AP Photo/Khalil Hamra Palestinian protesters hurls stones at Israeli troops during a protest at the Gaza Strip's border with Israel T he sirens screamed at 7 a.m. one morning last week in Israeli communities near the Gaza border. A few seconds later mortar shells started falling. One landed in a kindergarten playground, empty because of the early hour. All around Israel, through the day and into the night, cell phones flashed news of red alerts in the region around Gaza as shells and rockets came in. And into the night, Israeli Air Force jets bombed Hamas and Islamic Jihad arms stores in the coastal strip. Unusually, there were no reports of people killed. But bulletins pointed out, in case you weren't already thinking it, that this was the fiercest exchange of fire between Gaza and Israel since 2014. You knew the script, from 2014 and before that 2008: mortar shells or rockets, followed by air strikes, followed by mortars, and so on. Followed by war. The next morning, Wednesday, at 5...

(Wissam Nassar/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images) Palestinians attend Friday prayers during a tent city protest along the Israel border with Gaza on the 42nd anniversary of the Palestinian Land Day on March 30, 2018. H ow many Jews live between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean? How many Palestinians live in that same small strip of land? The question erupts irregularly, repeatedly, and inevitably in Israeli politics, like symptoms of a serious, misdiagnosed disease. The latest outbreak came when a meeting of a Knesset committee veered off-topic. The session was devoted to a labor dispute in Israel’s Civil Administration in the West Bank, which is responsible for all sorts of government services, both to Palestinians living under occupation and to Israeli settlers. The small size of the overworked, underpaid Civil Administration staff led a committee member to ask how many Palestinians live in the West Bank. “We estimate 2.5 to 2.7 million,” responded Colonel Uri Mendes, No. 2 in...