I asked whether they understood why so many people had been shocked and hurt by the letter’s failure to express any sympathy for the Israeli men, women, and children who had been murdered barely a day before its release. But they stubbornly resisted this line of thinking. “Our statement was not intended to do that,” Nadia said, but, rather, to address the politics of the region and “the root of the violence.” Anyone who was scandalized by the idea of Israel’s culpability struck her as “deeply misinformed.”