In order to comply with the court order to destroy the Jewish hamlet of Migron, an ‘illegal outpost,’ the government offered settlers a viable compromise: new homes will be built for them nearby on state land, after which they will abandon their existing homes for demolition.

Netanyahu misses the point. The outposts are being built to symbolize the Jewish right to set our feet anyplace in the Land of Israel. That is an important symbolic issue, not a housing affair.

Encouraged by the Knesset speaker’s demand to legalize their hamlet, Migron settlers are likely to refuse Netanyahu’s offer.

Netanyahu is beating the PR drums by calling on the Attorney General to investigate a Jerusalem mufti for incitement. The PM’s demand leads nowhere, as he knows full well. First, he cannot prosecute the mufti for political reasons. Second, Israeli law specifically excludes religious books from the definition of racism, and the mufti quoted a well-known hadith.

Now, it is an oddity that such a figure as a ‘mufti of Jerusalem’ exists in the Jewish state, whose religion commands the expulsion of other confessions from the Land of Israel. And it is no less odd that the Jewish state allows the practice of the Muslim religion, which contains similar instructions. But beyond that, the mufti was within his civil rights to quote the Hadith.