“What was once whispered about behind closed doors, people are no longer ashamed to say out in the open.”
--Raghad Jaraisy, director of Arab minority rights at the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, said incidents of racism against Arab citizens of Israel have changed in Israeli society - now even politicians aren’t ashamed to make racist statements against Arabs.

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Quote of the Day #2:
"Dozens of families in Israel still do not know that their children will be buried during the summer...In the course of the upcoming war in the south our sons and daughters will die for nothing, but from the point of view of the right-wing government, Hamas is a gift that does not stop giving. On one side is desperation, on the other side is folly."
--Maariv senior political commentator, Ben Caspit, writes about the war he fears Israel will have against Gaza.

"We must resolves this, but not with means of endless warfare and power."
--Ahuva Ilani, a Jewish Israeli residing in the vicinity of the Gaza Strip, was among many in the area who called for a political solution to the rockets from Gaza.*

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You Must Be Kidding: 
“Where is Ali? Ali’s dead. Ali’s on the grill.”
--In front of police officers outside the courthouse where the Jewish murder suspects were on trial, far-right-wing Jewish activists taunted the uncle and grandfather of Palestinian toddler Ali Saad Dawabsheh, whom Jewish terrorists murdered along with his mother and father in the 2015 West Bank arson attack.**

“From the start I had no confidence that the judicial system in Israel would do us justice. Now they’re trying everything possible to clear the accused, and if that happens this entire case comes to nothing.”
--Hussein Dawabsheh, grandfather of Ali Dawabsheh, the only survivor of the Jewish terror attack on Ali's home in 2015. Yesterday the court ruled that some of the key confessions from the murderers were inadmissible.*

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You Must Be Kidding: 
“I only know that I live beyond the Green Line."
--Student A., a settler, is the only person in a university class taught by Haaretz journalist Zvi Bar'el, who could explain the meaning of the term “Green Line,” Israel’s pre-1967 border. But A. didn't know that the Green Line is a border, writes Bar'el, nor do most of the hundreds of Israeli students to whom he has taught about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.**

"Apparently, the special measures used against the suspects were not more extreme than those used against Arab suspects in terrorism who were convicted following their confessions - which were allowed by the court."
--Maariv's Avishai Greenzweig gives an in-depth look at the dramatic question the court faces today about the admissibility of confessions made by two Jewish terrorists in the arson murders of the Dawabsheh family.**

"I feel so sorry for the policemen. If only they had been attacked by Arabs rather than by Jewish settlers, everything could have been so different. If it were Arabs, the orders would have allowed the use of counter-violence and even live fire, the policemen would have been required to use counter-violence and attack the rioters, and the government would have stood by them and awarded citations to those fighting terror."
--Yariv Oppenheimer writes in Yedioth about Israeli hypocrisy.*

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You Must Be Kidding: 
"They told me I couldn't enter, that I could only enter after 6 P.M. because I am Bedouin."
--Bedouin citizens of Israel revealed that public pool in the south has separate swim times for Bedouin, while the rest of the time the pool is officially open only to members, although Jewish citizens who don’t have membership do enter with payment at the entrance.**

"How is the use of money to advance an ideology different from avoiding the use of money to oppose an ideology? Why is the funding of advocacy in order to advance an annexation initiative in area of Judea and Samaria legal, but making things economically difficult for settlements is not legal?"
--Yedioth commentator, Yaron London, explains Israeli hypocrisy in the legislative bill that calls for punishing people who boycott Israel or Israeli settlements.*

“My hope is I get to see my Jewish brothers and sisters roam freely from Jerusalem to Ramallah, to Babylon and to the Nile, and for my fellow Arabs and Muslims to walk through Israel without fear of having an Israel stamp in their passports.”
--Sarah Idan, aka “Miss Iraq,” said during her visit this week to Israel where she met up with her friend, "Miss Israel," from the 2017 Miss Universe contest. Idan’s family was forced to flee Iraq after she posted a selfie of the two women in 2017.

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You Must Be Kidding: 
And while this week Miss Iraq visited Israel and the new political leader of Iraq called for Iraqi Jews to return to Iraq, dozens of Israelis in the Israeli city of Afula demonstrated yesterday again against the sale of a home to an Arab-Israeli family. And while the police last month detained 21 peaceful Arab-Israeli protesters in Haifa and injured seven of them, it "settled" for restraining the Jewish-Israeli protesters in Afula to the curbs and detained none.

“Today I write to you and my heart is on the verge of tears. I read the High Court's decision regarding our Bedouin neighbors. It is clear that the four petitions submitted by the (Kfar Adumim settlement) Association contributed to a decision that would enable the forcible evacuation of our Bedouin neighbors. From here, I cannot understand why the community leadership chose to act to expel our neighbors. What instinct has led us to want the destruction of their homes? What morality has motivated us to want to expel people for the second time, after their families were already expelled from the State of Israel in the 1950s? What imperviousness, and perhaps arrogance, led us to refuse to join the proposal of members of the community to reach a jointly agreed solution? What logic made us open a terrible account with those who live next to us? The Bedouin houses are illegal. Maintaining the law is essential to the welfare of society. But this was not the principle that was of top concern to the leadership of the community. If this were the case, it would have prevented unauthorized construction inside (our own) community, before it acted against illegal construction by the Bedouin. It eyes were set on other considerations, not keeping the law and not good neighborliness. I hope that there were no considerations regarding the fact that our neighbors are not Jews, because these are unacceptable to me as a Jew.”
—Part of a letter written this week by former Jewish Agency chairman, Sallai Meridor, slamming his fellow settlers at Kfar Adumim settlement where he lives, for their actions to get rid of their Bedouin neighbors, the village of Khan al-Ahmar.*