Avi and Rachel Fraenkel attend the funeral of their son, Naftali, in the West Bank Jewish settlement of Nof Ayalon on Tuesday.Tomer Appelbaum/The Associated Press
These are dark days in Israel and the Palestinian community. People on both sides are furious about brutal acts perpetrated by the other side and fearful of what will come next. Those in mixed communities such as Jerusalem are bolting their doors and keeping their teenage children off the streets.
In southern Israel, rockets are once again flying and people are sleeping in shelters; while, in Gaza, people wish they had such shelters as they look out at the growing number of Israeli troops and tanks pointed toward them.
"It's hard to recall any time when things were darker than this," said Yossi Alpher, former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University. "The ugliness of events is killing the atmosphere here."
It could have been avoided.
Leaders on both sides have been disingenuous, Mr. Alpher said Thursday in a conference call organized by Americans for Peace Now.
Hamas, for example, has been denying it played any role in the recent abduction and killing of three Israeli teenagers.
"The Hamas leadership probably didn't order it," acknowledged Mr. Alpher, whose intelligence career included 12 years in the Mossad. "But they didn't have to." Ever since the 2011 release of kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in exchange for the release of a thousand Palestinians from Israeli prisons, there has been a kind of standing order to kidnap Israelis in the hope that other prisoners would be freed.
"Hamas leaders incited Palestinians to kidnap Israelis," Mr. Alpher insisted, just as surely as if they had given a direct command. It would be "a serious mistake to give credence to their denials," he emphasized.
Likewise, the security analyst said, it would be wrong to ignore the role of the Netanyahu government in stirring up the fury and hatred now found in the Israeli people and on social media.
The emergency 911-type call made by one of the three Israeli youths when they were being abducted has made it clear, explained Mr. Alpher, that "the authorities knew, with 99.9 per cent certainty, that they [the three boys] were dead," right from the beginning.
Yet they withheld that information for 18 days, he pointed out.
"It was spun," he said, in order to undermine the Palestinians' unity government, to tarnish Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas and "to create international sympathy" for Israel and its rejection of Hamas.
"Even the mothers" of the three boys were duped, Mr. Alpher believes, in order "to build public fury."
It was "entirely predictable" that people would react the way they did when the bodies of the three were discovered on Monday, he said.
Even the "revenge killing" of 16-year-old Muhammad Abu Khdeir was a "predictable outcome of all the right-wing incitement."
"I've seldom seen such expressions of vengeance," Mr. Alpher noted, referring to the flood of comments on Israeli social media. "It has become acceptable to hate Arabs."
Such sentiments have been "legitimized" by the government's actions, he insisted.
"I would say that two-thirds of the country wants some kind of retaliation carried out against Palestinians," the security analyst offered. That support for vengeance is similar to the sentiments of Israelis a decade ago during the deadly Palestinian intifada of 2000 to 2005.
"And now we have the Palestinian fury," he said. And we await the government's plan of action/retaliation.
However, it's worth noting, Mr. Alpher said, that for all its fury and its vows to punish Hamas, the Israeli government doesn't really want to get rid of the organization.
"If the Hamas leadership could somehow be taken out," he said, "a more extreme group of leaders would take over and they [the government] don't want that."