Israel’s Religious Awakening

It haunts Israelis still—the image of a 19-year-old Israeli soldier, a medic with the rank of sergeant named Elor Azaria, captured on video executing a wounded Palestinian prisoner who lay inert on the street in the Israeli-occupied West Bank city of Hebron. The Palestinian, Abdel Fattah al-Sharif, was one of two young men who had stabbed and moderately wounded an Israeli soldier near a settlement of extremist Jewish activists, that day in March of 2016. The execution was no act of self-defence. Azaria, who had treated the wounded Israeli soldier, was shown calmly handing his helmet to a colleague, cocking his rifle and taking a few steps toward Sharif, then shooting him in the head. The video, recorded by a volunteer in the Israeli civil rights group B’Tselem, went viral. Azaria was duly convicted of manslaughter in January and sentenced to 18 months in prison.

But his trial and the accompanying outcry have illuminated a deep and fundamental divide in Israeli...