"And I did want to gently remind ourselves that the OP was stimulated by a horrendous attack on genuinely innocent folks who were celebrating culture in a culture that is statistically pretty free compared to ALL the surrounding 'neighbors.'"

Well your "statistically free" culture applies to three-quarters of Israeli citizens but not the quarter who live in the occupied areas. That minority are free to be discriminated against, with low pay, insecure work, poor housing and schools and blatant discrimination at checkpoints, etc., and to be shot at and bulldozed out every now and then. They're perfectly free to have their best land stolen so that those culture-celebrators you mentioned can build illegal settlements. The folks may be "genuinely innocent" (here we go again...) but their leaders never have been. I feel like a parrot saying the same thing all the time, but unless you make the effort to study the history of the region, at the very least since 1948, you really can't understand what is going on in the region today. The young people had every right to have their music festival, every right to feel safe there and every right to go home happy, and Hamas had no right to perpetrate their outrage. A terrible incident, but just one out of thousands (literally) of terrible incidents that have happened down the decades. Read the history.