In a small, close-knit society where family is everything, people are constantly glued to their mobile phones and trauma is an ever-present memory, the prospect of a child being kidnapped by Palestinians is an unspoken terror. And yes, a child in this context could also mean a 20-year-old soldier shouldering his rifle.

For Israelis, the nightmare of your son's phone ringing, unanswered, wipes away all the self-confidence that citizens of the Jewish state have built for themselves. That fear burrows into a national psyche that defines what Israel is about for its Jewish majority – a country that was founded and its entire military force built up so that no Jewish child should ever be captured and spirited away again. No other political arguments or realities apply. As far as they are concerned, that is Israel's core purpose.

That it is a technological superpower with one of the strongest militaries in the world doesn't matter. And neither do the rights and wrongs of its conflict with the Palestinians, the vast imbalance between a sovereign state and an occupied population suffering multiple injustices and humiliations. For the 18 and a half days between the abduction of Naftali Frenkel, Gilad Shaar and Eyal Yifrach and the discovery of their bodies north of Hebron, nearly every Israeli parent set politics aside and put him or herself in the place of those three mothers and three fathers.

Nearly every Israeli child and teenager imagined being in that car racing away through the night. Somewhere in their minds was the thought that this was just one more chapter in the long history of Jewish victimhood and the Palestinians are just the latest embodiment of the Jews' victimisers, as absurd as that may sound to an outsider.

Love or hate Israel, that is its core. You can't begin to grasp its society without understanding this. Israelis were deeply insulted by foreign media organisations which seemed to be downplaying the kidnapping, or, by describing the teenagers as "three settlers", to be putting them into a political context. To Israelis, this wasn't just another round of violence in a never-ending cycle; it was a national tragedy and the epitome of an ageless struggle.

Israelis are no strangers to the death and sacrifice of young people. But in many ways, the not knowing, the vulnerability of being at the mercy of anonymous captors, is worse than having to lay a soldier to rest. The Israel Defence Force has a standing order, the Hannibal procedure, that in case of a soldier being abducted, the fleeing vehicle must be shot at to prevent its escape, even if that endangers the captured soldier's life. Israelis can deal with a grave, but not with being at the mercy of those they see as cruel terrorists. That is why the capture and subsequent disappearance of airforce navigator Ron Arad in Lebanon, a mystery now in its 28th year, remains such a deep-seated trauma.

For British and American viewers, Homeland is an exciting television series about the war on terror, an upgraded and updated version of 24. In Israel, the original version – Hatufim – touched a deep nerve within its target audience, the yearning for the return of soldiers missing in action. This is why, three years ago, Israelis overwhelmingly supported the exchange of 1,027 Palestinian prisoners for one captured soldier held by Hamas – Gilad Shalit – despite many suspecting that prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who had signed off on the deal, was doing so for cynical political reasons. They weren't prepared to have another Ron Arad disappear. While Shalit had been taken prisoner from within his tank, the slogan of the campaign pressuring the government to obtain his release described him as "the child of all of us".

The national outpouring of grief now unifying Israel, which may provide the platform for a new military offensive against the Gaza Strip, does not, however, necessarily mean a further shift among Israelis towards the nationalist right. Even during the first days following the abduction, questions were raised asking what the hell the three were doing hitchhiking at night in the West Bank? These queries were subsumed in the collective feeling of support for the parents. But in the minds of many Israelis, they continue to linger.

Polling has shown a gradual decrease in the support of the Israeli public for the settlers. For now, the national mourning for the three teenagers is heartfelt and real. But as time passes, more Israelis will ask why their government is doing nothing to try to end a situation where Israeli teenagers are at constant risk of disappearing. And they won't be blaming only the Palestinians.

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