Ben-Gurion, writing in 1948 said defence was "the entire doctrine of Zionism." He added 20 years later "it is only an elite nation which can produce an elite army." How elite? In the same speech he explained it was "solely because of spiritual superiority". Here's the logic: we are superior to the rest of humanity because chosen by god; this spiritual superiority translates directly into military superiority; military superiority is the essence of our being; what makes us superior in secular terms is our ability to kill. This of course is "purity of arms" and the doctrine of "shoot and cry". What's the difference between this and Al Capone? It is the mentality of the mafia. It is the conjunction of an outrageous messianism with a despicable colonialism and what is results in is a mental derangement in which Palestinians cease to be people and become a fatal threat to every Jew, even, it seems the majority who don't live in Israel. Part of the distorted thinking and feeling is that Jewish and Israeli are coterminus: plainly absurd given that of 23 million Jews in the world fewer than 10 million are Israelis. Yet, only if Palestinians, simply by existing, threaten Jewry itself can the delusion be maintained. For the followers of Herzl, himself deranged enough to inspire Chaim Weizmann to declare: "It is the Zionist's good fortune that they are considered mad." Being crazed is essential to the project. To take the heat out of the madness and to look at things from a perspective based on normal human feeling would demolish the delusions. Hence, the retreat to the paranoid view that not only Palestinians but anyone who criticizes Israel puts all Jews at risk of extermination and therefore all violence is a last-chance defence and the consequent trigger-happy behaviour. It is this combination of messianic conviction of superiority and paranoid belief that the merest criticism is a threat to existence which results in outrages such as the recent killings. Madness.