Yes, he's 83, but Hall has eluded justice for sexually abusing girls for so long – why should his time in jail be reduced?

It's a rare day when Harriet Harman and the Daily Mail agree. But in their reaction to the sentencing of Stuart Hall to 15 months in jail for multiple counts of child sexual abuse, they are united. Both believe the punishment – which will see Hall's time in prison automatically reduced to seven and a half months – is "unduly lenient." And they're both right.

If you read the judge's sentencing statement closely you can see how he arrived at such a modest penalty. A crucial element was the "discount" awarded for a guilty plea, which reduced the time Hall could have served by a quarter. There can be few complaints about the principle of such a policy: a guilty plea spares victims the pain of having to give testimony in court.

But two other decisions by the judge are much harder to defend. The first was his ruling that Hall should serve time for each of his 14 counts of indecent assault concurrently rather than consecutively. Had the former TV presenter had to serve each sentence back to back he would, by my reckoning, have been ordered to spend just short of 10 years behind bars. Even after the automatic reduction, that would still have been a hefty five years in prison.

To opt for concurrent rather than consecutive sentences was entirely the judge's decision. Indeed he admitted that, "Undoubtedly, applying general sentencing principles, consecutive sentences could properly be imposed". If he had followed those general principles, Hall's punishment would have looked much more fitting – and sent the message to other victims, and perpetrators, that the justice system takes the abuse of children seriously.

But it's the second factor that weighed on Judge Anthony Russell that puzzles me most. As the judge put it, addressing Hall in a poorly worded sentence, "Your age is an appropriate factor to take into account because for a man of your age a custodial sentence would be particularly difficult for you." Many people will accept this logic, regarding it as inhumane to be too harsh with a man of 83.

And yet it is a strange logic. The implication is that because Stuart Hall got away with it for so long, he should be punished less. If anything, Hall's years of impunity surely make the need for punishment greater. How galling for the victims, who have wrestled for decades with the psychological damage of his abuse, to know that in those same years, Hall was able to enjoy a life of peace, serenity and public admiration. Why should the fact that he eluded justice so long make his sentence lighter?

The judge got this one wrong. The attorney general is right to review it.

The president and the web giants are disgraced by this scandal. But we made it possible - by becoming informants on ourselves

Among the guests at the fabled Bilderberg meeting, held this weekend just outside London, are the top brass of Google, Amazon and Microsoft. How appropriate they should be there, alongside luminaries of the US political and military establishment. For this was the week that seemed to confirm all the old bug-eyed conspiracy theories about governments and corporations colluding to enslave the rest of us.

The Guardian revealed that the US National Security Agency has cracked open our online lives, that it can rifle through your emails, listen to your calls on Skype, watching "your ideas form as you type", as a US intelligence officer put it – apparently in cahoots with the corporate titans of the web.

This disgraces all involved, but it damages the head of the US government most. Barack Obama always had much in common with the Apple and Facebook crowd. Like them, he held out the promise of modernity – a slick, cool contrast to their creaky, throwback rivals. (Obama was rarely without BlackBerry and iPod; McCain and Romney came from the age of the manual typewriter.) But, like those early internet giants, he promised more than just an open-necked, hipper style. He would be better too. Google's informal motto is Don't be Evil. Obama's is Hope.

Perhaps people lost their innocence about Google and Facebook long ago, realising that, just because their founders were kids in jeans, they were no less red-toothed than any other capitalist behemoth. But now the president's reputation will suffer the same treatment. This Prism will dim the halo that once adorned him.

For he has authorised not merely the continuation of a programme of state surveillance that he once opposed, but has actively expanded it. That officers who serve him could brag in a 41-page presentation – one, incidentally, laced with David Brent-style grandiosity, starting with the naffness of the Prism logo – of their ability to collect data "directly from the servers" of the likes of Microsoft, Apple and Yahoo, will be a lasting stain on his record. In this, he is George W Obama. There is a mirthless chuckle to be had from a president repeatedly slammed as a "liberal" whose legacy will be marred by a series of gravely illiberal acts.

He promised but failed to close the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, where men have been held for more than a decade without charge (though Congress shares the blame for that). He has made routine the use of drones, assassinating enemies from the sky – repeatedly taking the innocent in the process, as he's admitted. Last month it emerged that Obama's justice department had spied on a Fox News reporter, James Rosen, tracking his movements, seizing his telephone records and taking two days' worth of his personal emails, in pursuit of a state department leak. That came after Obama had made "no apologies" for seizing two months of telephone records from Associated Press. Little wonder that the high citadel of US liberalism, the editorial column of the New York Times, this week declared that "The administration has now lost all credibility", later softening the blow by adding the words, "on this issue".

