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. So when I saw the pictures of the murder of those young men, I cried and was filled with rage. For every outrage on one side there is a story of outrage on the other. I have to take responsibility for my side, my community, my people. 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. Nor are these labels applied to those Israelis who continue to visit and honor Baruch Goldstein's grave to publicly support his act of entering a mosque a few years ago and kill 30 Muslims at prayer. Nor the acts of the Israeli Underground which blew off the hand of the mayor Bethlehem. 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.