What kind of people are you Palestinians, that you initiate, support, trumpet and rejoice over these inhuman, brutal suicide attacks? What kind of society do you have, that gives rise to this phenomenon, and what kind of entity are you, that you embrace this phenomenon with monstrous joy and love? What kind of people are you, that you feed yourselves on boundless, incendiary, sobbing, howling, historical and deadly hatred?

The suicide-terrorists, that you produce in such large numbers, are an example and a model. He is you, all of you, as a society. You are a suicide-society, insane and rancorous, with chilling prospects, self-destructive, and loathing compromise. A suicide-society that aspires to absolutes, wants to either achieve everything or concede everything, regarding existence and life, ready to take everything that stands in its way with it into the abyss, and to laugh with insane glee on the way towards a violent end.

The suicide-terrorists are the example and you, all of you, as a society, are the model. A suicide-society seeks to embrace us and blow up along with us in order to destroy yourselves and us together. And you have a choice, between life and death, between hope and despair, between building and destroying. But you choose destruction, despair and death and you want to take us with you.

You, as a society, as an entity, are all responsible, all of you. Not just because most of you assist, support and identify with every monstrous act, but also because those of you who do not agree and do not identify, lack the integrity and the courage to rise up, condemn, excoriate and even do something: to vomit out these lowlifes from your midst, to pursue them, extradite them, imprison them or even kill them.

Even the few of you that gathered up courage yesterday to publish words of reservation regarding these attacks, did not condemn them on moral grounds, but only expressed concern that these attacks are not helpful to the Palestinian cause at this stage. How can it be, for crying out loud, that to this day, after so many suicide-attacks, so many lives cut short, after so many scenes of horror, there has arisen no moral outcry from your midst – just moral – clear, lucid, representing the majority, to say “Our hands did not shed this blood, only a condemnable, inhuman few?” How can it be, for crying out loud, that an entire society of one million people cannot produce from within itself – even under conditions of occupation, distress and struggle – half a million, 100 thousand, 50 thousand, men and women who would march, demonstrate, speak out, write, and be interviewed in order to say: We are not party to this moral outrage.

True, it is not easy to be Palestinian, it is very difficult, irksome and at times horrific, but the test of a person, of a society, is not to lose the divine image, precisely under difficult conditions, and you, all of you, have failed miserably.

For the type of moral horror for which you are all responsible, there can be no justification or pretext vis-a-vis background, circumstances, despair, helplessness, a quarrel over a piece of ground or haggling over kilometers. When a person and a society lose the human spark, the background and circumstances are washed away in one go and what remains unspeakably naked and ugly is the act itself in all its awfulness.

Yes, you are a suicide-society. And from now on, as we need to defend ourselves in large actions against you, with what moral claim could anyone come to us if we guard our souls and show less and less respect for human life and human dignity, which you yourselves have been wiping out with your own hands for some time?

No, even this time, we will not be dragged along after you, we will not seek out peaceful citizens, the elderly, women and children in order to fall on them and kill them with brutal lunacy. Yes, it seems that this time as well, if we are again forced to come into your cities and villages and fight there, we will not take the easy road in which the just are killed along with the wicked, but it seems that soldiers will pay with their lives in order not to carry out mass killings but to isolate the terrorists in an effort to hit them only. But, if for all that, it happens, the blood of all the injured will be on your heads, on all of your heads, because you are all guilty as a society.
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Amnon Dankner is the Editor of Maariv Newspaper