Last year I gave the Israeli artist Amir Nave an old Hebrew copy of Immanuel Kant’s Perpetual Peace, which I teach every so often in my Introduction to Political Theory class. He took the book, flipped through it, ripped out the title page, turned it upside down, signed it and returned it to me.

My friend’s wife was accepted to a PhD program at McGill University in Montreal. They decided to move to Canada with their two children at about the same time that I was offered a fellowship at Princeton and decided to move with my family to New Jersey for a year. Hoping to rent out our apartments while we’re away, we both posted ads on the most popular website in Israel. I received about five calls a day and found a tenant within a couple of weeks. My friend received only three calls in four weeks, and none of the people who called came to look at his flat.

Not long after Israel celebrated its 64th Independence Day (April 26), a friend prepared a quiz of sorts, and read out loud political quotes to about ten guests who were having dinner at my house. She asked us to identify the politician who had uttered each statement.

If truth be told, none of my guests did very well on the quiz, but I thought that readers acquainted with Zionist history might do better and be able to identify the source of each of the following statements. There is only one rule to this game: all search engines, including Google, are off limits.

Recent raids on Gaza were not just about allocating more money to defence - they were also about war with Iran.