"The trouble with the Palestinian teacher is twofold. She has trained many other teachers in how to use her teaching method, thereby spreading the culture of nonviolence under the noses of the Israeli rulers. But the real failure in this story is that Israel didn’t detect her activity in time, didn’t realize she was competing for the Global Teacher Prize and didn’t monitor the judging process."
--Haaretz analyst Zvi Barel writes a biting satire about Israeli attitudes to a Palestinian woman winning the Global Teacher of the Year Award for teaching children how to deal with the violence of the Israeli occupation through non-violent methods.

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You Must Be Kidding: 
One of the main sources of water in Israel, the desalination plant in Ashkelon, has recently stopped working. The reason: Israel does not supply electricity to the sewage purification plant in Gaza – and sewage from the Gaza Strip disabled it.

"The institute known as Ariel University is not located in the borders of the state of Israel, and so it is not a part of the sociological society's activities, which associates only with Israeli sociologists and institutes."
--Prof. Uri Ram of Ben-Gurion University, the new president of the Israeli Sociological Society, ruled to 'refresh' a decision from 2010 not to work over the Green Line. 

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You Must Be Kidding: 
“If I go in, I’ll say I’m pro-Israel and I’ve told that to everybody and anybody that would listen. But I would like to at least have the other side think I’m somewhat neutral as to them, so that we can maybe get a deal done.”
--Republican candidate for US President, Donald Trump, says publicly he will pretend to be neutral in negotiating an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. 

"The IDF is led only by its commanders; rabbis should not try to take their place.”
--Yesh Atid MK Ofer Shelah blasts the Chief Sephardi Rabbi's declaration that it's a 'mitzvah' to kill a terrorist.

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You Must Be Kidding: 
"Judea and Samaria are not occupied territories."
--Said Likud MK Nava Boker, who is leading the struggle for the Jordan Valley farmers against European labeling of their products as 'Made in Occupied Territories.' 

“This horrific episode was not an ‘incident."
--Israeli Ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, writes in letter to UN Secretary General after a UN report on 'The State of Palestinian Women' described the November 2014 terror attack in Jerusalem’s Har Nof synagogue as an “incident" in which five Israelis and two Palestinians were killed.  

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You Must Be Kidding #2: 
“Eight-year-old children shouldn’t know the difference between a stun grenade and a gas grenade.”
--One of the unhappy parents told Haaretz+ after Border Policemen gave Israeli second-graders a presentation at school that included explanations of crowd-dispersal tactics and displays of various types of weaponry.

"While everyone is talking about politics, we’re trying to create real change on the ground. This Jewish-Arab partnership between Nazareth and Tel Aviv simply works.”
 -Eitan Sela, co-founder of Hybrid, a project which aims to advance Israeli Arabs in the startup world with the help of alumni of Unit 8200, the elite IDF Military Intel hi-tech unit.

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You Must Be Kidding: 
“They told me always to start with a quote because it makes a cultured impression, so here’s one. As a well-known Chinese philosopher once said: ‘Cut the bullshit.’” 
--Controversial Israeli Culture Minister Miri Regev opens her address to the Haaretz Culture Conference. She was booed.

115,000,000.
--The amount of dollars donated in the last eight years to the far right-wing Elad organization, which champions Jewish settlement in East Jerusalem - much of it coming from shadowy companies based in global tax shelters.