It is becoming ever harder for liberals to defend Obama. One forlorn effort I heard this week was that perhaps he did not know what the NSA was up to, even though we're told Prism is now the prime generator of material for the president's daily brief. When you're reduced to saying your hero is not evil, just useless, you know you're in trouble.

As for the web companies, their role remains unclear. Initially they insisted that the access-all-areas relationship described in Prism's PowerPoint presentation is false and there was no such collaboration. Yet one industry insider tells me that "it's very hard to think the companies did not know" the NSA was collecting their data, since such an intrusion "would show up pretty damn quick". That leaves a third possibility: that the Prism pitch was exaggerated, in order to make it a more attractive sell to its potential customers among the US – and UK – intelligence fraternity.

Whatever the truth, it's unlikely to have a lasting impact on the web giants' success. That's partly because of cynicism: plenty of us assumed these big companies abused our privacy anyway. But it's also because our relationship is one of dependence. When it emerged that Starbucks, Amazon and Google had all been paying negligible tax in the UK, it was obvious Starbucks would feel the consumer heat most, simply because it's easy to walk across the street to get a cup of coffee somewhere else. Amazon is harder to avoid and Google all but impossible. So reliant are we on these companies' services, we simply shrug and move on.

And here lies the heart of the matter, the shift in our lives that has made Prism possible. Back in the Le Carré days of cold war espionage, private information was hard to get. Spies relied on papers stuffed in manila files, or operatives hanging around on street corners, forced to gain each bit of knowledge by hand. Back then, people gave up their personal details sparingly and reluctantly.

Now we are liberal with our innermost secrets, spraying them into the public ether with a generosity our forebears could not have imagined. Where we once sent love letters in a sealed envelope, or stuck photographs of our children in a family album, now such private material is despatched to servers and clouds operated by people we don't know and will never meet. Perhaps we assume that our name, address and search preferences will be viewed by some unseen pair of corporate eyes, probably not human, and don't mind that much. We guess the worst that can happen is Google bothering us with an annoying ad or Spotify recommending Taylor Swift.

But if that knowledge goes elsewhere, if governments can get it when they ask for it, or even without asking for it, then that means something else entirely. It means that the intelligence agencies can now watch the entire population, albeit by privatised means, having in effect outsourced the job of spying to the web mega-companies.

That leaves us with a choice. Either we try to stuff this genie back in the bottle and return to the privacy habits of old. Unlikely. Or we demand companies stand firm when pressed by governments to disclose our data. Not easy. Or we demand lawmakers change the rules, restraining the executive branch's limitless appetite for information on us.

It's hard to be optimistic, for technology has made the pickings available too rich, too tempting, for the spies to resist. And, strangest of all, it is us who made this possible – by becoming informants on ourselves.

Just as Anders Breivik's views on Islam did not deserve a hearing, Woolwich doesn't strengthen the left's case on foreign policy

The killers got their bloody hands on the front page first, but they struggled to keep the public's attention. On Friday, the focus moved to Lee Rigby, the man they killed, and the family he left behind. It was his face that stared from page one, the sobbing of his wife heard on the radio news.

Even on the previous day, when the victim was still nameless, the killers were not the stars of the spectacle they had scripted and staged. How galling it would be for them to know that the person attracting the most intense interest was not the men with knives, but Ingrid Loyau-Kennett – who had voluntarily stepped off a bus to insert herself in a lethal situation that she could so easily have avoided, armed only with a Brownie leader's knowledge of first aid. She spoke calmly to the murderers, very possibly preventing further bloodshed – an act of such quiet heroism it astonishes as much as it inspires. It was her, not them, we wanted to know about. If she is not included in the next honours list, then Britain's gongs are more pointless than their most damning critics assume.

Even at the moment of highest drama, as one of the men addressed an amateur camera, his hands drenched red, he did not dominate the scene. Watch it again and your eye goes to two women, unhurriedly walking past him as he speaks of horror and violence, one of them wheeling a shopping trolley. In its own way, it was a peculiarly British moment, surreally recalling the old Morecambe and Wise sketch that had Eric stride across the back of a busy stage, wearing a coat and cloth cap and carrying a shopping bag, as if oblivious of the mayhem around him. That the two women were black, while Loyau-Kennett spoke with a French accent, only completed the tableau of modern, plural London: superficially unrecognisable from the London of 1940, but still a city that knows how to keep calm and carry on.

