The cold-blooded killing of Israelis in acts of terrorism has, horribly, always been a fact of life here. The memories of the Second Intifada a decade ago — when suicide bombers were deployed against Israel in a strategic terrorist assault designed to force us to flee our country — are still fresh for most Israelis, even if largely forgotten by the rest of the international community. Every few days, a bus, a shopping mall, a supermarket would be blown up, another five, ten, twenty, thirty innocents would be laid to rest in scenes of heartwrenching anguish, and the nation would grit its teeth and resolve, quite astoundingly in retrospect, not to be broken.

But the case of the seized teens was a little different, nonetheless; it was even more widely resonant. Because, by Monday afternoon, we were 18 days into the search for Eyal, Gil-ad and Naftali, and we had seen their faces over and over again, heard from their friends, become familiar with the ways their parents were grappling with the nightmare. And though we knew to expect the worst — the initial sense of foreboding only confirmed by the revelation that one of them had called the police from the car in which they were abducted, enabling all of us to make the elementary deduction about how matters might then have played out — we desperately wanted to be proven wrong.

Israelis are not perfect, our leaders are not perfect, and not all of their policies are always wise. But at the most basic level, our hearts are most emphatically in the right place. Most fundamentally of all, we want to live. And we want those around us to live — those, that is, who do not rise up to kill us.