Sectarian tensions in Israel continue to soar ahead of Pope Francis’ first visit to the Holy Land this coming weekend.

Over the past month and a half, not a week has gone by without the defacement or arson of a church, a mosque, or property belonging to Israel's Palestinian citizens.

The Palestinian community inside Israel, including church leaders representing the Vatican, has expressed outrage at the growing culture of impunity and Jewish extremism that has allowed such attacks to carry on without consequence.

Making up some 20 percent of the population, more than 1.5 million Palestinians carry Israeli citizenship and live in villages, towns, and cities across the country. According to Adalah, a Haifa-based legal center, more than 50 laws discriminate against them.

Just last week, Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said that Israel’s Palestinian citizens constitute a “fifth column.”

“The attacks against the Christian community are spreading hatred, fear and violence,” said Jamal Khader, head of the Latin Patriarch seminary and spokesperson for the Pope’s visit to the Palestinian territories told VICE News. “The Vatican fears the damage these hate crimes will do to the possibility of coexistence between religions in the holy land.”

Two churches in Jerusalem were vandalized in the last week alone. A Romanian Orthodox church in Jerusalem was found defaced on Friday with the words "Price Tag" and "King David, king of the Jews. Jesus is Garbage" on its walls.

'The state isn’t doing much about these hate crimes. If they wanted to, they could catch those fanatics within hours… but they haven’t'

Just a few days earlier, Jewish extremists scrawled graffiti across the exterior of offices belonging to the Vatican in East Jerusalem; "Death to Arabs and Christians and those who hate Israel," the Hebrew-script graffiti read.

These incidents directly follow a wave of attacks against non-Jewish places of worship throughout the Galilee in northern Israel.

Since the beginning of April, mosques in the villages of Jish, Umm al-Fahm, Fureidis, and a graveyard in Nesher were all defaced with anti-Arab slogans. Cars in each village, upwards of 40 in Jish, were damaged or had their tires slashed. Slogans scrawled at the crime scenes ranged from the signature “Price Tag,” to “Close mosques, not yeshivas,” to a more forceful, “Arabs out,” and direct threats: “Death to Arabs.”

In the predominantly Jewish city of Yokneam, cars belonging to Palestinian citizens have been vandalized six times in the last month.

Right-wing Jewish extremists use the term "price tag" to refer to violence against Palestinians, both in the occupied territories and within Israel, carried out ostensibly as punishment for challenges to Israel's settlement enterprise and/or Palestinian diplomatic action against Israel. The phenomenon has become so common since it began in 2008 that Wikipedia now keeps a running tally.

Although the attacks have customarily been aimed at Palestinian villages in the West Bank, their frequency has skyrocketed in 2014.

Jafar Farah, director of the Haifa based Mossawa Center, the Advocacy Center for Palestinian Arab citizens in Israel, told VICE News he believes the shift is indicative of the change in political discourse as well.

“It’s no longer about the two state solution,” he said. “It’s about historical Palestine and historical Israel.”

Last month, the US State Department for the first time included "price tag" attacks in its 2013 Country Reports on Terrorism. Prominent Israeli writer Amos Oz took the public condemnation a step further last week, arguing that those responsible for "price tag" hate crimes should be called what they really are: "Hebrew neo-Nazis."

National police spokesperson Mickey Rosenfeld challenged the legitimacy of Washington’s report. “There’s no comparison whatsoever between criminal incidents with nationalistic motives and terrorist-related incidents,” Rosenfeld told AFP earlier this month.

Yet Yazid Sadi, a Palestinian activist from Acre, disagrees with Rosenfeld’s assessment.

“The state isn’t doing much about these hate crimes,” he told VICE News. “If they wanted to, they could catch those fanatics within hours… but they haven’t. They [Israeli authorities] are clearly looking for a clash with Palestinians inside 48 [the term Palestinians use to describe present -day Israel] in the near future. We are considered to be a demographic danger for them. Maybe they’ll use these future clashes as an excuse to enact large population transfers to protect their ‘Jewish State.’”

The rise of such attacks not only comes in conjunction with Pope Francis’ first visit to the Holy Land on May 25, it also must be set in context with the current efforts by Israeli parliamentarians — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the forefront — to pass a Basic Law that would "legally anchor" Israel's status as "the nation-state of the Jewish people."

Critics argue that such a law would, in effect, suck the life out of Israel's democratic claims, exchanging its egalitarian values for Jewish preference, and allowing further attacks on religious (read Palestinian) minorities to continue unabated.

Nonetheless, Israeli authorities continue to champion the country’s pluralism, recently implementing an active campaign to recruit Israel’s Arab Christian citizens into the army. In February, Israel’s parliament — the Knesset — passed a law officially, and rather puzzlingly, recognizing Christians as “non-Arabs.”

'Israel has always promoted "divide and conquer" policies among Palestinians. It isolated the Druze from their Arab identity and now it is trying to do the same with the Christians.'

“The Christian community in Israel is being pressured from many different sides. The army is pushing from one side and the state’s lack of response to such blatant hate crimes from another. We are Palestinians, we are Arabs — we can’t join a purely Israeli, Zionist, militarized institution. It will turn us against each other. Why would we want to help maintain the occupation?” Vatican representative Khader said.

Abir Kopty, a Palestinian activist and writer from Nazareth, told VICE News she believes Israel is deliberately allowing religions tensions to increase, pitting Christians against Muslims against Druze in an effort to sow division among Palestinians in Israel. “Israel has always promoted ‘divide and conquer’ policies among Palestinians. It isolated the Druze from their Arab identity and now it is trying to do the same with the Christians,” Kopty said.

“The papal visits are the litmus tests for Israeli society,” Dr. Amnon Ramon, a comparative religion professor at the Hebrew University, told Haaretz in a recent interview. As anti-Palestinian hate crimes and discriminatory legislation peak, the prospects of Israel passing that test seem slim.