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The video opens with bearded men traveling in a pickup truck, flying the black IS flag with its distinctive white calligraphy. The driver of the truck pulls up beside another car and honks for the other driver’s attention. The IS guy in the passenger seat leans out the window and asks him, in Hebrew with a comically exaggerated Arabic accent, “Hey bro, how do you get to Jerusalem?” The driver of the car shouts back (in Israeli Hebrew), “Take a left!” Then there’s the slogan, in red Hebrew letters emblazoned on a gray, bullet-marked background: “THE LEFT WILL SURRENDER TO TERROR.” One of the IS guys fires celebratory bullets skyward and the driver peels off, ostensibly in the direction of Jerusalem, as they all shout exultantly in Arabic, “Shukran, ya ward!” (“Thanks, bro!”). The camera pans briefly to the rear of the truck to focus on a popular Israeli bumper sticker that reads, “Anyone but Bibi.” The tagline: “It’s us, or them. Only the Likud. Only Netanyahu.” The snatch of Arabic rap lyrics is excerpted from a song by an Amman-based Palestinian group called Torabyeh: “I want to be buried in the same cemetery that my grandfather was buried in. And since my childhood I’ve been dreaming to be a soldier and as time passed I discovered who I want to belong to: Mahmoud Abbas, Fatah, Hamas or…Jabha …”

Netanyahu has for years been promoting his message about the threat to Israeli security posed by Islamic extremism, never missing an opportunity to list Hamas along with the Islamic State, Al Qaeda, Boko Haram and even Fatah, mixing them all up so that the average Israeli Jew reflexively associates Arabs and Islam with terror. Like all accomplished populists, he understands the power of repeating a mendacious slogan, and he is an expert at exploiting popular fears and racism.

The popular Israeli narrative is so reactionary and confused these days, that if one were to walk the streets asking average citizens if there was a difference between Fatah and Al Qaeda, most people would be hard-pressed to answer coherently. Go ahead and try to explain to an Israeli audience that Hamas is a small offshoot of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, that it is basically a technocratic political party, that it is extremely unpopular in Gaza and that it has nothing to do with expansionist jihadism. Try telling people that if Israel would lift the siege on Gaza, disgruntled Palestinians in Gaza would probably kick Hamas out of power immediately. Just try. The best you can hope for is that you’d be told that you’re a traitor who should go live in Gaza.

Any democracy worthy of the label requires (among other things) a relatively efficient and impartial judiciary. Yet today, more than five years after the regime of President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali was toppled, attempts to reform the judiciary (which encompasses some 16,000 employees) are proceeding slowly at best.

“If you go to a working-class cafe, you might run into someone you passed judgment on,” he tells me. “You have an image to maintain in society. You have to give a positive example.” (In Tunisia, it would seem, the upper classes don’t often find themselves in court.)

The old autocrats — Ben Ali and his predecessor Habib Bourguiba — habitually regarded the courts as an extension of their own executive power, and used them to crack down on their political opponents and bolster their allies. Judges who resisted would get reassigned to backwater postings.

A Moroccan court on Monday sentenced rapper Mohamed Mounir, known as Gnawi, to one year in jail for insulting police on social media.

The song, Aach al Chaab - which translates to "long live the people" - has been viewed more than 15 million times on YouTube since it was released last month.

rages against the authorities and criticises the country's widening economic gap, a message aimed at the disillusioned younger generation