I would like to stress that only 57 percent of the respondents of an Israeli survey found that it was OK to shoot and kill an incapacitated Palestinian lying on the ground. The other 43 per cent found that it was not OK at all, and that the soldier who did the killing, the executing, I should say, should be punished, even though the Palestinian in question had actually attacked him with an axe.

Moreover, it has come to my attention that there are even some Israeli soldiers who have taken the brave step of publishing, anonymously, of course, what they think of such actions in Breaking the Silence.

I also happen to know for certain that not all Israelis think it is OK to forcibly evict people from East Jerusalem, by literally dragging them out of their houses, just because they happen to belong to a different “race”. Not all Israelis think it’s OK to base political geography on 2000 year old legend, or even on vindictiveness (understandable as  rancour may be) not least since the victim, the Palestinians, had nothing to do with the injustice Jews have had to endure in Europe for centuries.

Had we all insisted on our country’s retaking the land it had at any given point of time (presumably when our country was at it’s apogee, which might not coincide with the apogee of other countries) none of us would be where we are – assuming we had been anywhere at all; we would probably all have killed each other off a long time ago.

Maybe that would have been for the best, and even pleasing to the fierce Jewish God, because then there would have been no desperate poverty, and no bands of heavily armed barbarians shattering cities and kidnapping schools of little girls, and then we wouldn’t have managed to exterminate so many other other species.

But again I repeat: Not all Israelis condone what I consider a still ongoing genocide. Certainly, all American Jews don’t either. In fact, I believe only a minority of American Jews condone Israel’s barbaric treatment of Palestinians. I think it is very important to bear this in mind, not least now when so many people (not least many Palestinians) are losing faith in the feasibility of a two-state solution.