The news that over 230 children have been killed since Israel launched its recent Gaza campaign is one of the bleaker aspects of a case study in how normally reasonable human beings become complicit in acts of the most stupid and vicious violence.

My own attempts to make sense of this year’s depressing Christmas message from the Holy Land has been shaped by my experiences over the last 16 months in Latin America. Young Israelis crisscross this region in great numbers, propelled by both a thirst for adventure and the emancipating energy of completed military service. Most of the young Israeli travelers I have encountered in Latin America were conscript soldiers only a short time before they began their personal journeys of discovery. These smiling, athletic and curious young people provide the faces I picture when I think of the members of the Israeli Defense Forces who are now killing and being killed in Gaza.

The engaging and thoughtful explorers I met in Latin America are young ambassadors of a society that remains overwhelmingly supportive of a conflict that has claimed over 800 lives in roughly two weeks. I have struggled to reconcile the intelligence and goodness I discovered in graduates of Israel’s military with the dumb and callous violence now unfolding in Gaza.

Rockets periodically lobbed at Israel by Hamas form just one strain of the self-replicating and highly contagious virus of violence that seems able to corrupt even the most healthy of hosts. Other sources of infection revealed themselves to me when I met two young Israeli women in the Bay Islands in Honduras. While watching the film Blood Diamond in their company, I noticed that a tiny, teary stream had formed on the delicate features of one of these women. She was quietly crying in empathy with fictional characters in a war scene. Yet even someone so young and gentle had already participated in military operations in which real people died.

It was revealing to note that someone with natural empathy could have her ability for human connection to be selectively choked. The same young woman who cried at film representation of violence told me how her time in the Israeli army had changed her attitudes to Palestinians. “I used to be really sympathetic - now I hate them.” Her work in Israeli intelligence involved listening to intercepted conversations in which Palestinians lustily rejoiced in the deaths of Israelis killed in recent terrorist attacks. Part of the sickness that infected those she listened to had spread along the phone lines to claim her ability to empathize with an entire people.

Trust and empathy are perhaps the most important parts of the immune system that protects us from succumbing to cruelty. The Israeli military claim that the deaths of hundreds of children and other civilians is really the responsibility of Hamas fighters who use their compatriots as human shields. Yet, it is hard to imagine Israeli bombs exploding with such indiscriminate lethality if the human shields were Israeli civilians.

As an Irishman, I note that even during the most vicious violence perpetrated by the IRA against British civilians, the British Government did not engage in large scale bombings of nationalist areas of Ireland where IRA leaders were known to sleep at night. That relative restraint in the face of unjustified terrorist violence akin to that Israelis now endure from Hamas proved to be wise. Yesterday I was in Belfast and able to enjoy the easy charm of a city moving on from decades of savage conflict. I hope that the Israeli friends I have made while in Latin America soon discover a similar sense of security in the streets of cities such as Netivot and Ashkelon that are currently targeted by the Qassam rockets fired by Hamas. But with great sadness, I feel that Israel’s response to its terrorist threat makes it much harder for that day to come soon.