While kidnappers abducted three young Israelis in the Hebron region as they were on their way home, Umm Mazen, the wife of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, was undergoing surgery in a Tel Aviv hospital on June 13. The fate of the boys remains unknown. Right now, Syrians wounded in the bloody civil war are receiving treatment in Israeli hospitals.

While the Israeli public is consumed with worry and anguish, it can barely hear the call by call by President Abbas for the abductors to release the Israelis, but can clearly see the Internet campaign in which ordinary Palestinians are shown waving three fingers, each representing one of the kidnapped boys. There is nothing surprising about this campaign, but there has been some progress since the last visual of a hand gesture glorifying an act by a Palestinian that traumatized the Israeli psyche. In that searing image, from Oct. 12, 2000, Aziz Salha waved his bloodied hands from the window of the Ramallah police station after participating in the lynching of two Israeli soldiers. The Palestinians taking part in the current campaign will still have to contend in the future with the hatred in their hearts. No one appointed me their psychologist, but I am suggesting to them that they turn away for a moment from their obvious bitterness — I do not contest their rights to national sovereignty — and invite them to look at what is happening to the north and the east, because there is a clear connection between the relatively good conditions that the Palestinians enjoy and Israeli security control.

In Mosul, a city of two million people, 800 jihadists were able to defeat 30,000 soldiers and 25,000 police without a battle on June 10. The United States invested $15 billion in the Iraqi army, and it was $15 billion too much. The defense forces were funded and trained by the United States, but they did not fight. They even left their shoes behind when they fled. The most common image from events in Mosul was of policemen and soldiers hastily removing their uniforms while fleeing and ditching their weapons. Fear was one of the reasons why the Iraqi defense forces collapsed in such an astonishing manner this week. It is easy to understand why.

When fighters from the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) took the cities of Mosul and Tikrit this week, their enemies faced a terrible fate. While Tel Aviv’s gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community was taking part in the annual Gay Pride Parade along with thousands of tourists from around the world, it was hell on earth in Mosul. Videos and photos of the shooting of thousands of captives reminded many of the photos of the actions of the Einsatzgruppen, the German death squads that murdered the Soviet Jews during Operation Barbarossa. In Mosul, however, it was not Germans killing Jews in the name of some insane racial theory, it was Muslims killing other Muslims in the name of religious zealotry.