A Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court judge on Wednesday accepted an insanity defense and ordered a Jewish settler from the occupied West Bank committed to psychiatric hospitalization for up to six years for an April assault on a Catholic nun walking in her habit through the Old City. Under Section 34 of Israel’s Penal Law, a finding that the defendant was unable to understand the wrongfulness of his conduct at the time of the act extinguishes criminal responsibility. The district psychiatrist’s finding of psychosis triggered that result. The man is in treatment. The verdict resolves one case.
The case was never the problem. The problem is what produced it.
Clergy and advocates who walk the same lanes describe verbal abuse and spitting at religious minorities — Christians in habits, Muslims in identifiable dress, Jews in the wrong place at the wrong moment — as routine now. Christians, Jews, and Muslims who share those crowded passages and their holiest shrines have been navigating harassment as the daily baseline through nearly three years of war. The April assault on the nun was not the origin. It was the escalation. Spitting did not become assault because one man broke. It became assault because the harassment that preceded it had been allowed to operate without consequence.
The administrative failure at issue does not live in the abstract. It lives in three named offices.
The first is the Israeli Police Jerusalem District, which has statutory authority under the Police Ordinance to maintain order in the Old City and which is the only institution with the immediate power to intervene when a nun in a habit is being spat upon. The documented pattern of unaddressed low-level harassment — the routine the clergy describe — is the operational signature of an enforcement posture that declines to treat sectarian abuse as a policing priority until it crosses into an arrestable assault. By then, as the April case demonstrates, the escalation has already happened.
The second is the Jerusalem Municipality’s Old City administration, which controls the infrastructure, signage, and conditions of daily passage through the lanes where harassment concentrates. A municipality that declines to install the visible protective infrastructure that lets a Catholic nun walk to the Holy Sepulchre without becoming a target has made a choice about what the historic basin is for. That choice has consequences.
The third is the Civil Administration of Judea and Samaria, which administers the area where the defendant lived and which bears responsibility for monitoring the population whose presence in proximity to Old City tensions has been a documented flashpoint. The defendant’s residency in a West Bank settlement is not the crime. The absence of any meaningful monitoring of settler populations whose conduct in and around the Old City is the predicate of these prosecutions is.
The statutory framework that should reach this conduct exists. It is being underused.
Section 144A of the Israeli Penal Law elevates assault motivated by hostility toward a public or an individual on grounds of religion to a serious offense with an enhanced sentence. Section 2 of the Prohibition of Incitement Law criminalizes incitement to religious hatred. The conduct the clergy describe — the daily abuse, the spitting, the threats — is the conduct these statutes target. The prosecutorial question is not whether the law is on the books. It is whether the Jerusalem District Attorney’s Office has been filing cases under it.
The answer to that question is a number. The number should be public.
The response that has worked at street level is the one the coverage treats as a footnote. Christians frightened for their safety have begun walking the Old City with Jewish protectors at their side, ordinary people deciding that a woman in a habit is their neighbor before she is a target. That kindness is real and should be honored. It is also not a substitute for the enforcement posture the Israeli Police and the Jerusalem District Attorney have declined to adopt. Kind neighbors can protect one nun on one block. They cannot reverse a harassment regime that has been allowed to spread through the Old City for nearly three years.
The trial court applied the law it had. The defendant is in treatment. That part of the system did what it was built to do. What the system has not done is treat the harassment that produced the April assault as a problem to be charged, prosecuted, and stopped before it escalates into a verdict like Wednesday’s. The Israeli Police Jerusalem District, the Jerusalem Municipality’s Old City administration, and the Jerusalem District Attorney’s Office can answer for that. They should be asked. The question that follows them out of this verdict is the one the verdict cannot reach: how many times, in three years of war, has a nun in a habit been spat upon in the Old City without an arrest, a charge, or a prosecution under the statutes already on the books?