Between pauses

I've noticed that several bloggers are having trouble articulating a response to yesterday's terrorist attacks in Jerusalem. Me, too. My response was to take a 24-hour time out from the internet. Then I wandered over to Mike Sanders' place for some spiritual refreshment and, well, found this. Mike's equilibrium never ceases to amaze me, but even he seems rattled. And with good reason.

I still have nothing to say about the bombing of that bus that would begin to reflect my feelings. Nor about the bomb that exploded in Hebron this morning, intended to murder more people tonight but which fortunately and against all odds injured no one. But my mother pointed out this column from Wednesday's Jerusalem Post. "Learning from Sadism," by Lawrence Kelemen, is quite frightening, only somewhat plausible and concludes with a bit of puffy pie-in-the-sky prattling. But it's worth a look.

Early last week Revital Ohayon, 34, was reading her sons Matan, five, and Noam, four, a bedtime story when a Fatah terrorist burst into their home on Kibbutz Metzer. She jumped in front of the children to protect them, but he shot all three dead.

A few months ago, on a Shabbat morning, Palestinian terrorists burst into the bedroom of Shiri Shefi, took aim, and sprayed her and her three children with bullets using M-16 assault rifles. Shefi, her four-year-old son Uriel, and her two-year-old son Eliad were wounded. Five-year-old Danielle, who was shot in the head, was killed.

About a year ago, a Palestinian sniper trained his high-powered rifle on 10-month-old Shalhevet Pass, killing the baby girl in her father's arms.

About six months before that, Vadim Novesche and Yosef Avrahami, two Israeli reserve officers abducted by Palestinian police, had their heads beaten into unrecognizable pulp and were then disemboweled by a waiting crowd outside the Palestinian Authority's Ramallah headquarters who then danced, entrails in hand, through the city's streets.

Cases like these stand out among the hundreds of murders of Israelis and foreign visitors here in recent months, not because of their evil but because of their inhumanity. They reveal a terrifying angle of the story of this war.

Beneath the strata of Islamic unity, Pan-Arabism, and Palestinian national aspiration at the root of this great campaign engineered by Arab leaders is pure, unbridled sadism, a delight in cruelty that boggles the Western mind. And even if this lust for savagery is slightly less evident in the "ordinary" shootings and suicide bombings that people suffer in this country on a daily basis, there is a growing suspicion that much of this violence flows from a visceral, Palestinian truculence a craving for Jewish pain, for blood.

After citing various manifestations of virulent anti-Semitic propaganda and child abuse in Arab culture, Kelemen suggests that the palestinian population may be "hardwired" for impulsive, sadistic and suicidal violence. I must say I was tempted, at this precise point in time, to perceive some kernel of truth here. It was comforting to think there might be a "rational," scientific explanation for these mind-numbingly horrific attacks. But I think I'll pass on this one, at least for now. And I'll try to take advantage of this Shabbat to find ways to tame and channel my outrage in more constructive directions.

Shabbat Shalom.