Former Israeli High Court of Justice Justice Menachem Mazuz says he left the Court last year because he could no longer lend legitimacy to Palestinian house demolitions, which he said reflect the barbaric principle of an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.

The Israeli military has changed its rules of engagement to allow its forces to fire on Palestinians who have thrown stones or firebombs even when they no longer pose any danger. The rules will only be applied to Palestinian stonethrowers, though Jewish settlers run riot in the West Bank. The new rule is a sop to Israeli settlers, the IDF’s clientele.

Following a pogrom in Southern Hebron that injured a 3-year-old Palestinian child, Israeli human rights organizations started an ad campaign calling on the Defense Minister and Internal Security Minister to end settler violence. Israeli bus companies removed the ad within a day after pressure from rightwing activists.

The secret is out. Yair Lapid’s call for a Jewish majority in Israel shows that Israel’s raison d’etre is Jewish supremacy. Jews in Israel have spent immense effort and time over the last 70 years, trying to find another meaning for a “Jewish state”, and failed. A Jewish state is one in which the Jew is master and everyone else should be thankful for what rights he deigns to grant them.

Israel’s possible next prime minister Naftali Bennett would need to deliver to his base, with anti-Palestinian provocation. Which makes it unlikely that a non-Netanyahu government can stem the tide of pro-Palestinian sentiment which followed the last massacre in Gaza. Though this is what hasbara-ists, in the US and Israel, are hoping for.

As of yesterday, Benjamin Netanyahu is officially a loser. He lost four elections in a row, and failed to form a government – the one time he managed it, a year ago, he did so on Benny Gantz’s mandate. That, however, does not mean Yair Lapid, who received the mandate to try to form a government yesterday from Israeli President Reuven Rivlin, will do any better.

Remember Israel’s basic law stating that it is the “Nation State of the Jewish People”? Well a judge dismissed a discrimination suit filed on behalf of Palestinian children who can’t find Arabic-speaking classes in the town of Karmiel, saying the law prioritizes Jewish settlement of the land, Palestinians are a minority in the town, so the state doesn’t have to lift a finger to help these children.

An Israeli university warned Jewish female students that they may have to live with Palestinian students, suggesting they move.

Even now, 25 years after the assassination, the majority of the Israeli center and left cannot divest itself of the Oslo Accords and of the chimera of a two-states solution. They are, after all, sacred. They are what Oseh Shalom Bimromaiv planned. Any attempts to deviate from it is denying scripture. And so the devotees of Oslo and Rabin become the equivalent of monks, dead to the world and singing the sacred hymns. The divine plan has long lost any connection to reality, but anyone challenging it quickly becomes anathema.

Israel’s leading governing party, Likud, is secular, but its leaders parrot biblical statements about the Jewish people’s supposed right to lands in Palestine as history, such as that Abraham bought land in Hebron. These religious nationalist claims underlie the government’s desire for annexation, though the U.S. press never talks about this zealotry.