The behaviour of these women raises a challenging question for the rest of us: when killers strike in this way, should we listen to what they have to say? Or should we walk on, pretending we can't hear?

Judging by our responses to Woolwich and comparable acts of violence, the truth is we don't know. If you were kind, you would say we are confused. Less charitably, you'd say that we are guilty of double standards and hypocrisy. It seems we're ready to listen when we have some sneaking sympathy, not for the act itself, but for the cause it seeks to highlight. But when we find the killer's motive as repugnant as his action, we put our fingers in our ears.

A useful comparison is with the case of Anders Breivik, who in 2011 planted a bomb in Oslo that killed eight people and who went on to murder another 69, mostly teenagers, on the island of Utøya in Norway. He did not spread his message via bystanders' cameraphones, but through an 1,801-page manifesto that denounced what he saw as the evils of mass immigration and multiculturalism.

At the time there was no shortage of voices on the right rushing to denounce what Breivik had done, before suggesting he was voicing a widely felt sentiment, adding that perhaps a frank conversation about the excesses of diversity and the alienating effects of globalisation and migration was overdue. As I wrote at the time: "To listen to it, you'd think Breivik had simply wanted to start a debate, that he'd perhaps written a provocative pamphlet for Demos, rather than committed an act of murderous cruelty."

Some shook their heads ruefully, sadly noting that they had long warned such violence would be the result of the headlong rush to a multicultural, rainbow-hued future.

Liberal and left opinion knew what it thought of such talk. It was wrong to accord Breivik's warped beliefs such a respectful hearing. Airing his ideas this way was to reward his massacre, surely providing an incentive for others to repeat the slaughter. His actions should be treated as murder, plain and simple. To respond by debating his grievances was to cede him, and violence itself, too much power.

Yet when the killer's cause is the matter of western intervention in Muslim countries, it seems some left voices find their previous fastidiousness has deserted them. Cue a BBC interview with Ken Livingstone, who spoke so powerfully after the 7 July bombings in London. Now, he linked Woolwich to Iraq, Afghanistan and the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. Enter the Stop the War coalition, whose statement on Woolwich similarly made the connection with "western foreign policy in the Middle East and south Asia", ending with the declaration that events had proved their position "absolutely right".

Be in no doubt, Livingstone and the anti-war movement would be appalled if their arguments were played back to them in reverse. Imagine what they would say to the claim that Breivik's terror vindicated the old rivers-of-blood warnings, predicting that decades of multiculturalism would end in disaster, and now it was time to change course. Consider their reaction if the right had seized on the bombing of the Admiral Duncan pub in 1999, casting it as the inevitable result of a liberalisation of gay rights that was bound to radicalise a certain young male demographic and that therefore a policy shift was in order.

Of course they'd have rejected such logic utterly. But if it's wrong for the right to seek vindication in acts of brutal violence, then it's surely wrong for the left to do the same. Nor is it any good for the latter to say, "we're not justifying, we're simply explaining": the right said the same about Breivik. Nor can they claim theirs is no more than a cold, analytical judgment, merely forecasting rather than endorsing the logical consequences of a current course of action. Their opponents could and did say the same about multiculturalism after Breivik.

As it happens, I too once made the case that the war in Iraq would only fuel more terror on our own soil. But what happened in Norway has made me hesitant to use that argument any longer. For now we know that there are minds twisted enough to be provoked to kill by any policy they despise. If you believe western foreign policy is wrong, then argue that case. But don't rest your argument on the threat of blowback violence against us. For as we have learned at great cost, in today's world horror can come from any direction.

Twitter: @j_freedland

Insulting Nigel Farage won't work, but David Cameron shouldn't impersonate him either. The answer is far subtler

David Cameron gave a hint, never properly fleshed out, during an interview this week that one of his close relatives is a supporter of the UK Independence party. The remark was seized on by political chatterers, delighted by the prospect of a prime ministerial version of an earlier story involving Priti Patel, a Conservative MP whose father was a Ukip candidate in Hertfordshire – until he appeared to withdraw, presumably under some heavy filial pressure, before unwithdrawing 90 minutes later. Both stories struck a chord because they spoke to a larger truth about the Ukip phenomenon: that this is a family feud on the right, a split in the conservative clan that could prove lethal for their shared cause.

