You Must Be Kidding: 
The IDF General Staff planned to deploy armed soldiers to accompany police as they patrolled ultra-Orthodox cities, where people have been bucking the health guidelines and endangering lives. But it decided against it because of the "potential for problems," for example, when a soldier shoots into the air to disperse civilians, reported Haaretz+. Yet, that potential never stopped the IDF from employing the method in the Palestinian Territories.**


“Why take the child support away from children because their mother – like the rest of the country – was put on unpaid leave?”
—Etti Manshur, 42, a single mom of three asks. She was dismissed from her job due to the corona virus effects. Under current Israeli law, single mothers who get child support payments from the National Insurance Institute suffer a double financial blow when they lose their jobs: they also get a reduction in their child support.*

You Must Be Kidding: 
“For lack of choice."
--Reasoning for Israel National Security Council decision to provide asylum seekers from Sudan and Eritrea with the same treatment for the coronavirus as Israelis, even though they aren't citizens and don't have health insurance.**

"The State of Israel manages the corona crisis without an elected government, without a Police Commissioner, without a Director General of the Ministry of Justice, without a Prison Service commissioner, without a State Prosecutor, without an elected Prime Minister, without a Knesset Speaker, without a state budget, without a National Emergency Authority, without masks, without protective equipment, without (enough) respirators, without rule of law, without [corona test] swabs, without a national information system."
--Maariv's top political commentator, Ben Caspit, sums up the situation in Israel.*

Breaking News:
POLITICAL DRAMA: Kahol-Lavan leader Benny Gantz shocks and offers himself to be Knesset Speaker with right-wing support in order to form a unity government with Binyamin Netanyahu and prevent law from being passed that would prevent anyone with an indictment from forming a government - i.e. Netanyahu. Kahol-Lavan faction unravels as partners break-off. (See Elections 2020 / Netanyahu Indictment News below.**)

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Without coordinating his arrival with the Palestinian Authority, Israeli Police dumped a very sick Palestinian laborer, who was working illegally in Israel, at a West Bank checkpoint.*

You Must Be Kidding: 
"Because of the coronavirus," Israel's Education Ministry reduced the number of topics that will be on the high school civics matriculation exam this summer: all those related to aspects of the Jewish character of Israel will remain, but questions about the High Court of Justice, the historical roots of the conflict between Jews and Arabs and inequality in contemporary Israel won't and it will include very little about the rule of law.**

"The main problem with this sudden epidemic is that there is no one to hate, no one to take revenge on, and no obvious enemy to destroy."
--Israeli poet, Yehonatan Geffen, in an Op-Ed in Yedioth.*

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You Must Be Kidding: 
Some Israeli backpackers returning from Peru to Israel rioted at the airport when told they must sign a Health Ministry form committing to self-quarantine.**

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“The attempt to prevent the elected Knesset from overseeing what an unelected prime minister does is a coup attempt. And as long as the Knesset is not functioning, we live in a dictatorship.”
—Yuval Noah Harari in a chilling Op-Ed in today's Yedioth Ahronoth.*

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You Must Be Kidding #1: 
Netanyahu and three Likud ministers wanted to shut down the Knesset for corona-related reasons, but don't down synagogues even though a third of the corona infected cases were tracked back to synagogues. In the Jewish Diaspora synagogues were closed.**

You Must Be Kidding #2: 
Israeli police went into a Palestinian neighborhood in E. Jerusalem to apprehend a young man suspected of performing sanitation work on behalf of the Palestinian Authority in E. Jerusalem, which police do not allow. And residents said that arrests are conducted without protective gear and police officers do not abide by the social-distancing orders.***

"The corona will disappear in the end. But democracy never goes back to zero: what is going wrong these days, under the auspices of corona, will not be easily corrected. Corona must therefore be dealt with, as if there weren’t a terrorist attack against democracy in front of our eyes, and we must fight for democracy as if there were no corona."
--Yedioth's top political commentator, Nahum Barnea writes in an Op-Ed today, after the government employed numerous anti-democratic  means to fight the corona virus.**

"Dear world, how is the lockdown? --Gaza."
--One of the many sardonic political social media posts made by Gazans this week.*

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"Nothing brings people together in solidarity like a natural disaster, even when that disaster requires more social distancing than gathering together. Let the new plague be our shared enemy."
--Middle East experts, Seraj Assi and Zachary Foster, write in a beautiful essay about how Jews and Arabs united to fight a locust plague in Palestine in 1915.*

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