The kids didn’t exactly get what was coming, Fisher makes that clear, but anyone could understand why this sort of thing happens. Three children studying at a religious school in Hebron, one of the oldest Jewish communities in the world, a city that Palestinians officially agreed to share in 1997, could, reasonably, be seen as extension of the occupation. Fisher goes out of his way to tell us that the Israeli-controlled stretch of Hebron “seeps with paranoid rage” about “Arab violence” (or, so-called Arab violence, as Fisher’s quotation marks insinuate)— though he does save us any discussion of the all-encompassing and deep-seated paranoia, anti-Semitism and anti-Western hysteria that plagues Palestinian society.

And as he catalogs the injustices Arabs face, including checkpoints — erected after Fatah, cajoled by the Jews, sent militants to murder over a thousand Israelis during Intifada 2 — Fisher points out that the “entire population” of “middle-aged and older men who work for Hamas’s political branch (remember that they are also a political party)” were also detained. You know, just another asymmetrical response deployed by Israel. Because, as you can imagine, Hamas is super diligent in compartmentalizing its political and terrorist operations.

So just to recap: Three teens could be seen as an extension of a brutal occupation. Hamas’ political organization should not be put out by Israel. Collective punishment that ropes in Hamas is bad. Collective terror that ropes in a trio of hapless Yeshiva students could be understandable.