"The politics of the last atrocity" - that's what we see here.

You have a series of terrible things done to each other by two sets of opponents, and each atrocity leads on to its retaliation, and each sides sets aside the atrocity they are guilty of,and concentrates on the one committed against them.

A terrified child killed in the arms of his father as they cower for shelter in a street raked with bullets by a sniper in a fortified guard-post.("Crossfire" they tried to say.) A rabbi beaten to death as he tries to stop a crowd tearing down a shrine. Kids with slingshots shot dead by soldiers in body armour. Captured soldiers lynched. Gunships firing rockets at the centre of a town. Burnings and killings, the kinds of things that have abeen seen in pogroms - but carried out by Jews.

Take any of these on their own, they are monstrous and incomprehensible. Take them in context, and they are still monstrous, but only too easy to understand. But it seems that people bound up in the struggle cannot help but see them in isolation from each other, and to only really see the ones that justify the actions of "their" side.

Ireland or "the Holy Land", or any one of scores of other conflicts. We always construct a narrative that starts where we want, and ends where we want, and leaves out the bits we don't like to think about.

For example: "Does anybody else remember the Palestinian troubles really started with the Black September movement, when the Palestinians got thrown out of Jordan". But then they were only there because they'd been ethnically cleansed from their homes by the incomers. Who were only there because of what had been dione to them by the anti-semites of Europe.

And you can go back to the Crusadrs. Or the Romans. Or Joshua and his divinely ordained campaign of genocide.

It's true that what has been done to the Palestinians is no worse than what was done to the Native Americans. Not much better either. And you can't undo the crimes of history. If you try to you just set off a new cycle of crimes.

But it is possible to acknowledge that crimes have been done, and until that happens moving on is impossible. The crime that has been done to the Palestinians over the past three generation or so has it's roots in the anti-semitism in Europe, culminating in Nazi Germany. Both peoples in "the Holy Land" are in a real sense both victims of Hitlerism, and of the centurues of hate and persecution of the Jews in Euroope that led up to that. And the latest phase of anti-semitism is directed especially against Arabs.