Almost 30 years ago, Leon Wieseltier penned a cover story for the New Republic, “The Demons of the Jews.” The title described the extremist Brooklyn-born rabbi and Israeli politician Meir Kahane, but it also referred to the pathologies in Israeli society that allowed Kahane’s racist incitement to find purchase. When, decades ago, Kahane and his followers were banished from Israeli politics, we dreamed we had exorcised these demons. But this past week, as an Arab youth’s murder defiled the forests of Jerusalem, our Jewish demons returned.

When “The Demons of the Jews” was published, Jews were still relatively new to power, only recently introduced to political authority and military might. And the realization that Jews have demons, too, that Israeli society had national pathologies and racist demagogues, was unsettling partially because it was surprising. With our Bible and our millennia of victimization, there was a tendency toward moral exceptionalism deep within the Jewish national soul. We have been oppressed and slaughtered, we told ourselves, but we would never produce oppressors and slaughterers.

That myth still holds power. And so for days after the murder of Muhammad Abu Khdeir, the Israeli Arab boy abducted and killed last week in Jerusalem, outlandish theories of honor killings and intra-family violence flew fast and thick. After all, a Jew would never do such a thing. But with yesterday’s announcement by Israeli police that several Jewish extremists had been arrested and confessed, denial is no longer possible. Our demons are free again. As with the astounding surge in Kahane’s popularity decades ago, as with the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, and as with Baruch Goldstein’s killing spree at the Tomb of the Patriarchs, there must be a reckoning.

However, social reckonings are a complicated business. Critics of Israel are far too quick to characterize the murder as somehow symptomatic, or the inevitable product, of rightist Israeli politics. This is its own form of blood libel. Neither the Jewish people, not Israel, nor even the Israeli right is guilty of this murder. There is plenty of space—both conceptually and sociologically—between the logic of a hawkish defense and territorial maximalism on the one hand and the murder of innocents on the other. And those who conflate the two are guilty of the same chauvinism as those who vilify Islam for the sins of Islamist fanatics.

But ideas have power, and it would also be a mistake to write these murders off as the insane acts of deranged lone wolves. The perpetrators were deranged, but they were not alone. The same pathologies that animated Kahane’s followers and that Wieseltier identified decades ago have not disappeared. Radical nationalism, militant millenarianism, and social resentment—often tinged with the fundamentalism of religious dogma—are all too alive in Israel’s underclass. And after years of steady Palestinian violence and rejection, too many in Israel shrug off the rhetoric of its own racists as regrettable, but understandable.