At the very least, Ukip's success when the votes were counted yesterday – bagging more than a quarter of ballots cast and winning more than 147 councillors, to go with a silver medal in the South Shields byelection, where they pushed the Tories into third place – has brought into the open what has been an internal Conservative argument since 2005.

Now, in plain view, are two theories for how the right can win in Britain. The first says the answer is to hug a hoodie, a huskie and the centre ground; to ape Tony Blair and modernise. But Ukip is presenting a frontal challenge to that Cameron project, insisting on a traditional conservative message on welfare, immigration, tax, defence and, though much less important than widely thought, Europe.

Viewed like this, Ukip's success stands as a rebuke to the Cameroons and also a statement of the obvious: if the Conservatives reinvented themselves as the party of international aid and gay marriage then a breakaway group offering a traditional Tory diet, heavy on the red meat, was bound to fill the gap.

For a while, plenty of Conservatives tried to convince themselves that such a group would appeal only to the right's wilder fringe, those identified by the late backbench maverick Eric Forth , who once declared: "There are millions of people in this country who are white, Anglo-Saxon and bigoted, and they need to be represented."

But when Ukip can claim the backing of one in four voters, that kind of dismissal is no longer available. The pressing question now for the Tories, and for British politics, is: can the Ukip surge last? Most believe the party will peak at next year's European elections, where the temptation to show two, Farage-shaped fingers to Brussels will be irresistible. What matters more is whether Ukip can stay strong all the way till 2015. If you're a Tory, that is the point at which the Faragiste army could do serious damage.

The precedent was voiced explicitly by the Ukip leader when he spelled out the three letters burned into the hearts of Labour veterans of the 1980s and which should now chill the blood of Conservatives: SDP. The Social Democratic party surged 30-plus years ago. Like Ukip – which uniquely polled above 20% in both South Shields and February's byelection in Eastleigh, a feat not matched by any of the three main parties – they proved able to win in the Labour north and Tory south. The SDP did not form a government, but they did shape one. Indeed they shaped at least two, by splitting the anti-Conservative vote and keeping the Tories in office. Cameron's fear is that by splitting the anti-Labour vote, Ukip could do to him in 2015 what the SDP did to Foot and Kinnock in 1983 and 1987.

How should he respond to this threat? His first reaction was on display yesterday: no more insults. There'll be no talk of fruitcakes, closet racists or clowns now – for fear it will be understood as an attack not on Farage but on the quarter of the nation that backs him. The party will be shown courtesy, lest its supporters be alienated any further.

On the substance, there's a noisy faction, out in force today, that believes imitation is the best form of defence. Their remedy to the Ukip threat is to be like Ukip, to chuck out all that compassionate conservatism nonsense and replace it with harder positions on social security, immigration and Europe.By way of example, the council votes were barely counted when John Redwood demanded the in/out EU referendum be brought forward, to a date before 2015.

The trouble is, such moves are unlikely to work. For one thing, they simply strengthen Ukip, by showing that Farage's party is setting the agenda. For another, any concession will never be enough: tack right and Ukip will demand you go further. Besides, if people want Ukip policy, why would they vote for the inauthentic copy when they could have the real thing? No, the more respectful approach to Ukip is to recognise that it is about more than just a few policy positions. It is articulating a broader rage against what Farage referred to yesterday as the "establishment", the political class that goes beyond the Tory party and which includes those who have run the country for the last two decades or more, those who have presided over the drift to Brussels and mass immigration, yes, but also about declining living standards, the MPs' expenses scandal and runaway bankers' pay.

This kind of fury is not confined to these shores, but present in Europe and beyond, whether articulated by Beppe Grillo in Italy or Syriza in Greece. Indeed, it's an irony that it should fall to the least internationalist of parties – Ukip – to be the British face of a truly international phenomenon.

It is not only the Tories who have to respond to this attack on politics-as-usual. All parties will have to strive to present themselves as outside the metroplitan elite, with its incestuous, dynastic politics and cronyism. Labour believes it held up its vote in South Shields partly because it had an authentically local candidate, rather than an apparachik, air-dropped from London. "The days of the parachute are very nearly over," says one senior figure.

