In the spring of 2018, the Palestinian politician Haneen Zoabi spoke in a committee hearing of the Knesset, Israel’s parliamentary body, and intimated, not for the first time, that IDF soldiers were murderers. “Haven’t you heard of Palestinian youths who’ve been murdered?” she said. “Who murders the Palestinians in the occupied territories?”

Over the course of a decade as an elected official, Zoabi, forty-nine, has regularly faced death threats. On and off, she’s had to be assigned a government bodyguard. A few years ago, ex-Knesset member Danny Danon, now Israel’s representative to the UN, referred charges of “incitement to violence and terrorism” against her to the Israeli High Court. “I ask the court to help open the eyes of law enforcement,” he wrote in his official petition, “and send Zoabi to the place she really belongs: prison.” Her “murderer” comments got her a suspension of one week. A pittance compared to her record six-month stint.

A few months after that bit of controversy, on a late morning in late summer, I take a rental car and head to Nazareth, with my father Yoav, to meet Zoabi. Passing through Nazareth Illit, a planned Jewish town, we drive past construction cranes puttering near rising three- and four-floor apartment buildings. The attempt to “Judaize” the land adjacent to the historical Arab city began in the late fifties, my father points out. Clearly it is still ongoing.