If a rocket blew my child to pieces in her bed I would devote my life to revenge.

I'd happily kill soldiers of the army responsible. I'd spend my every waking moment planning and obsessing over it. I would be insane with hatred. My life would have no other meaning save bringing pain to the people who'd taken my daughter.

It wouldn't matter if the perpetrators were Israeli, Palestinian, American, New Zealanders or Eritrean. I would have no other reason to live.

I'll readily admit this is an ignorant, un-evolved response but it's the way I am wired and, I daresay, many others are too.

It's equally sad and pathetic a middle-class, white man residing in a wealthy liberal democracy has so little else in his life it would be eclipsed by the murder of his child. Yet I know I would be so broken the only conceivable way I could survive is to become a monster of revenge.

I can't imagine there's much else to distract you in Gaza.

Terence, the Roman playwright of North African descent (circa 185 BC) famously wrote in his play Heauton Timorumenos: "I am a human being, I consider nothing that is human alien to me."

Critics of Israel, of Hamas, of Russian separatists who shoot down commercial aircraft, would do well to reflect on that quote.

It is very easy to sit in Sydney or Melbourne atop a pyramid of genetic, geographic and socio-economic lottery winnings and opine about the "evil" doings of people who live with terrors, stresses, deprivation and discrimination most of us will never experience.

I am under no illusion as to my nature. I would kill with savagery to protect my family. If they'd been crushed to death in the rubble of my house, I'd become a creature of despair and violence (and, I suspect, addiction).

I would reduce my enemy to subhuman, to the "other".

You may be cut from different cloth, yet the fascinations of the Australian public over the last fortnight suggest to me there's millions more people quite capable of this diminution of strangers.

There is a dreadful arithmetic that exists somewhere in all of our hearts and heads: it is the exact number of dead Palestinian or Syrian or Israeli children that will provoke the same response from us as a dead Australian child.

It is not a one = one equation. If two hundred Australian children had been torn apart by missiles in their homes, playing on beaches, huddled in schools, this country would be on a war footing. 

Dead kids are a horrifying statistic, one that illustrates perhaps the most disturbing aspect of human nature - that there are people quite prepared to take the life of a child.

There is a remote possibility whoever fired the rocket that brought down MH17 in Ukraine didn’t know they were aiming at a commercial airliner, nor the person who gave the order to shoot.

Probable? No. Possible? Yes.

There's little doubt the people giving the orders and firing rockets into Gaza know they will kill children. Hundreds have died already.

Only the soulless or the sick could argue these children will be any less mourned than the children killed on board that Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777, yet our ability to make dead Gazan children "other", to minimise the significance of their deaths is, at its root, the same response that allows people to kill them.

It is the power of abstraction.

The outcry over Gaza is but a fraction of what has been generated by MH17. Logic suggests we - as Australians value the dead of Gaza as fractions as well.

20, 50, 100 Arab dead kids = one dead Aussie child.

Whether you agree with me or not, I think we can all understand the despair and rage that must fill a parent's heart when their child is murdered, mutilated, crushed like an insect.

If Israel thinks the massacre of children will somehow subdue or pacify the people of Palestine, they're operating under a grave misunderstanding of human nature.

Every child that dies, every beloved spouse or relative dismembered by grim technology, marks the birth of another blood-enemy who dreams only of killing Israelis.

smh.com.au