But change will have to go deeper. Ukip's appeal won't be blunted by a policy change here or there, because it is voicing something less concrete – a nostalgic desire to halt the changes of recent years, to turn the clock back to an imagined gentler past. Such a message appeals, says pollster and former Tory strategist Rick Nye, only if people feel they have "an insufficient stake in the present and future".

Give them that stake – by improving, say, living standards, growth and public services – and the lure of Farage's golden age romanticism will wane. In this way,Ukip's rise is not the cause of Tory woes, but merely their symptom. Throwing them a bone on Europe or migrants won't fool them or their supporters. They want something much bigger than that – and they won't go away till they get it.

Twitter: @j_freedland

As Ukip makes big gains in local elections across England, our panel discuss what this means for wider politics

Simon Jenkins: A protest vote has acquired backbone

There is no doubt of the victor. The UK Independence party is the new kid on the electoral block and looking good. The key statistic in the local elections is overall poll share. At the time of writing that is one quarter, and it is well distributed, double their performance in the opinion polls.

Ukip showed strongly from South Shields in the north to Hampshire in the south. It hurt everyone, shaving Labour, humiliating the Liberal Democrats as never before and leaving the Tories with heavy loss of blood.

The trouble for the Tories is that a customary mid-term protest vote has acquired backbone from three hardcore issues: immigration, Europe and gay marriage. It is hard to see how David Cameron can produce policies that will calm his worried party in the time available. If he were to try on immigration or Europe he could hardly hold his coalition together – though he might argue that no one wants an early election less then Nick Clegg's Liberal Democrats.

Splinter parties on the extremes rarely threaten entrenched parties in the long term. Core votes may defect for a while, but have no other place to go when the reason for defection diminishes. But politics is about the short term. Ukip is in a similar position to the Social Democratic party in 1981. It devastated Michael Foot's Labour and helped keep it from office through three subsequent elections. It recovered only when completely recast – in the SDP's image – by Tony Blair. That is the prospect now facing the Conservatives.

Jonathan Freedland: Ukip has cross-country appeal

Even before the day had begun, when votes had been counted for just seven of the 35 councils up for election, Ukip could claim to have won a great prize: the right to regard themselves as a challenge to every party, everywhere.

Consider this fact. Only one party managed to clear the 20% threshold in both the South Shields byelection last night and the parliamentary contest in Eastleigh in February. That was not Labour, which safely won in the former last night, after it had trailed in fourth in the latter. It certainly was not the Tories, who came third in both places. And it emphatically was not the Liberal Democrats who managed to retain Eastleigh, but won a miserable 352 votes – half those of the BNP – to come seventh in South Shields.

Only Ukip performed strongly in both these seats, one in the heart of traditionally Tory southern England, the other in a northern Labour stronghold – claiming nearly 28% in the first and 24% in the second.

To have such wide geographic appeal, taking on both government and opposition, is a feat rarely achieved by a third party, let alone a fourth.

It's early in the day; we still await four-fifths of the council election results. And, yes, protest parties that do well in midterm or local elections usually fade come the general election that chooses a government. But this represents a huge step forward by Ukip, a protest party that, of course, threatens the Tories above all – but which now represents a challenge that will be felt in every corner of Westminster.

Polly Toynbee: Next year will be as good as it gets for the Faragistes

Didn't Ukip do well? But the party had better relish the day and revel to the max. I'm going to take a risk and predict that this and probably next year's Euro elections will be its peak, as good as it gets. There is no better time for a protest vote, nor have their been better reasons to protest in most people's living memory. Living standards have dipped low and long, with not much hope in prospect. Immigration has always been the age-old issue that rises up when the low paid feel the pinch: blame the foreigners is the easy weapon to hand, when distant forces too great to grasp grind people down. Besides, there is some truth that the lowest paid have paid the price of immigration.

But come the general election things will turn less favourable for the Faragistes. The unforgiving logic of our first-past-the-post electoral system crushes incomers: I know, I've been there with the SDP, which at one stage hit 50% in the polls. Who governs the country matters more than who governs the county, sending people back to vote for their least worst likely winner. Besides, once Ukip is under real scrutiny – and attack from the Tory press – slashing tax while increasing defence spending by 40% is just one of its impossible policies that will puncture the lilo. What's more, rightwing mavericks have form for falling apart once they arrive in council chambers.

