The “new Palestinian,” or “neo-Palestinian,” is the name the Israeli security establishment has coined to refer to the generation of young Palestinians leading the current terror wave that Israel continues to find difficult to define, characterize and restrain some two and a half months after it began. Israeli security officials have compared the struggle against this brand of violence to jousting with windmills. There is no infrastructure, no planning, no hierarchy, no leaders, no organizations and no intelligence.

“This is something else entirely, something we have not completely identified,” admitted a higher-up in Israeli security speaking on condition of anonymity. “It is a social phenomenon, maybe even a mental one. It is the outcome of circumstances and deep processes that have come to fruition. At this stage, we don’t have a clue where this is going and how long it will last,” he said.

Israeli security has described the so-called new Palestinian as young, slightly older than 20 years of age. That said, there have also been much younger assailants — for example, one 13-year-old, girls aged 15 and even an 11-year-old. The new Palestinian wears fashionable jeans, a patterned tricot shirt, and carries a smartphone in his back pocket and wears earphones connected to it by Bluetooth. He wraps a patriotic, Palestinian kaffiyeh around his neck, and in his hand he holds a large rock. The new Palestinian rages and fumes, defies authority, does not owe anything to anyone and is not subject to any kind of higher hierarchy. He doesn’t listen to his parents, teachers, police, mukhtars (village leaders), family members or extended clan. He cleaves to the global “independence rights” discourse.

He was around 3 or 5 years old during the second intifada (2000-2005) and doesn't really remember the horror of those years. In the early 2000s, more than 1,000 Israelis and more than 3,000 Palestinians were slaughtered. The new Palestinian goes to college but nothing will become of his education. It is estimated that at least 30,000 young Palestinians earn undergraduate degrees every year in the West Bank, and another 20,000 or so do the same in the Gaza Strip. They are discharged from university campuses into a total wasteland. There is nothing they can do with their degrees. There are no decent positions, no high-tech jobs and no serious economic infrastructure. At best, a young Palestinian graduate or academic can hope to secure a work permit in Israel and wash dishes in the bowels of a Tel Aviv restaurant.