The "knife intifada" ratcheted up a few notches Oct. 18 and metamorphosed. Until now, the incidents were characterized as "lone wolf" attacks in which the perpetrator targets bystanders and attempts to harm as many people as he can before he is neutralized or killed. But a turnabout occurred Oct. 18 involving real firearms and an Israeli Bedouin terrorist, and the accidental lynching of an illegal Eritrean worker who was mistaken for another terrorist.

Security cameras that filmed the chaotic scene in the Beersheba central bus station captured the terror, panic and pandemonium caused by an isolated terrorist armed with a handgun. At 7:30 p.m., the terrorist burst into one of the bus platforms, shot and killed a Golani Brigade soldier and snatched his gun. He succeeded in wounding several more civilians and soldiers until he was killed by police.

After a short time, it emerged that the terrorist was not Palestinian, nor even an East Jerusalemite. He is, instead, an Israeli citizen, with all its implications; a Bedouin-Israeli from the town of Hura in the Negev. This intifada surprises us each day anew; sometimes it seems to surprise itself, too. No one has control; it's guided by raging impulses and exposed nerves.

But the main hub of the intifada and the epicenter of the violence was and remains Jerusalem. On Oct. 18, the police started construction of a concrete separation wall, 2½ meters (8.2 feet) tall, between the Jewish Armon Hanatziv neighborhood and the Palestinian neighborhood of Jabel Mukaber. The wall was erected after Palestinian rioters turned the Jewish neighborhood into a target for Molotov cocktails and stones. The wall was supposed to disconnect Jabel Mukaber, considered the most violent of the Palestinian neighborhoods and the one that spawned a large percentage of the terrorists, from the Jewish sections of the city. But the move also has symbolic significance. The trademark of the Israeli right, principally of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is a “united” Jerusalem.