Nonetheless, warning lights should flash. The Tories will turn reckless right, losing the last shreds of pretending to be nice. Labour will agonise: go right, say the Blairites, hug the middle way. Others will say the only way is bold: cautious establishment mush, double-speak and ambiguity only makes people despair of politics. They didn't like Thatcher or her policies, but her clarity and determination won the day. We need not watch Ukip too closely, but watch what Ukip does to the only two contenders for 2015.

John Harris: Ukip can now weave itself into the social fabric

"An astounding performance of a historic scale," says the psephologist John Curtice of the great Ukip surge, and he's not wrong. Sixteen councillors in Lincolnshire, 10 in Hampshire, nine in Essex – and so the list will go on as results are announced through the day, and Tory headaches grow ever-more painful. Metropolitan political commentary pays too little attention to local government, and the upshot of these results is simple enough: Nigel Farage's party now has the basis of an English national infrastructure, and a means by which its activists can be introduced to the grind of public office. Some, perhaps, will find it a shock. But for the next four years at least, Ukip can weave itself into the social fabric of scores of neighbourhoods.

Nice to see the Greens winning two seats in Essex, but the message sent out to the left by Ukip's rise is sobering beyond words: after years of wondering what a crack in mainstream politics might look like, there comes a huge fissure – and the people responsible hail from the populist right. And what does it speak of? Anger and bafflement – "protest", if you prefer – about immigration and so-called "welfare", for sure. But also a profound cultural estrangement from Westminster, and an anodyne political class whose inadequacies were always going to spark public anger, not least in the midst of an economic crisis seemingly without end.

Such is the message for Labour from South Shields, though there obviously are even sharper signals from these results for the Conservative party. I was in Essex with Ukip on Wednesday, and among voters of a certain age, there was bafflement about the Tories' modern public face, and a nostalgic yearning for the days of Thatcher, Norman Tebbit, and such past local MPs as Teddy Taylor and Teresa Gorman. The merits or demerits of what the government is up to are secondary: the people I spoke to see Cameron and Osborne as representatives of the same alien tribe as Tony Blair, and long for politicians who instinctively understand the nitty-gritty of their lives, and cannot quite understand why the Tories' once rock-solid bond with the south-eastern working class has been so neglected. Similar questions, I would imagine, will be eating away at more clued-up Tories throughout the weekend, and beyond.

Israel's ultra-orthodox parties – so long deemed part of the hawkish right – might just unlock the two-state solution

Everybody knows that religious fundamentalists are part of the Middle East's problem. Everybody knows that Muslim and Jewish extremists make a hard situation harder, delaying the day Palestinians and Israelis find a way to live in peace. Everybody knows that the great Israeli writer Amos Oz is right when he says that so long as the conflict is "a battle over real estate" it can be solved, but once it becomes a holy war only catastrophe beckons.

But what if that conventional wisdom is wrong – or rather, what if it lumps together all religious hardliners too crudely, mistakenly including one group that might not be part of the problem at all, that might in fact be the key to the solution?

The question arises because of one unexpected side-effect of Israel's most recent elections and the new coalition that followed. For the first time in years the ultra-orthodox Jewish parties find themselves in opposition, sitting alongside Labour, the civil rights activists of Meretz and the 11 members of the mainly Arab parties, representing Israel's Palestinian citizens. So long inside successive ruling coalitions, the ultra-orthodox, or haredi, parties are, for now at least, outsiders. That simple fact suggests an intriguing possibility.

First, though, a word or two of definition. There are two parties involved: one, United Torah Judaism, that aims to speak for Ashkenazi religious Jews and whose leaders still wear the distinctive garb of eastern European orthodoxy; and the other, Shas, that seeks to represent those Jews with a Middle Eastern or north African background. Different though they are from each other, the relevant gap is between them and the so-called "national religious camp", whose political arm, Naftali Bennett's Jewish Home party, surged at the last elections straight into government. Bennett is the champion of, among others, the religiously motivated Jewish settlers on the West Bank, those whose faith is inseparable from a muscular brand of nationalism.

For years, these two camps – ultra-orthodox and national religious – co-existed happily, their leaders often sitting side by side in coalition. The distinction between them became ever harder to discern, the haredi parties acquiescing without complaint in the steady rightward drift of the last government.

But that long-established alliance is now over. While the national religious camp enjoys the best seats around the cabinet table, its former partners are outside, experiencing the unfamiliar chill of opposition. What's more, the two groups are now at each other's throats.

