When Middle Eastern summer heat coincided earlier this week with Muslim holy days and a long-simmering property dispute in Jerusalem, the result was predictably explosive.
So far, dozens of Palestinians and six Israelis have died in the exchange of the rockets fired at Israeli civilians by Hamas from Gaza and Israel’s retaliatory air strikes on Gazan military targets. But there are unprecedented aspects to the latest round of violence, the worst in seven years, that deeply trouble Israelis.
Among the most challenging is the spread of the violence to Israel’s own Arab population, a development that has thrown Israeli national politics into even greater disarray and is likely to prompt Israeli Jews to reconsider their own community’s relationship with the country’s 1.9 million Israeli Arabs, or roughly 20 percent of the country’s 10 million people.
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Judith Miller is a contributing editor of City Journal and adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Follow her on Twitter here.
Photo by MOHAMMED ABED/AFP via Getty Images
