Why does Israel's assault on the ships attempting to break the blockade on the Gaza Strip appal and outrage us?
The numbers, after all, who died were relatively small, by today's lavish standards.
The convoy was warned in advance that it would be stopped.
Israel argues that attempts were made to lynch its troops when they took legitimate measures to halt a provocative act.
So why are we so appalled? Many, too, if not most of us, will have grown up with a warm sympathy for little Israel.
The ideals of its kibbutzim are inspiring.
My own family has multiple links with dear friends there. Its art, music, theatre are inspiring.
Amos Oz and Aharon Appelfeld are wonderful gifts to world literature. Above all, there are the memories of the Holocaust, ever refreshed by superb films and documentaries, many too painful to watch, but a necessary discipline if we are not to forget.
I have had a particular interest in the long history of Christian-Jewish relations as a religious historian, in the generally disgraceful way in which the Christian churches have behaved, misusing their power to keep a heel on the neck of the synagogue, or inflaming anti-Judaic feeling and provoking ghastly pogroms.
The late writings of Martin Luther, Protestantism's founder, may be known to few, but make absolutely sickening reading.
All too often, too, the churches have been totally blind to the incalculable debt they owe to the Jewish womb from which they sprang.
They have even unconsciously or quite consciously repressed the fact that Jesus himself and all his early followers were Jews.
So one hesitates to be critical of Israel.
Yet I sense that we have reached a tipping point.
The Lebanon war, the crushingly disproportionate attack on Gaza last year, the infiltration of the West Bank with ever more settler colonies - all seem to hammer home the same message: Palestinians are lesser human beings.
They just don't matter. The significance of this latest incident is that it makes Palestinians of all of us.
None of us matter, either. Not the opinions of the UN, nor that of the European Union.
Certainly not those of France.
To be critical of Israel's policies is taken as ipso facto proof that one is anti-Semitic.
Effectively, Israel regards itself as beyond criticism, and above the laws that constrain others: a new exceptionalism.
International laws that bind everyone else have no jurisdiction, apparently, for Israel. Just as the exceptionalism which characterised the United States for so long is beginning to fade, here it crops up again.
Anything that serves the interests of Israel seems to be justified.
Israel is so used to being pilloried by European opinion, world opinion, that it appears almost to revel in the criticism and abuse thrown at it, and to take it as confirmation of the rightness of its cause.
As a result it is losing, one by one, all its friends and allies.
Turkey, which long played a mediating role in the Middle East is only the latest example.
As alarming as the exceptionalism is the bland confidence that its superior military technology will sweep aside every obstacle, fix everything.
The resort to arms is immediate, no longer a means of last resort.
Commentators note the growing influence of religious fundamentalists in the armed forces, as we edge ever closer to the ideology of the holy war to defend the God-given land.
For those of us, not least those in the Abrahamic faith, who are friends of the people of Israel, and cherish their dreams of security and peace, these are grim times.
For with Israel's victims we mourn for a nation that has stopped listening and imagines it can flourish without a friend in the world.
• Peter Matheson is a fellow of the department of theology and religious studies at the University of Otago.
