A senior member of the Israeli government complained last week that despite repeated bombings of targets in the Gaza Strip, from which several rockets were fired at Israel, there had been no reports of wounded or dead Palestinians. “What is this special weapon we have that we fire and see pillars of smoke and fire, but nobody gets hurt? It is time for there to be injuries and deaths as well,” Agriculture Minister Uri Ariel demanded in a radio interview on Jan. 10. On the same day, while eulogizing Rabbi Raziel Shevach, who was murdered in a drive-by shooting near the unsanctioned West Bank outpost of Havat Gilad, Ariel appealed to a higher power to get the job done. “We want divine retribution,” he cried.

The minister, whose far-right Tkuma (Hebrew for "resurrection") party joined HaBayit HaYehudi in the ruling coalition, vowed not to back down. “We swear to build the Land of Israel, and there is no one to stop the redemption of the people of Israel. … You cannot stop this melody. It is a divine melody and we are its messengers,” added Ariel, himself from the West Bank settlement of Beit El.

When an elected official in a state that presumes to be the only democracy in the region views himself as the messenger of a higher power, he obviously has no use for the Knesset and its laws nor for the government and its decisions. An Israeli soldier who stops Jewish settlers from uprooting the olive trees of Palestinians is preventing the redemption of holy land, and when an Israeli police officer detains a West Bank settler for spitting in the face of a Palestinian woman, he is clearly disrupting the “divine melody.”

If a minister in the Palestinian Authority had complained about the negligible number of Israelis killed and wounded in terror attacks, an almighty storm would have ensued. Imagine the headlines reporting the Palestinian ministerial declaration, “We are the messengers of God. No one can stop the redemption of Palestine in its entirety.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would have demanded that President Mahmoud Abbas immediately fire the “wayward” minister and condemn his remarks. Pundits would have pointed with concern to Abbas’ inability to stem the spread of Islamist ideology to the Palestinian leadership’s top echelons.