Connect: Singing a song Jews sang on their way to Nazi gas chambers, extremist Jewish settlers resisted eviction. One supporter wrested a gun from an Israeli soldier and killed four Palestinians. An elderly woman set herself alight and 15 people barricaded themselves into a synagogue threatening to do likewise. Israeli policemen used water cannon but cried over evicting fellow Jews.
This newspaper published a front page photograph on Wednesday that captured the depth of feeling as police arrested a settler. His face was purple, contorted and utterly enraged. His fists were clenched white. It's very seldom however that such intense emotion has produced so little external sympathy. In fact, the obvious trauma of the settlers induced much derision.
It doesn't feel good to deride the heartfelt tears and anger of others. It feels nasty. Yet the situation demanded context. The Gaza Strip housed just 2 per cent of illegal Jewish settlements. Furthermore, Israel has in recent years destroyed thousands - literally thousands - of Palestinian homes without compensation and we have seldom, if ever, seen the tears or anger of the victims.
Still, there are at least two sides to every story and the eviction of 8,000 Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip is no different. But the "divine" basis on which the settlers based their "right" to remain around Gaza cuts no ice with most non-Jews.
Like Islamists who support Sharia law, insisting that religious and secular law be identical, extremist settlers evoke more anger than empathy. They also show that no one religion has a monopoly on fanaticism.
Nonetheless, even though the Palestinian case is, in context, overwhelming, perhaps we ought not be too smug. Like Orthodox Jewish Law and Sharia Law, Canon Law invariably resists any primacy of secular state law. Can you remember, for instance, how reluctant many of the most powerful among the Irish Catholic clergy were to see state justice meted out to clerical paedophiles? Can you remember how many devout people supported the hierarchy?
It's the same principle. Organised religion, which is older than states, considers that its laws answer to higher authority (indeed a supreme authority) than do those of states.
In a sense, it's ironically logical. After all, though religions are based on illogical belief (it is impossible to prove or disprove the existence of God!) if you believe, then its laws must, by definition, be supreme.
In that regard, reports of the Christian United States giving excessive credence to theories preaching against evolution are as alarming as Jewish settler resistance. It all suggests that religious fundamentalism - Jewish, Islamic and Christian - is hardening.
Perhaps in one sense we should not be surprised. In a globalising world, fundamentalism - the desire to stem all outside influences - is to be expected. Fundamentalism, after all, promises no dilution of identity or certainty and it venerates the past. All cultures - great and tiny, religious and secular, rich and poor - have elements of it in greater or lesser degree. Anyway, this week's clashes in the Gaza Strip show just how intractable are the problems of the Middle East. It's churlish to snigger at the discomfort of evicted settler Jews but it's immeasurably more churlish to argue that they have any God-given "right" to be there. On that basis, anybody can claim that God has said it's fine to go ahead and appropriate whatever they want. In fact, the might - predominantly American arms - that got them the territory after the Six Day War in 1967, is a more honest basis for claiming ownership. All countries have been colonised by successive waves of invaders so in that sense, the "might is right" principle is ultimately undeniable. But invoking God and insisting you're "the chosen people" are antithetical to peace.
Yet again though, the sentiment is not unique to Jewish culture. Catholics over 40 will remember being taught that people of no other religion - including, indeed often especially, Protestants - could go to heaven. Meanwhile, Protestants were inculcated with the idea that Catholics (such idolaters with "Confession" and those ghastly plaster saints!) were their social inferiors.
And so it goes. Religions that live cheek by jowl make the bitterest of enemies. In the West Bank and east Jerusalem there are 400,000 more Jewish settlers. In that sense, this week's meagre withdrawal from the illegal occupation of the Occupied Territories demands perspective.
For 30 years international law has demanded the removal of the other 98 per cent of settlers from the Occupied Territories so the "trauma" of the Gaza squatters is limited. For individuals it may be painful (albeit well compensated - the average family gets about €369,500!) but hardly catastrophic.
Common sense requires that we treat the Gaza pull-out with caution and those attempts to evoke comparisons between the predicament of the Gaza Strip settlers and Jews under Nazism were utterly tasteless. If anything, they dishonoured victims of the Holocaust. A strange week and it felt more ominous than hopeful. We'll see.