An edition of the mass-circulation Hebrew newspaper Yedi’ot Ahronot one day last week had in it an assortment of stories that are fairly typical of what you might have found in the Israeli press in recent months.

A 24-year-old man was arrested for bludgeoning an elderly neighbor to death with a hammer. A 16-year-old was indicted for the murder of a teenage girl he didn’t know. Freshly released statistics showed that in the first half of 2005, violent crime reached unprecedented heights. Ninety percent of Israeli secondary school teachers reported in a poll that they had personally witnessed student violence in the schools they teach in. A newly formed Knesset committee on juvenile violence was expected to recommend draconian measures, including lowering the age of criminal accountability to 12.

Once known as a society in which physical violence was relatively low, Israel has been in the throes of a rising curve of it for many years now. In some areas it is well on its way to becoming an international “leader”; figures show that it is now fifth in the developed world in the annual number of murders per capita. This is not exactly what was expected of a Jewish state, most of whose inhabitants belong to a people historically known – and sometimes even mocked for – their extreme aversion to and fear of physical aggression.

What has gone wrong?

The reasons offered have been various and are undoubtedly all, in one degree or another, correct. There is the growing gap between rich and poor in a country that was once highly egalitarian. There is the brutalizing effect of four decades of military rule over millions of Palestinians, in which a high percentage of Israelis have actively taken part. There is the huge Russian immigration of the 1990s, which brought to Israel hundreds of thousands of non-Jews with less qualms about resorting to violence and a feeling of exclusion that encouraged the use of it. There is the growing power and competition of underworld crime organizations. There is the growing incidence in Israeli life of drug and alcohol abuse. There is the effects of TV violence on young people in a country that did not have commercial television until 10 years ago – and so on and so forth.

Beyond all these explanations is a basic fact: Israel is slowly edging toward becoming a country in which high levels of verbal and behavioral emotionalism no longer serve to prevent physical violence, but rather stimulate it.

Broadly speaking there are, in their attitude toward anger and hostility, two kinds of societies. One kind, like that of the United States, northern Europe, and Japan, forbids the public expression of negative feelings in all but the most extreme situations. Codes of politeness dictate that anger remain unstated, and even repressed, in the name of social decorum.

It is rare in such countries to encounter loud quarrels or arguments in the street – and yet when they do break out, they often end in physical violence, both because they are considered unbearable breaches of conduct and because the emotions released by them have been pent up for long periods. If you shout at someone in public in America, you risk a fist in your face. The phenomenon of “nice,” well-behaved people who suddenly go on berserk killing sprees is typical of such societies.

As opposed to this, there is the kind of society, found in some Mediterranean countries and elsewhere, in which the public expression of anger is socially acceptable. No Italian thinks anything of shouting at or being shouted at by another Italian in front of others – yet in Italy, it is far rarer than it is in America to see two people come to blows. Precisely because the expression of strong feeling is permitted, it builds up into murderous aggression far less often. People get it out of their system on a daily basis.

Traditionally, Israel has always been in this respect a Mediterranean-type society like Italy’s. Expressing anger has never been thought of as socially aberrant, and forms of behavior that would be considered shocking in many places – verbal insults, cutting in front in queues or traffic, not bothering to say “thank you” or “please” when one doesn’t feel like it – have been tolerated. There was always a line that never was crossed, and although visitors to Israel have often found it an exasperatingly “impolite” place, they have generally been impressed, even in the worst periods of Palestinian terror, by how safe its streets felt. The same two Israelis who would have screamed insults at each other over a trivial incident would never have dreamed of reaching for a knife or a gun.

And yet there is also a third and dysfunctional type of society, one in which the inhibitions against violence that are characteristic of “Type 2” societies break down. In such places (one thinks of certain countries in Latin America), expressing anger no longer serves to vent it but rather fans it quickly into physical action – and since the expression of anger is widespread, violence becomes so also. When emotions run high in societies like these – and they run high frequently – they have a way of boiling over, there being nothing to keep the flame beneath them low.

This is the kind of dysfunctionality that Israel has been edging closer to. It has been doing so for too many years for there to be any hope of reversing course quickly. Yet if it does not want to end up resembling Colombia more than Italy, it will have to start edging back the other way soon.

Mr. Halkin is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.