My son served in the Israeli army in the West Bank, so for me the barbarous killings Thursday of three soldiers by a lynch mob in Ramallah made me feel the same anger that must have led Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak to bomb Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's compound in retaliation and to escalate the war against the Palestinians. Yet I can also understand that to the Palestinians the three boys killed were just members of the occupying army, the army that has brutally killed more than 85 Palestinians and wounded more than 2,000 civilians in the past two weeks and which 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.
Yet the preponderance of responsibility lies with Israel and with an international media that continue to obscure the basic realities facing the Palestinian people, and continue to treat the death of Israeli soldiers enforcing a brutal occupation as somehow more outrageous and barbarous than the killing of many times as many Palestinian teenagers who were resisting the occupation. To me, Israeli deaths are a personal tragedy. The way we talk that discounts the huge number of Palestinians killed and wounded reinforces the desperation that led to the current tragic moment. The reality is quite different. Since taking office, 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.