For the glue that binds together Binyamin Netanyahu's new coalition is a willingness to confront the ultra-orthodox, insisting that they have been feather-bedded for too long, taking too much from the state and giving too little in return. That's the signature message of Yair Lapid, the TV talkshow host who emerged as the election's big winner and coalition kingmaker. The price of his support was Netanyahu backing Lapid's campaign promise "to share the burden" – code for demanding that the haredim, like everyone else, send their children to join the army or do some form of national service at 18, ending an exemption enjoyed by religious students since the founding of the state. No less threatening to the haredi way of life, Lapid is bent on slashing the fat state subsidies that have long funded ultra-orthodox schools and academies, as well as the haredim's traditionally large families. Now in place as finance minister, Lapid is already wielding his knife.

These twin assaults are devastating for the haredim, whose fury is directed at Lapid but even more hotly at Bennett – who they see as a traitor to his fellow religious Jews for participating in a coalition that imperils their way of life. Suddenly the ideological fissure that always existed between the haredi brand of orthodoxy and the nationalist variety has been pulled wide open, left gaping for all to see. And it's not pretty. Stung by the rejection of their former allies, the haredim have hit the national religious camp where it hurts – threatening to back a settlement freeze, even to boycott settlement produce.

This is the opening that all those who yearn for an end to occupation should be watching closely. It may not look like it, but this is more than a family feud among those who wear different varieties of skullcap. The hard arithmetic of Israeli politics is that the strictly religious parties regularly command close to 20 of the Knesset's 120 seats. That makes them a crucial, even decisive bloc in the formation of a coalition. If the votes of the centre-left and right blocs are deadlocked, as they often are, then it can fall to the haredim to decide who governs – those forces ready to do what needs to be done to implement a two-state solution, or those who refuse.

It's not foolish to think that the haredim could one day choose left over right. Theologically, it makes sense. Ultra-orthodox Jews were historically ambivalent, if not outright hostile, towards Zionism itself, many regarding it as a blasphemous pre-emption of God's will for Jews to organise their own return to Zion when "the ingathering of the exiles" was the sole mandate of the Almighty. Given that attitude to Israel proper, they have no great attachment to the settlement project. Plenty of rabbinic sages have indeed ruled that, if a genuine peace were on offer, Israelis would have a religious duty to give up territory – because even the holiest land is not holier than the sanctity of life. Besides, strict Judaism includes the injunction lo lehitgarot ba-umota, a prohibition against "taunting the non-Jewish nations", pursuing a course that antagonises the world – which the post-1967 occupation so clearly does.

The pragmatic truth is that if a dove-ish Israeli government, even one committed to ending the occupation, were to give the haredim what they want – military exemption and serious funding – the ultra-religious parties would be likely to give it their blessing. That may be hard for the Israeli left to swallow. "Liberal Israel has to make its choice," says Daniel Levy, who runs the Middle East programme for the European Council on Foreign Relations. "What's more important: having the haredim serve in the army or a two-state solution?"

But this is not a matter for the left in Israel alone. There's a role here for the rest of the world. When Bill Clinton was overseeing the ultimately successful peace process for Northern Ireland, he went through a spell of seeing everyone, even the tiniest loyalist splinter group would get a face-to-face meeting in the Oval Office. He knew that every vote would count. Barack Obama and John Kerry – and William Hague for that matter – should take note. Don't just meet the leaders of today's Israeli government, meet the men and women who could form the next one – including the religious fundamentalists who might just hold the key to peace.

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The last 24 hours have felt like an extended episode of Homeland. Amid all the uncertainty, what are we to make of it?

Nobody knows anything. William Goldman's timeless verdict on Hollywood also applies, it seems, to the handful of spectacular real-life events that resemble – including the manhunt for the suspected Boston bombers, which played out on the 24-hour news networks on Friday like an extended episode of Homeland or 24.

There was a time when the scrambling uncertainty over information, grasping hold of an apparent fact only to see it slip through your fingers, was a process kept safely out of public view, behind the closed doors of police stations and newsrooms. Now a watching world shares in the confusion. Everyone with access to a TV, computer or mobile phone could observe – and indeed add to – the mountain of quasi-information as it piled up: a rumoured raid or sighting here, an apparent revelation about the men's origins or ideological leanings there. As I write, the picture is still hazy. But there are five early observations which seem likely to stand.

