Approximately one third of the Negev’s Bedouin live in unauthorized villages. Recently Israel has embarked on a campaign to dismantle these villages, primarily by offering their residents incentives to relocate with the long-term goal of integrating them into Israeli society and the modern economy. But when the residents of Umm Hiran turned down offers to relocate to a nearby, legal Bedouin village, Israel forcibly dismantled the settlement, provoking outrage from Arab parliamentarians and demonstrations. Since then, tensions have grown even greater. Ariel Ben Solomon writes:

In the 1930s, a Republic Jewish judge, observing his coreligionists’ commitment to the Democratic party, quipped, in Yiddish, that Jews have three velt (worlds): di velt (this world), yene velt (the next world), and Roosevelt. Since then, Jewish devotion has attenuated somewhat, although Jews still overwhelmingly lean Democratic. Most American Jews, however, are unfamiliar with the terms “this world” or “the next world” in any language. Carefully examining a wealth of statistical data, Samuel J. Abrams and Jack Wertheimer argue that the sort of robust Jewish liberalism that characterized U.S. Jewry a few decades ago is in steep decline. Jews, they explain, are undergoing their own version of what political scientists call the “great sort,” whereby politics, religion, and place of residence increasingly align: