Police have requested that the left-wing Israelis and Arabs from the Samaria village of Inbus submit to lie-detector tests after an olive-tree expert brought in by the police concluded they may have manufactured the entire “olive tree saga” as a provocation.

With these sorts of conflicting reports and bidirectional accusations of “constructive lying,” how can you ever be sure who’s telling the truth over there? It’s this sort of scenario, in particular, which complicates the entire peace process. It reduces everything to ethnocentric flag-waving and “us vs. them” rhetoric, rendering true dialogue impossible.

I just think it’s f’d up that in 1933, the Nazis dismissed reports of attacks on German Jews as “attrocity propaganda,” and that the Israeli government today is quick to do the same.