As the Palestinian Authority’s rocket attacks on Israeli cities proceeds apace, the United States supported a unanimously passed UN Security Council “press statement” calling for an immediate cease fire on Saturday. Because Israel acting, militarily this time, to protect its people from this murderous assault is of a piece with the terrorism that is the assault.

Or so holds this administration. That’s the shame of the US, inflicted by the Obama administration: this pretense of moral equivalency between the terrorism of the Palestinian Authority—an entity that now has as its primary goal the destruction of Israel—in shooting rockets into Israel for the express purpose of killing civilians and children, as well as damaging the Israeli nuclear power facility in Dimona (an act even the UN used to regard as nuclear terror) on the one hand, and the Israeli response of defending itself against such terrorism by shooting back, seeking to destroy the terrorists’ equipment and infrastructure and to kill the terrorists, during which killing civilians and children are avoided at great cost, if imperfectly.

All the Palestinian Authority, this shiny, new unity government, needs to do to stop the “deteriorating situation in the Palestinian territories” is to stop its terrorist rain of rockets on Israel and to expel the terrorists from Palestinian territory. All of them from all of it.

Israel has no obligation to stop its active defense before that is complete.