I cried and felt rage. Yet I can also understand that to those Palestinians, the two young men killed were just members of the occupying army, the army that had brutally killed more than 80 Palestinians and wounded more than 2,000 civilians in the past weeks. And to Palestinians, the mob that lynched those soldiers may have seemed indistinguishable from the Jewish mobs that attacked random Arab-Israelis in Nazareth a few days before. For every outrage on one side, there is a story of outrage on the other. Our atonement was not an attempt to claim that Israel holds all the responsibility.
Palestinian violence is both immoral and irrational.
But they were animals. I've heard this said in response to the lynchings. We Jews can't remember any of them, because we see ourselves as eternal victims, and so we see the situation only as Jews being the victims of inhuman others. The way we talk discounts the huge number of Palestinians killed and wounded and reinforces the desperation that led to the current tragic moment. The reality is quite different.