In 1998, an Israeli film appeared called "Buzz." It was based on a true story that had rocked the country four years earlier: two teenagers murdered a taxi driver, shooting him six times in the back. In the style of some great literature, there was no motive at all, just sheer thrill for boys who had already developed a pastime of petty crime. Nobody is making films these days about stunningly random, lethal violence. We've grown ritually used to it. We have a few days to nurse our horror, then we return to the struggle to close out the month…

The rioting last night in south Tel Aviv against African migrants – some of them asylum seekers –  was another one of those moments that paralyzed me with a mixture of disbelief, horror and sorrow. The photos of smashed windows were reflexively associated in many Jewish minds with Kristallnacht, as many people on social networks pointed out. One photo of Likud MK Danny Danon standing on a platform exhorting the masses to expel the strangers in their midst was reflexively associated in my mind with Benjamin Netanyahu "on the balcony" circa 1994 or 1995. In those notorious demonstrations, Netanyahu famously…