In a frank, if disappointing, admission Thursday, National Infrastructure Minister Yuval Steinitz, a member of the security cabinet, said that current Israeli policy had failed to protect citizens from terror.

Speaking on a local radio station in central Israel, Steinitz said that “there are no magical solutions, but I do not believe that any other government would have succeeded better than us. We have no magical patent to prevent terror.”

Steinitz reminded listeners that Israel had been under terror threats in the past – and that those threats had been worse than the current situation. “We beat all those terror waves, even though they may have been more serious,” he said. “I have no doubt that we will overcome the current wave, just as we the others.”

The Palestinian Authority, said Steinitz, is the main body responsible for the terror wave Israel is facing, due to its active incitement to violence. “This has to stop. The PA must stop its terrible incitement, in which it brainwashes children from kindergarten age that the Jews are horrible and must be sent away, destroyed, gotten rid of,” said Steinitz.

“The broadcasts to children and youths especially that incite to hate and violence must be halted. The images of Jews being shot must end. The calls by PA chief Mahmoud Abbas to ‘protect’ the Al-Aqsa mosque must be stopped. The praise of terrorists, whether suicide bombers or stabbers, must stop,” he continued.

The moment the PA ends its incitement, said Steinitz – “something that will probably be very difficult to do, given that they have been doing it for so long,” he said – will be “the basis for the end of terror. Incitement is the true engine of incitement, and the PA leads this terrible phenomenon in its television broadcasts and in its educational system.”