"The degradation of Israel’s police as a public service and its increasing militarization is now a feature, not a bug. And that’s been evident in the heavy-handed over-policing in Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood and near al-Aqsa Mosque, where clashes between police and Palestinian protesters sparked the latest round of hostilities and gave Hamas its excuse to launch rockets from Gaza. The over-policing of Jerusalem stands in stark contrast to the way police neglected Israel’s Arab neighborhoods and towns in recent years, allowing many of them to descend into gang warfare as unsolved murder rates rocketed. One Arab resident of Lod asked me this week, “How do you expect us to calm down when the police come here only when the victims are Jews? When an Arab murders an Arab, they come the next day, arrest a member of each family and then release them for lack of evidence. That’s all.”