On May 11, 2004, six Israeli soldiers in an armored personnel carrier were killed when the vehicle, heavily-loaded with ammunition, hit a mine planted by Hamas. A few hours later, a number of Palestinians appeared in public cheering and waving parts of the dead soldiers bodies triumphantly.

Some days before, on Sunday May 1, an Israeli automobile carrying Tali Hatuel and her four daughters was ambushed. The terrorists, seeing the car had turned off the road, walked up to the vehicle and shot to death, at point-blank range, the mother, who was visibly pregnant, and the four children.

These two recent incidents connect with a very long and sad chain of particularly cruel actions by Palestinian Arabs. These actions are not rare and isolated incidents, but rather form a pattern that a very large share of the Palestinian society approves of and participates in.

One especially prominent example of this was the October 12, 2000, public lynching of two Israeli soldiers. The soldiers had been beaten to death and their bodies mutilated. This action was witnessed in the main square of Ramallah by thousands of cheering, ecstatic Palestinians. Time and again, acts in which Israeli civilians have been killed have been occasion for Palestinian public celebrations.

The Palestinians, in their unending terror campaign, do not simply regularly target civilians, women and children, but they do so in ways that will cause the maximum damage and pain. In their suicide-bomb packages, they add poisons designed to add to the torment and pain of the victims.

This, again, is not a question of a rare incident here or there of inhumane cruelty, but of a general pattern of cruelty that pervades. This cruelty is by and large undertaken against the Jews of Israel, but there have been periods when internal Palestinian strife led to acts of unusual cruelty (decapitations and the chopping up of bodies) against Palestinians by other Palestinians. It was the order of the day during the so-called 'first intifada'.

All this raises essential questions of morality and identity. What kind of human beings are these people? Do people who engage in such cruelties deserve to be called human beings? And how can we possibly deal with such people when we know that this kind of cruelty seems to be a fixture of their culture? Perhaps most importantly, what exactly should one's political relations be with this people? And how does one realistically and wisely relate to such an enemy?

My own feeling is perhaps a simplistic one. I cannot see us, as Jews, engaged in like-for-like action. I cannot see us altering our humane policy of targeting terrorist leaders while trying to avoid civilian casualties. I cannot see us engaged in any retaliatory cruelty based on the Palestinian principle of harming, as much as one can, in any way one can, whomever one can.

But I can see us having the moral wisdom and courage not to reward terror. I can see us deciding once and for all that a people so cruel to us should not be given territory or a state.

The Palestinians, as I understand it, have disqualified themselves as a political entity Israel should deal with. Israel should simply do everything possible to make the best security situation it can for itself. And it should in no way provide the Palestinians with any kind of help or incentive to build their power as a people; i.e., they will use whatever power they have to seek to destroy the Jewish state and do maximum injury to its citizens.