The big news, apparently, isn't that a young Palestinian blew himself up at a Tel Aviv sandwich stand last Monday, killing nine innocent Israelis and inflicting horrific injuries on dozens of others. The big news, rather, is that the bombing, though not carried out by Hamas, was condoned by it.

"This is the natural result of continued Israeli aggression and escalation and can only be considered a form of self-defense," the party said.

Israeli and American politicians—and editorialists—were quick to jump on the Hamas announcement, condemning it as vociferously as they condemned the bombing itself.

Hardly anyone seemed to notice the rest of what Hamas had to say. "The Israeli occupation bears responsibility for the consequences of its policies," the party declared. "We have continuously repeated that the occupation is the reason for the cycle of violence. The killing, the assassinations and the bombings of Palestinian areas have resulted in the deaths of 20 Palestinians and the wounding of 85 in less than two weeks. The various groups have called for civilians not to be involved in the violence but the occupation [army] is not bound by this."

That part of the statement didn't generate any editorials.

Nothing can justify a wanton attack on a purely civilian target—no matter who carries it out.

But the question we should be asking ourselves isn't the one about why we are so quick to condemn the Tel Aviv bombing while remaining silent about the context of seething violence from which it emerged; it's the one about what possible connection there might be between that resounding silence and the bombing itself.

The point here, then, is not that Israel has been killing Palestinian men, women and children at a steady pace for several weeks; that it has routinely been flying mock air raids over Gaza, flying low and breaking the sound barrier in the middle of the night for no other reason than to terrify sleeping children and their parents; that it has condemned much of the Palestinian population to what a senior advisor to the Israeli cabinet euphemistically referred as a "diet," by which he means a kind of slow starvation designed to add pressure to an already beleaguered people. Nor is it that all of this happens without ever generating headlines, let alone editorials.

The point, rather, is that all of this violence is the direct result of Israel's insistence on maintaining its occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and east Jerusalem—in defiance of international law, of UN Security Council Resolutions, and of the will of the Palestinian people.

And while there is no end to the list of demands on the Palestinians, there seem to be no demands whatsoever on Israel to end its occupation.

There is no way to understand what happened in Tel Aviv without understanding this. It's easy to condemn last Monday's attack; it requires a little more energy to see what can be done to prevent more attacks in the future.

A murderer, wrote the English philosopher William Godwin, "is propelled to act by necessary causes and irresistible motives, which, having once occurred, are likely to occur again." The only way to stop crime, he argued, is to understand and attend to its causes and motives: punishing a murderer is little better than punishing his knife.

Godwin's approach to criminality may sound strange, but it has never been proved wrong. It has also never been easier to understand the relationship between a particular crime and the causes and motives leading up to it, as well as what must be done to prevent it recurring.

Sami Hammed, the youth who blew himself up last Monday, was born under the military occupation that Israel has imposed on the Palestinian territories for almost forty years now, with no end in sight. Not only his entire life, but all of his imaginable futures were defined by the Israeli occupation. He was the living product of that occupation.

The Palestinians never chose to live under Israeli occupation: they do not want to live under the occupation now. To end the occupation, they entered into peace negotiations whose only tangible result was the reinforcement of the occupation. They protested and were severely punished for protesting. They were told nothing would happen until they pushed through democratic reforms and held elections. They did so. And the election results only brought international isolation and more punishment.

Palestinians are asking what exactly they are supposed to do to end the occupation—and why no demands are made of the occupiers themselves. A tiny minority will answer the question the only way they know how—with the same callousness and brutality to which they have been subjected for decades on end. Most are looking for a better answer; all they hear is silence.

Saree Makdisi is a professor of English and Comparative Literature at UCLA and a frequent commentator on the Middle East.