LONDON — The facts are always a useful starting point: Two Palestinians stormed a synagogue in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighborhood of West Jerusalem, killing three rabbis, a devout Jew, and a Druse police officer (who succumbed after the attack). Security forces killed the assailants. It was the deadliest attack on Israeli civilians in more than three years. The killing capped a spate of violence over one of the holiest sites in Jerusalem, a plateau revered by Jews as the site of the first temples and by Muslims as the location of Muhammad’s ascent to heaven.

Now, here are two interpretations of the facts, starting with one from a Jewish acquaintance:

The Palestinians never learn. They want to kill Jews at prayer. They celebrate the slaughter. Anti-Semitic incitement from their leaders never relents. For them, the only good Jew is a dead Jew. Killers are hailed as martyrs and have public squares named after them. Some Palestinians may talk of territorial compromise at the 1967 lines but it’s just an attempt to lull Israel into weakness and disguise the true Palestinian goal, which is to reclaim every last olive grove and drive the Jews into the sea. They want Haifa, they don’t want peace. If they did they could have had it many times over since 1948. Who are we supposed to negotiate with? They’ve turned their national struggle into a holy war led by Hamas with its vile Charter. So forget about it. If it’s Islam against the Jews in the Holy Land, there’s no stopping the fight. There never was. Arab armies went to war to destroy Israel at its creation in 1948. They lost. They lost again and again. Why is Israel the only country in the world that’s supposed to sue for peace when it’s victorious and give up land to the vanquished? My Russian friends laugh at the idea. The Palestinians are professional victims. Imagine if the myriad Jews thrown out of Arab countries in the 1940’s were still sitting in refugee camps with their millions of descendants using the keys to lost homes as worry beads and being spoon-fed by the United Nations! Don’t get me started. The way Hamas, with its rockets and terror tunnels, deploys forces among civilians in Gaza to ensure plenty of civilian dead. The dead make good propaganda. Europeans lap up Palestinian victimhood because they’re a bunch of pacifists. They don’t understand Jews who are through with the meekness that led to the gas. There’s no compromise with Palestinians. The Land of Israel was given to the Jews, it’s in the Bible. The West Bank does not exist, nor does the so-called occupation. It’s Judea and Samaria, Jewish land. Get used to it.

A second interpretation of the facts came from a Palestinian acquaintance, who viewed things differently:

You hit people over the head once, twice, three times, four times, and the fifth they won’t take it any longer. That’s what the Israeli occupation is, daily humiliation. We’re noncitizens. We’re nothing, in our own land, for almost a half-century now. The only way to exist becomes to fight. Maybe violence leads nowhere. But at least it reminds Israelis that the miserable specks they no longer see are alive. Like a relative of the two martyrs said, “They were under pressures, pressures, pressures, and in one ripe moment the explosion took place.” If Israel wants the status quo, this is the bloody status quo. They expand the settlements, they take property in East Jerusalem, they blow up our homes, they kill hundreds of our children, they police our prayer, block our roads and businesses, take our water, pocket our taxes, deny us a port or airport, fracture us into Bantustans — and they tell us they want peace! They don’t, they want all the land. They want us to go away. Vanish. Disappear. Government ministers declare it openly. And that’s not incitement! The Jews say the land is theirs because the Bible says so — and that’s not making this a religious war! If we try moderation, we’re unilateralists; if we resist, we’re terrorists; if we mourn, we are death merchants; if we breathe, we are intruders. They don’t want two states, they want a “peace process” to camouflage colonial rule. Gaza is the way it is because that is the way Israel wants it in order to say, you see, peace with these people is impossible. They have all America, money, nuclear bombs, highways, drones, an army and technology. We have nothing. We are poor. We only have our narrative. But we will fight until we have a state that restores our pride.

Two children, one Israeli and one Palestinian, asked me if it is possible to have two ideas in your head at the same time. Not in the Middle East, I said. But it is important to try, because this is where you both have to live.