Many Israelis, including those who stride the corridors of power, look at the bloodshed in Egypt and Syria and mutter: “It’s the Arab nature.” Even Uri Savir, one of the people behind the Oslo Accords, declared this week that our neighbors “aren’t Swiss.” Just a few decades ago Europeans murdered more than 100 million people during 31 years of horror. Was that a manifestation of “European nature”? “White nature”? “European murderousness”?

I'm not crazy about jokes; they tend to promote stereotypes. But sometimes they’re all right. In 1916 an African dignitary was invited to meet two European dignitaries. The three sat down on a hill above Gallipoli. At sunset, when the fighting ceased for the night, the guest licks his lips and says: “So, do we eat them now?” “Are you mad?” his hosts reply, “We don’t eat people.” “Then why did you kill them?” asks the African.

The years of the European massacre of 1914-1945 came after more than 1,000 years of violence in Europe, from Europe, in the name of Europe. Wars of religion and race, murderous crusades, methodical colonial racial violence. Genocide of the kind carried out by the Europeans from North America southward. And not only back in the far-off, repressed past. Just 20 years ago there was a mass ethnic massacre on Yugoslav soil.

People are people. There is no “Arab,” “European,” “Chinese,” “Indian,” “green cat,” “Jew.” As circumstances change, people and cultures change their behavior radically. Instead of adding racism with talk of “nature,” we would do better to see to the cultural circumstances, to expand the humanity of each person to include as many as possible.

This patently obvious statement does not bear mentioning under normal circumstances. But the circumstances are not normal. The remarks of Daniel Seaman – an ideological associate of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his choice for heading up Israeli public relations – about “Arab nature,” reported by Barak Ravid in Haaretz, are just an example of the prevailing governmental winds in Israel.

Economy Minister Naftali Bennett and Housing and Construction Uri Ariel say it repeatedly, as do the religious media outlets. Senior cabinet ministers speak this way in private conversation: Are we insane to be giving these people, whose nature is like this, significant chunks of territory? Talking to them is good PR, but to take action?

There’s more than a pinch of irony in the fact that the Israeli regime, so supportive of suppressing the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, is led by the “Jewish Brotherhood.”

Add to this the Netanyahu regime’s strategic reliance on the evangelical “Christian Brotherhood,” whose support of the Jewish Brotherhood is rooted in their belief in the Apocalyptic vision, in which the Jews are actually destined for destruction.

There is much more than irony here. For many Israelis of Arab origin, as well as for Palestinians and other Arabs, the massacres in the region serve as a reminder of the importance of choosing life, normalcy, simply seeing to their children’s future.

Just as after the years in which millions were massacred, Europe chose a different path, so to for the residents of Israel – whether they feel themselves to be “Jews,” “Arabs” or “people” – the events in the region afford insight into what should “never return,” and what is an existential necessity.

It is sobriety, based not on a vision of a “new Middle East” but on the need to make a shared choice of life, that provides a stable basis for careful progress toward a different future. Just as Europe and Japan were stabilized after the raging storm of “massacring nature,” so it is here. The terrors of the region can bring about a worldwide effort – a kind of Marshall Plan – to create an alternative model, a model of life that will help to stop the region apocalypse.

But for this to happen Israel needs a regime that will return to its own Declaration of Independence. Sobriety in face of the cruelty revealed in man – after the massacre in Europe and in the course of fighting in Palestine – is what contributed to that declaration’s humanism, embodied in the pledge to “complete equality of social and political rights irrespective of religion, race, or sex.” Only such an Israel can again emerge from the terror of mass killings to establish a self-reliant independence.