I am relieved that the evictions from Gaza have been achieved so much more rapidly and efficiently than had been expected. As a child growing up Jewish, I recall my visceral revulsion about the culture of victimization that seemed to be the sole source of Jewish identity in the secular Jewish community to which I was exposed. It was important to remain a Jew, the message went, because these were the people who had endured such perennial anti-Semitic persecution and its apotheosis in the Holocaust. I thought it was pitiful that that was all there was to modern Jewish identity and I questioned whether that was a sufficient way of being Jewish.

Of course it wasn’t sufficient, and it isn’t really all there is to being a secular Jew in the contemporary world, but it seemed so. I have been reminded of that pitiful victim stance by some of the shrill extremist settlers’ outcries this week. “How can a Jew do this to a Jew?” “We have nowhere to go, we’ll be homeless!” And, predictably, the ultimate perversion of the memory of the Holocaust, “The Israeli government is treating us just like Hitler did.” I am grateful this particularly egregious sentiment will fade from the front page.

Most group hatred seems based on a tribal mentality in which core identity is maintained by desperate measures to distinguish insiders from outsiders, like from unlike, by construing the foreign as dangerous. This may be hardwired into human neurobiology and is inherently at odds with a world in which we commune with those who are heterogeneous. Those who appeal to our tribal instincts — which, by the way, is the unconscious message upon which the American Republican party’s appeal is built, I am convinced — are appealing to our basest, most reptilian perversion of the yearning for community which functions as little more than a justification for continuing violence and victimization.