Five comments on the unity talks between Herzog and Netanyahu, and why the prime minister will have the last laugh.

Zionist Union chairman Isaac Herzog is taking action to have his party join the coalition in the coming days, despite his lack of success in achieving significant changes in the coalition guidelines and without the ouster of the rightist Habayit Hayehudi party – both of which he had previously demanded.

“It turns out that one of Benjamin Netanyahu’s most notoriously divisive statements in recent years reflects, almost identically, an anti-Semitic election slogan exposed and decried by none other than the founding father of right-wing Zionism, Jabotinsky,” writes Gilad Halpern.

“For the first time in years, Jerusalem’s Holy Esplanade, known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as Haram al-Sharif, was relatively calm during the Passover holiday,” writes Ofer Zalzberg. “The reasons why are as complex as they are significant.”

Anxiety is rising among residents of the Amari refugee camp, where a collection of drab grey concrete and stucco dwellings line the narrow alleys near the central West Bank city of Al Bireh. The United Nations’ agency for Palestinian refugees has decided to halt its food distribution programme in all 18 camps across the occupied West Bank and replace it with a cash card system. But this message does not appear to have reached Amari where rumours abound about the perceived ill intentions on the part of the UN.

Officials have indicated for months they are considering bureaucratic measures to punish the BDS movement co-founder. The de facto travel ban is part of a possible revocation of his residency status; Barghouti has lived in Israel for 22 years.