This was the year that the antisemitism smear against the left proved the political weapon of choice. Centrists let the genie out of the bottle, but the populist right will ultimately benefit by stoking further hatred of minorities, including Jews.

Israel’s decision to trap Christians in Gaza this Christmas is only a prelude to a larger, seemingly contradictory longer-term plan. The choking blockade is designed to sap the people of the will to stay and struggle for what is theirs.

British officials have stonewalled a campaign seeking to expose a UK ‘charity’, the Jewish National Fund, that has helped to fund crimes in Israel and the occupied territories, including planting a forest used to ethnically cleanse Palestinians

With its plan for a new Hebron settlement, Israel has reminded Palestinians that there are no limits – military, legal, moral or diplomatic – to the settlers’ power. Israel will annex land where it chooses and deceptively refashion the resulting apartheid system as the rule of law.

Surveys suggesting that British Jews are frightened on a Labour election victory should not be surprising. The media have ensured we have been living in a nationwide anti-Corbyn echo-chamber for the best part of four years.

The decision to indict Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on three separate criminal counts pushes the country’s already unprecedented electoral stalemate into the entirely uncharted territory of a constitutional crisis. There is no legal precedent for a prime minister facing a trial while in office.

Digital-age weapons developed by Israel to oppress Palestinians under occupation are rapidly being repurposed for much wider applications – against Western populations who have long taken their freedoms for granted.

It is a sign of Israel’s overweening confidence in its own impunity that it so openly violates the rights of those whose job it is to monitor human rights. Palestinians, meanwhile, are rapidly losing the very last voices prepared to stand up and defend them against the systematic abuses associated with Israel’s occupation.

The judge who laid down the legal architecture needed to establish Israel’s settlements has just died. But his legacy has inspired a fresh generation of jurists to create new mechanisms for dispossessing the Palestinians.

Renewed efforts by Israel to turn tens of thousands of Bedouin into refugees in their own country – some for the second or third time – is proof that in a Jewish state some Israelis are simply the wrong kind of citizen.

Israel has ignored warnings by the United Nations that Gaza is about to become uninhabitable, acting as if Palestinians there can be caged, starved and abused indefinitely. Now crises are unfolding on all fronts – social, economic, political and humanitarian – and Israel is running out of time to find solutions

Israel’s Palestinian citizens brought the country’s busiest highway to a crawl as they drove in a slow convoy towards Jerusalem to protest police inaction over a tide of violence that has swept their communities. More than 70 lives have been claimed so far this year.

It would be a grave mistake to assume that the continuing political deadlock in Israel is evidence of a deep ideological divide. There is nothing divided about Israel. In this month’s general election, 90 per cent of Israeli Jews voted for parties that identify as being either on the militaristic, anti-Arab right or on the religious, anti-Arab far-right.

New film The Voice of Ahmad documents an extraordinary story from Israel’s early years – and erased from its official history – when the kibbutz movement adopted small numbers of Palestinian teens at the same time as stealing the village lands of their new recruits.

The strangest thing about the coverage of the deadlock between the Israeli right and the “center-left” is that none of the parties view it that way. According to their own assessments, only a tiny fraction of the new parliament consider themselves to be on the so-called center-left.

As the Joint List endorses former general Benny Gantz for prime minister over Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s Palestinian citizens have found themselves once again characterised as a threat to the country’s supposed ‘Jewish and democratic’ politics.

Netanyahu’s failure to secure a majority for his far-right coalition in the election was all the more glaring, given that he conducted by far the ugliest – and most reckless – campaign in Israeli history, including a bid to bypass his military chiefs to wage war on Gaza to postpone the vote.

Every Israeli prime minister understands that a military entanglement with Hezbollah, Lebanon’s armed Shia movement, is a dangerous wager, especially during an election campaign. So why is Benjamin Netanyahu risking a dangerous clash on Israel’s northern border?

The real fight in Israel’s imminent election re-run isn’t between the right wing and a so-called ‘centre-left’ but between two rival camps within the ultra-nationalist right. The outcome may prove a moment of truth for the shrinking secular right as it comes up once again against an ever-more powerful religious camp.