It's The Optics, Stupid

"They are responding to what they perceive to be an insult, an insult where somebody got hurt, or somebody got killed or a settlement got uprooted."
"They immediately interpret any insult or humiliation of themselves to be a humiliation of God."
"[No rabbi tells them to destroy property or to attack Palestinians] But there is in certain corners an atmosphere created -- Meir Kahane had a lot to do with this initially -- there's an aura of the exercise of power being a sanctification of God's name, and it almost doesn't matter how the power is exercised."
"What is happening now within Israel is a growing willingness to castigate and criticize them [the violence-prone], including from this current government, which is a centre-right government. I think everybody realizes it's bad for Israel."
Don Seeman, professor of religion, Emory University, Atlanta

"We see how terrorism is escalating, every generation has to show something more shocking in order to gain attention."
"Of course it's horrific, but from a national security point of view, unless they do something really shocking that would escalate the situation with the Palestinians and with the rest of the world, they are not as dangerous as their predecessors."
Ami Pedahzur, director, Institute for Israel Studies, University of Texas, Austin

"[The ultra-Orthodox driven to violence represent the] fringe of a fringe, [young men absorbing the incitement of radicals claiming invalidity of the Israeli government. Their attitude] The land belongs to us and to nobody else [motivates them]."
"This is part of a theology that says that, insofar as my reaction is spontaneous and pure for the sake of heaven, it's really god moving me."
Shlomo Fischer, sociologist, Hebrew University, Jerusalem

Illustrative photo of Israeli police officers scuffling with ultra-Orthodox demonstrators in Jerusalem on August 10, 2014. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

These are Jewish extremists who have their counterparts in the Palestinian community; just as the Jews who claim ultimate sovereignty over all the land consecrated by God to his Chosen People decry the presence of Arabs where they don't belong, Palestinian Arabs have been incited by their leaders to believe that the Jews have taken Arab land consecrated to Islam, and must be driven from the land, the Palestinian Arabs reunited with what is their rightful possession.

The difference between the two groups in large part is that it has been the Arab 'resistance' that has, since 1948, chosen to express their rage at the presence of a sovereign Jewish state by attacking all those who live in that state. Yasser Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization gave cohesion and a united purpose to the mission to destroy the State of Israel, prodded by surrounding Arab states which themselves attempted on multiple occasions to destroy Israel with their conventional military.

It took the PLO to develop other tactics of a guerrilla, terrorist nature, abducting Jews, attacking and killing Jews, hijacking international aircraft and vessels at sea, bombing international venues owned by or catering to Jews. When the PLO set up shop using Jordan as their military base, they precipitated Black September when the Jordanian military routed the PLO which ended up in Lebanon, attacking Israel over the border until the IDF entered Lebanon.

That era saw the creation of Hezbollah from among Lebanon's oppressed Shiite population, groomed by the al-Quds division of the Iranian Republican National Guard, and the entry of Syria to a despoiled and fractured Lebanon. Whatever the sectarian non-state militia, along with the state administrations of the Middle East intended, the foremost goal to be attended to, was the dismantling of the State of Israel to 'free' Palestine from its grip and return it to the Palestinians.

Because, truth be told, none of the Middle East Arab nations had any wish to absorb the Palestinian refugees, known as troublemakers, held in contempt wherever they went, living in their permanent 'refugee' camps, and the resolve was to keep them a festering victim yearning to return to the land that they felt Jews had co-opted. Attacks against Israel and Israelis never stopped and they were gruesomely atrocious.

Nothing Jews ever did to Arabs ever came close to the atrocities committed by Arabs against Jews with the possible exception of a Jewish medical practitioner who in 1994 killed 29 Muslim worshippers at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, wounding many others. The difference between the Israeli and the Palestinian leaders' reactions was that the former deplored and grieved the assault while the latter had a habit of congratulating Arab attackers against Jewish targets.

While Jews felt shaken and desperately unsettled that a Jew would take human life, the Palestinians had a habit of celebrating, from shooting off celebratory firearms into the air, to handing out sweets to savour the moment of revenge. Israel feels shame and anticipates that any such incident will serve to aid those happy to slander them. Palestinians feel justified and depend on sympathy as the underdog from the international community, and they are not disappointed.

The late Rabbi Meir Kahane formed the Jewish Defence League in the United States to impress upon Jews that there would be those among them to protect them from anything resembling a recurrence of the Holocaust, using violence if required. When he migrated to Israel, forming the Kach Party, its volatile ideology of violence responding to violence alarmed authorities sufficiently to ban the movement, now taken up once again by his grandson.

JACK GUEZ / AFP/GETTY IMAGES  Meir Ettinger, the head of a Jewish extremist group, stands at the Israeli justice court in Nazareth Illit on Tuesday, a day after his arrest. Ettinger, 23, is the grandson of Rabbi Meir Kahane, Israel’s most notorious Jewish extremist.

Israel, and Jews, are held to a loftier standard than others living in the Middle East, of whom not much is expected from a tribal, ultra-religious society for whom worship and clan trump all other interests in populations given to suspicious aggravation and a penchant for both hatred and violent upheaval.