Revital Ohayon, 34, was reading her sons Matan, five, and Noam, four, a bedtime story when a Fatah terrorist burst into their home on Kibbutz Metzer. She jumped in front of the children to protect them, but he shot all three dead.

A few months ago, on a Shabbat morning, Palestinian terrorists burst into the bedroom of Shiri Shefi, took aim, and sprayed her and her three children with bullets using M-16 assault rifles. Shefi, her 4-year-old son Uriel and 2-year-old son Eliad were wounded. Five-year-old Danielle, shot in the head, was killed.

About a year ago, a Palestinian sniper trained his high-powered rifle on 10-month-old Shalhevet Pass, killing the baby girl in her father's arms.

About six months before that, Vadim Novesche and Yosef Avrahami, two Israeli reserve officers abducted by Palestinian police, had their heads beaten into unrecognizable pulp and were then disemboweled by a waiting crowd outside the Palestinian Authority's Ramallah headquarters, who then danced, entrails in hand, through the city's streets.

Cases like these stand out among the hundreds of murders of Israelis and foreign visitors in recent months, not because of their evil but because of their inhumanity. They reveal a terrifying angle of the story of this war.

Beneath the strata of Islamic unity, Pan-Arabism, and Palestinian national aspiration ― at the root of this great campaign engineered by Arab leaders ― is pure, unbridled sadism, a delight in cruelty that boggles the Western mind. And even if this lust for savagery is slightly less evident in the "ordinary" shootings and suicide bombings that people suffer in Israel on a daily basis, there is a growing suspicion that much of this violence flows from a visceral, Palestinian truculence ― a craving for Jewish pain, for blood.

Those of conscience ask not only what practical steps we can take to escape this nightmare, but also how it could ever have been conceived. What great power have Palestinian leaders tapped into? How do they draw forth so much human energy and direct it for evil? And can we learn from them how to harness the same energy and use it for good?

"The sword and the book descended intertwined." (Midrash Rabba)

The Palestinian leadership takes education very seriously. On the Palestinian National Authority website, the first three listings are the ministries of Higher Education, Information, and Education ― before the ministries of Planning, Labor, and Health.

Since September 2000, the PA composed and introduced into its elementary and high schools a series of new textbooks, replacing Egyptian and Jordanian texts on four grade levels.

These books obliterate the State of Israel from history and maps, showing instead a greater Palestine that stretches from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea ― with Jerusalem as the capital of the Palestinian state.

These texts present the liberation of Palestine as a struggle against Jewish occupation, describe the waves of aliyah as "infiltration," and glorify jihad and martyrdom.

Beyond its local educational products, the PA also imports a wealth of materials from its neighbors. A 30-part series, produced by Arab Radio and Television, featuring a cast of 400, and aired during the second half of Ramadan 2002, "dramatized" the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Arab viewers were also treated to a popular political satire showing Ariel Sharon drinking the blood of Palestinian children.

The myth that Jews sprinkle the blood of Arab children into their matzah is graphically described in The Matzah of Zion, published in 1983 by the current Syrian minister of defense, Mustafa Tlas. The Egyptian mass circulation daily al-Ahram also recently reported "many cases of the bodies of [Palestinian] children who had disappeared being found, torn to pieces, without a single drop of blood. The most reasonable explanation is that the blood was taken to be kneaded into the dough of extremist Jews."

One can only imagine the effect that academic and media presentations such as these have on the Palestinian soul.

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However frightening this propaganda and its effects might be, we must confront the possibility that an even more hideous engine drives the terrorists' cruelty. Relative to the West, life in Arab countries has always been harsh. Corporal punishment of children is thoroughly embedded in the culture. No mainstream Islamic authority has yet spoken out against slapping children's faces, dragging them by the hair, or any of the other disciplinary approaches that shock Western onlookers.

Survival in such a culture necessitates some numbing. But this psychological component might be insignificant relative to the neurobiological effects of being beaten and tortured in childhood. It was Harvard researchers who first revealed that stress hormones released when children experience physical and sexual abuse actually impede development of that part of the brain responsible for empathy and conscience.

Brain scans of those who suffered through events common in the childhood of Palestinian children reveal an underdeveloped hippocampus and vermis. Among the behaviors associated with this sort of brain damage: impulsivity, sadism, and suicide. It is almost too frightening to consider that Israel today faces a population many of whom are hardwired for the sort of violence we have been witnessing.

More terrifying is the long-term prognosis for Palestinian society. Martin Teicher, a lead researcher in the Harvard study, reports that sadistic parents neurobiologically infect their children with the same trait: Society reaps what it sows in the way it nurtures its children. Whether it comes in the form of physical, emotional, or sexual trauma, or through exposure to warfare, famine, or pestilence, stress can set off a ripple of hormonal changes that permanently wire a child's brain to cope with a malevolent world. Through this chain of events, violence and abuse pass from generation to generation as well as from one society to the next.

Our stark conclusion is that we see the need to do much more to ensure that child abuse does not happen in the first place, because once the key brain alterations occur, there may be no going back. (Scientific American, March 2002)

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In the near term it is unlikely that Israel will do much to stem the flow of anti-Semitic propaganda or reduce the violence that Palestinians commit against their own children. We must accept that Israel is locked in a battle with a population, many of whom are programmed for inconceivable callousness and hatred.

Ironically, we can learn from our neighbor's example: Islam is a powerful force. If given a chance, Judaism can be too ― but in a very different way. If Palestinians use the Koran to teach hatred, we can use the Torah to teach sensitivity, altruism, and righteousness.

But this would require teaching our tradition as passionately as the Palestinians teach theirs. Just as Palestinian parents speak to their children about the need to sacrifice for the Palestinian national dream, so too we can speak to our children about giving of themselves to achieve real Tikkun Olam (mending the world).

To date, we are failing at this mission. The percentage of Jewish charitable funds directed to teaching Torah to Jews is minuscule.

Too often, Israeli leaders and heads of major Jewish organizations in the Diaspora downplay or outright deny the value of an immersion in Judaism.

The solution might also require changing our parenting habits. Just as the harshness of Palestinian parenthood might be wiring children for hatred and violence, so too might attentive, loving parenting wire our children for goodness.

Perhaps the moment has arrived to rethink the amount of time we spend (or don't spend) with our children; the way we discipline them; and the media we expose them to.

Perhaps, ironically, we can be inspired by the horrors of this war to commit ourselves to raising a different sort of child.

Perhaps those of us who survive the current crisis can emerge different, better, for the horrors we have seen.