THE SIGN AT the entrance is clear: “According to Torah Law entering the Temple Mount area is strictly forbidden due to the holiness of the site.” Rabbinical tradition holds that Jews may not set foot on any part of the esplanade atop Jerusalem’s holiest site. Once the location of the Jewish temple, which was destroyed by the Romans in 70AD, the area has for centuries been a Muslim compound comprising the al-Aqsa Mosque and the golden Dome of the Rock. Because the location of the Holy of Holies (the inner sanctum of the former temple) is unknown, say the rabbis, ritually impure Jews might accidentally enter and defile it. These days Jews mostly pray outside, at the base of the retaining wall, known as the Western Wall, or Kotel.

Nonetheless, Jewish zealots venture into the al-Aqsa compound almost every day, ostensibly as tourists. The police let them jump the queue of foreigners and form a protective cordon as they perambulate the Dome of the Rock, amid curses from Muslim worshippers. Sometimes they stand silently, gazing at it longingly. They are filmed by the police, who are supposed to ensure that they do not attempt to pray. One trick is to address God while pretending to speak on a mobile phone.

The activists maintain that their holiest place is not down below and outside, at the Western Wall, but above and within the great enclosure (see picture). They demand the right to pray there after centuries of exclusion. “The Western Wall is a refugee camp for Jews,” declares one campaigner. Besides, he says, the Holy of Holies is under the golden dome, which covers a rock where tradition says Abraham prepared to sacrifice Isaac (or Ishmael, according to Muslim lore). Rabbi Yehudah Glick, a Likud member of the Knesset (parliament), who was wounded by a Palestinian gunman in 2014, dismisses the prohibition on Jews entering the Temple Mount. As the campaign gathers support, he predicts, traditionalist rabbis will be forced to bow before the popular will. Had they not once opposed Zionism itself?

Rabbi Glick casts the campaign for prayer rights as a matter of religious freedom. But it has been spurred by politics, as a response to the Camp David talks in 2000, when the status of Jerusalem’s holy places was negotiated over for the first time; establishing the right of Jews to pray on the Temple Mount would reinforce Israel’s claim to sovereignty over the site.

Layers of complexity

For Palestinians, the intrusion of Jewish activists into the al-Aqsa compound is all of a piece with the creeping “Judaisation” of Jerusalem. All around al-Aqsa, they lament, right-wing Jews financed by foreign donors are buying up Arab houses above while conducting archaeological digs below.

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.

Weaponising prayer

To understand the danger of politicised piety, consider Hebron, Jerusalem’s “older sister” and site of the Cave of the Patriarchs (which Muslims call the Ibrahimi Mosque), where the Bible says Abraham bought a burial-place for his family. Both the Kotel and the Hebron site feature massive stone blocks from the time of Herod the Great. After the war of 1967 Jews gained the right to pray in the cave complex for the first time in 700 years. They also moved into buildings nearby to restore a Jewish community that had been massacred and evicted in 1929. Where Jewish settlers go, the Israeli state usually follows. The friction in Hebron has caused much bloodshed on all sides. After a massacre of Muslim worshippers in the Cave of the Patriarchs by a settler in 1994, Israeli authorities partitioned the site, and later the city.

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.

Outside parliament, things can turn uglier still. The ultras of the Beitar Jerusalem football club, La Familia, sing racist chants and are frequently involved in violence, not least when they pour out of matches to look for Arabs to beat up. The team has never had an Arab player. “I am a racist,” says one member. “That’s what La Familia means: the Jewish family.” A related group, Lehava, campaigns rowdily against miscegenation. All this might be dismissed as fringe activity, except that Beitar Jerusalem is much beloved of Likud ministers, and the government gives money to groups close to Lehava that seek to “save” Jewish women from Muslims. It has also objected to a book featuring love between Arabs and Jews.

Ehud Barak, a former Labour prime minister, talks of “budding fascism”. Older Likud members, from Moshe Arens, a former defence minister, to President Reuven Rivlin, and even some of the settlers’ father figures, find the crass racism disturbing, but these days they are sidelined. “Likud was hawkish, but was liberal and democratic. It has been transformed,” says Moshe Halbertal, a professor of Jewish philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. “For ultranationalists, the enemy is within—NGOs, the minorities, the courts.”

Labour’s love lost

The drift to illiberalism is also a symptom of the weakness of the Labour party, damaged by decades of post-Oslo violence. The party is in perpetual turmoil: it has gone through 11 leaders since 1994, whereas Likud has had just two. In Israel’s strange parliamentary arithmetic, Labour cannot form a coalition with Arab parties, which hold 13 seats, lest it be accused of treachery.

Counter-intuitively, perhaps, there is a fear on the right that the settlement project is failing. Settlers account for a minority of the West Bank’s population, and have not managed to convince most Israelis of their case for permanently annexing the West Bank. By casting their movement largely in religious terms, they have lost much of secular Israel. Mr Netanyahu has confined the building of settlements to the main blocks on the borders of the West Bank. And people remember that Ariel Sharon, a previous Likud prime minister, pulled out the settlers from Gaza, proving that settlement is reversible.

“We are bigger, but we are not as influential as we used to be,” says Israel Harel, a veteran of the settler movement. He regrets that settlers did not push immediately for the annexation of the West Bank. These days he would make do with the absorption of just Area C, handing areas A and B to Jordan (a deal that would not be accepted by either Jordan or the Palestinians). “I am not so concerned about security and more concerned about what happens in Israel. This issue divides us. It creates hate and chauvinism. I don’t want Israel to become hell.”

The headline of this article was updated on June 22nd 2017