While I might “understand” the “political context,” it defies the moral imagination how, for whatever political cause, someone gets up one morning and sets out to murder young parents, a wife and husband, on the road, in their car, in front of their four children, aged four months to nine years. Viewed morally, do the political specifics matter, on the road linking the settlements of Alon Moreh and Itamar, in the Northern West Bank, near the Palestinian village of Beit Furiq? I don’t think they do.

On the low road of anti-Zionism, there are nasty twitter feeds out there that refer to the killing of “colonists.” (Some of you might follow them, but I won’t name names.) The corrupt use of cheap political nomenclature obscures the human face to what is, in fact, a complex and grinding conflict. Anyone genuinely invested in a one state solution should be the first to condemn this despicable act without a caveat. Identified by Human Rights Watch as such, this murder is, by any definition, a war crime.