Holy sites are the powder kegs of the conflict, imbuing the nationalist dispute with religious fervour. A row over the Kotel in 1929 led to deadly anti-Jewish riots across British-ruled Palestine. A visit to the Temple Mount in 2000 by Ariel Sharon, then the Likud party leader, lit the fuse of the second Palestinian intifada. And the increasingly frequent prayer visits helped launch the current wave of stabbings and car-rammings by Palestinians. [...]
It was in Hebron in March 2016 that an army medic, Sergeant Elor Azaria, killed a Palestinian lying on the ground, even though he had already been wounded and incapacitated after trying to stab Israeli soldiers. Mr Azaria shot the man not in the heat of the moment but 11 minutes after the stabbing—and was caught on video. The army’s high command demanded exemplary punishment, but populist politicians agitated for an acquittal or, once the soldier was convicted of manslaughter, a pardon. Strikingly, the prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, took the side of the pardon-seekers.
The Azaria affair says much about the chauvinism that suffuses Israeli public life. Politics is no longer a contest of right against left but of right against far right. Israel has become more ethno-nationalist and less universalist; more Jewish and less Israeli. Mr Netanyahu, once regarded as a demagogue, often looks like a moderate next to many of his cabinet members. [...]
Right-wingers have sought to marginalise Arab parties in the Knesset and hamper leftists and liberals. The Knesset is pushing laws on everything from reducing the volume of Muslim calls to prayer to forcing the disclosure of money given by foreign governments to NGOs (which often support human rights and other liberal causes) and giving immigration authorities greater power to ban BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel) activists from entering Israel. The government has inveighed against what it calls the “activist” Supreme Court (which it deems too liberal) and against the media.
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