Israelis gather to pay their respects at the site of a fatal shooting in Tel Aviv, April 8.

Photo: CORINNA KERN/REUTERS

Jerusalem

The attack in Tel Aviv last Thursday, in which a gunman opened fire on a bar, killing three, brought the number of Israelis murdered in terror incidents since March 22 to 13. It confirms the suspicion, raised and then suppressed with dread by many Israelis over the same period, that their country faces a new wave of terror.

This is a new incarnation of a known phenomenon, the latest chapter in a long, smoldering and intractable conflict. Close observation of the latest events offers three clues as to the emerging shape of the next chapter in the long dispute between Jews and Arab Muslims west of the Jordan River.

First, note that the conflict now runs, unambiguously, on religious time. The old secular nationalist shells are past. It is now the month of Ramadan. Over the past half-decade, Israeli residents of mixed towns and cities (I’m one of them) have come to expect that this month of fasting and heightened Islamic religious sensibilities will bring a corresponding increase in attacks. Not all these take the headline-grabbing form of the latest events in Tel Aviv, Bnei Brak, Hadera and Beersheba. Rather, these are the sharpest edge of a much broader pattern of increased incidents of harassment, street violence and tension, which have become the familiar accompaniment to Ramadan.

Second, this atmosphere of tension is neither incited nor controlled by any organized political or religious element. The four most recent incidents involved perpetrators from a variety of ideological backgrounds. The Beersheba and Hadera attacks were carried out by Arab citizens of Israel who were supporters of Islamic State. (ISIS claimed responsibility for the Hadera attack, though not for Beersheba.) The Bnei Brak and Tel Aviv incidents were committed by residents of the northern West Bank. Both hailed from the Jenin area, a stronghold of the Iran-supported Islamic Jihad organization. Neither, however, were militants of that organization.

No guiding hand has been identified. Rather, social media is the means through which an atmosphere of incitement and raised tensions is communicated. People loyal to a variety of organizations or to none spread vivid messages, including recommendations for methods of assault. The most committed, using access to the vast amount of unregistered weaponry in both the West Bank and Arab communities in Israel, then plan their individual missions. This is, among other things, an immensely difficult pattern to penetrate and break. The current evidence suggests that the Israeli authorities are still in the process of formulating their response to it.

Third and most important, this wave of attacks has no coherent political aim and is wedded to no identifiable political process. Beyond a religiously inspired desire to kill non-Muslims, presumably as part of a larger will toward the destruction of non-Islamic sovereignty west of the Jordan, there are no discernible demands, no coherent goals, nothing to talk about, no one to talk to.

This aspect connects the latest incidents to the salient fact not only of Palestinian but also of broader Sunni Arab politics in the Levant, Iraq and the surrounding areas. Namely, that the Sunni Arabs, while constituting the largest population in this area, are everywhere a defeated, politically incoherent and suppressed population.

Over the past two decades, every political project emerging from among this population has gone down to failure. The second intifada of 2000-04, the short-lived Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt of 2012-13, the 2012-18 Sunni Arab insurgency in Syria, and the Islamic State “caliphate” of 2014-19 are the most significant mass political efforts by Middle Eastern Sunni Arab populations in recent years. All were defeated.

The result of these failures has not, however, been the emergence of a more pragmatic politics. Rather, a sort of inchoate, largely formless, rejection of current arrangements is identifiable. This rejection produces periodic episodes of violence but seems unlikely to affect larger structures of power.

In the case of Israel and the Palestinian territories, a familiar pattern has emerged. The Jewish and Arab populations are at near demographic parity. Efforts at partition going back nearly a century have foundered on the consistent unwillingness on the Arab side to accept the division of the land as the final settlement of claims. As a result of this rejection, combined with the inability on the Arab side of reaching its goals by force, the conflict remains in a kind of chronic state: unresolved but subject to more or less successful management.

The conflict remains manageable—by Israel, in cooperation with both the West and the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority, because of the de facto division of the Arabs west of the Jordan into four populations: the inhabitants of the West Bank, the inhabitants of the Hamas enclave in Gaza, the Arab population of Jerusalem, and the Arab citizens of Israel.

Might the power of shared religious symbols eventually prove sufficient to unite these populations? If so, the result will be the return of this conflict to its acute form. At present, however, there are few signs of this. Periodic outbreaks of individual terror, with each attack fueling the next, look to be the main active form that this unresolved dispute is set to take.

We are currently experiencing the latest manifestation of this process. Given the balance of power between the sides, it is unlikely to break the larger holding pattern into which this dispute remains locked.

Mr. Spyer is director of the Middle East Center for Reporting and Analysis and a research fellow at the Middle East Forum. He is author of “Days of the Fall: A Reporter’s Journey in the Syria and Iraq Wars.”