1. The boundary between foreign and domestic terrorism has been blurred. The question that nagged in the anxious interlude between the blasts on Monday and the publication of the suspects' photos, even if many were wary of putting it too baldly, was a variant on one of these: Who were these men who could do such a thing? Were they from America or abroad? Were they of us or outside us?

The US, and especially its media, learned a hard lesson after the Oklahoma City bombing – which struck exactly 18 years ago to the day on Friday – when so many rushed to assume that only foreign, presumed to be Muslim, terrorists would inflict such pain on US civilians. The shock at discovering that the bomber was in fact a white supremacist and veteran of the first Gulf war, Timothy McVeigh, went very deep.

After that, Americans understood that there could be homegrown terror – of the McVeigh variety, fuelled by paranoid loathing of the federal government – and the more conventional, international variety, of which 9/11 will forever be the prime example.

But if the Tsarnaev brothers were behind the Boston marathon attack, then the line dividing those two categories is unnervingly fuzzy. For they were not born in the US like McVeigh, but nor were they outsiders like the 19 hijackers of 9/11. They were, instead, newcomers to the US, said to have arrived as children. If Monday's bomb was theirs, does that make the three Bostonians it killed victims of foreign or domestic terror?

The truth is, in today's intensely globalised world, we can no longer think of anywhere as remote. Because far away is right here.

2. These events dent a key American ideal. When four British-born men bombed the London underground (and a bus) on 7 July 2005, it prompted much soul-searching in this country. How could those who had been born and raised here feel so little kinship with their fellow Britons that they would set out to murder scores of them at random? Some, me included, suggested that perhaps we needed to devote more energy into nurturing the ties that bind our diverse nation together – that while multiculturalism had rightly urged Britain's different communities to cherish their heritage and indeed their difference, we needed to put equal energy into forging the connections between us all. The US seemed a good model to learn from, the place that had invented hyphenated identity – Irish-American, Italian-American and the like – but which placed equal emphasis on both sides of that hyphen.

The melting pot and the American dream are both cliches, but the notion that an immigrant of talent and energy can become fully American, integrating successfully and even rising to the very top, is central to the way the country sees itself. In 2005, I spoke to one Muslim-American leader who saw no reason why his community should ever feel alienated from the rest of their society.

The Tsarnaev brothers challenge that core part of America's defining story. They looked to be making the classic immigrant journey, the younger brother by all accounts a popular, accomplished young man – once a star on his high school wrestling team, recently enrolled as a medical student. His social media profile had him listing his priorities in quintessentially American terms: "career and money".

And yet, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, a winner in the boxing ring, the traditional escape route for so many immigrants, once said, "I don't have a single American friend; I don't understand them." This will shake Americans, to discover that their country had somehow failed to work its usual seductive magic, transforming one-time outsiders into loyal citizens.

3. This could have a direct political impact, impeding Barack Obama's planned immigration reform. Every rational argument will say that millions of immigrants cannot be judged by the evil deeds of two. Yet politics is not always rational. Obama will need to work hard to resist the argument that the Tsarnaev brothers – if their responsibility for Monday's bombings is confirmed – prove that America needs to dispense the gift of citizenship less freely. Republicans who, chastened by defeat in the 2012 presidential election, were warming to a more open policy may be tempted to close the doors once more.

4. This is the first such attack in the age of Twitter and it has given rise to a new phenomenon: profiling by crowdsourcing. As soon as the names of the two suspects were released, the crowds were unleashed, seeking, if not wisdom, then at least information. Instantly, Twitter buzzed with details of what was purported to be the older suspect's YouTube account – including a playlist dedicated to "terrorism" – and even one brother's Amazon wishlist.

Perhaps this kind of collective, communal policing is a return to the days of the sheriff and his posse, but it's uncomfortable, especially for the police. At one point they had to urge the media to turn their cameras away and plead with the public not to tweet details of operations they had witnessed or picked up on the police scanner, audible online, lest they alert the wanted man. This is a new situation.

5. The established media are struggling too. On Wednesday, CNN repeatedly reported an arrest when there had been none, while Thursday's New York Post splashed the photos of two innocent men on its front page, implying they were suspects. The media still want to be first, but first can often be wrong.

As for the larger questions of motive and policy response, it's far too soon for any of that. We still know so little, except this: too many innocent people are dead and will never be coming back.

Twitter @j_freedland