have been in the West Bank or East Jerusalem; elsewhere life feels normal.

Still the violence refuses to fade, and the fear is constant that a single incident may provoke something worse. “There is a scenario in which this is just a wake-up call,” says Husam Zumlot, an adviser to Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the PA. “But there is another scenario in which it leads to Armageddon.” A poll last month by the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research found that most Palestinians now want a return to armed uprising.

There are two main reasons for the high level of Palestinian discontent. The first is a deepening conviction that Israel no longer has any interest in a “two-state solution” that would see Israel and Palestine coexist side by side. It is not hard to see why this view holds sway. Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, even said it himself in the run-up to this year’s election, though he has since backtracked.

The reality is that his single-seat majority in the Knesset (parliament) gives him no scope to move towards a deal even if he wanted to; his coalition includes right-wing and ultra-orthodox parties that will never accept one. Mr Netanyahu, who has warned of the dangers of “Hamastan B” being created on the West Bank if Israel withdraws, is in fact one of the more moderate leaders in his coalition. “Hamastan” is a reference to Gaza: in 2005 Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip, where the Islamist group Hamas, after winning an election, threw out the moderate Fatah party, and has periodically fired rockets at Israel ever since. The recent emergence of affiliates of Islamic State in Sinai, which Israel restored to Egypt after 1979, is seen as a further warning by many coalition members of the dangers of handing back land.