My son served in the Israeli Army in the West Bank, so for me the barbarous killings of two soldiers by a lynch mob in Ramallah made me feel the same anger that must have led Israeli Prime Minister Barak to bomb Palestinian leader Arafat's compound in retaliation and to escalate the war against the Palestinians. Yet I can also understand that to those Palestinians these two boys killed were just members of the occupying army, the army that had been brutally killing over 80 Palestinians and wounding more than 2,000 civilians in the past week and might have seemed indistinguishable from the Jewish mobs that attacked random Arab Israelis in Nazareth a few days ago, beating and burning. For every outrage on one side there is a story of outrage on the other. And yet, in my synagogue on Yom Kippur we atoned for our side of the story for Jewish violence. Our atonement was not an attempt to claim that Israel holds all the responsibility.
Palestinian violence is both immoral and irrational.
To me, Israeli deaths are a personal tragedy. The way we talk that discounts the huge amount of Palestinians killed and wounded reinforces the desperation that led to the current tragic moment. The reality is quite different. Since taking office, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak has expanded existing settlements, built new roads into the West Bank and made it clear at Camp David that he would insist on keeping the vast majority of settlers in place. The state Palestinians would then be offered would have within it a group of Israeli nationalistic fanatics, many of whom moved to the West Bank precisely to ensure that there would never be a Palestinian state.