The counterman at the snack-food shack called A Blast of a Kiosk spotted the ownerless valise next to the busy bus stop and called the police to report a suspicious object. While he was talking on the phone and simultaneously trying to shoo people away from the bag, the bomb went off, spraying the metal pellets that had been packed with the explosives. The kiosk got its name after it was destroyed in an-early 1990s suicide bombing at the same spot, in front of the Jerusalem Convention Center, and then was rebuilt and defiantly reopened. That time, the owner was luckily late for work. This time, his brother-in-law, the vigilant counterman, sustained shrapnel wounds. The blast on the grimy street was heard clearly more than two miles away by pedestrians in the gentrified German Colony. It took a moment to register what the sound meant. A Border Police jeep racing past the cafés helped jog memories. The bad old days were back, like malaria resurfacing after years of dormancy. For a...

You don't actually need Mahatma Gandhi's spiritual values, or even a Gandhi, to pull off a mostly nonviolent revolution. That's one lesson from the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and for those Israelis and Westerners who have long asked, "Where is the Palestinian Gandhi?" Whether that implication will be applied in the West Bank -- and against whom -- remains an open question. I examined the question of why the Palestinians had not produced a Gandhi in a long article published two years ago, originally written at the request of Atlantic Monthly editor James Bennett, whose curiosity grew out of his years as The New York Times correspondent in Jerusalem. The question was logical: The successes of Gandhi against the British in India and of Martin Luther King in the American civil-rights struggle suggest that nonviolence can be particularly effective against a regime that claims to be committed to liberal values but is actually behaving in a deeply...