Donna Rosenthal

 Arabs & Jews Love, Hate Relationship

People all around the world get the notion that Jews and Arabs in Israel hate each other and will act upon one another violently, however, this is not the case. The fact is that they don’t all despise each other and most Jews and Arabs have learned to live together peacefully. Donna Rosenthal in her book The Israelis, states in a quote “In Haifa, more than almost anywhere else in Israel, Jews and Arabs have a long history of mutual give and take”(Rosenthal, 252). Rosenthal’s book contains several stories from citizens’ first hand experiences in Israel. It can be observed that the minority understand, respect, and appreciate Jewish culture and customs.  Other cultures are known to assimilate into Jewish practices to a certain extent in order to achieve a peaceful living amongst each other. “dress no differently from their secular Jewish friends. In fact, they know more about the Jewish religion and customs than some secular Jews” (Rosenthal, 261). Throughout chapter 12 you get a positive picture of what life is like for Arabs and Jews who live together and is somewhat hopeful of complete peace and unity.

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In order to fully understand the relationship between Jews and Arabs and get the whole picture whether they utterly hope to see the other depart from Israel, I recommend a glimpse of this article. The Poll:Jews/Arabs much less divided than Israeli politics lets on, article, by Diana Sheindlin shows us the contrary to the perspective we may have of them. Jews and Arabs for the most part believe there are benefits in cooperation with each other. The research in this poll under the supervision of Dr. Sheindlin shows that of 414 Arab Israelis and 411 of Jewish Israelis that the majority from both sides got along positively.  Out of the 414 Arab Israelis 75% got along positively, 18% got along negatively, and 6% didn’t have interaction with Jews. Out of 411 Jewish Israelis 53% got along positively, 33% got along negatively, and 13% didn’t have interaction.  Another important thing to note in this article was that “The Israeli right in Israel is also fond of insisting that relations between Jews and Arabs are good, and become tense only when left-wing activists and Arab leaders instigate political protests among Arab citizens”. The overall tone of this study seems to be more positive and focuses on the fact that Israeli Jews despite what the media may show is in favor of cooperating with Arab Israelis and doesn’t wish to expel them from the land. I consider the data to be very credible because the author includes many statistics, charts, questions, and percentages pertaining to both groups.

According to  PEW Research Center “Israel’sReligiously Divided Society”and “The +972” article, they both claim that not all Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs hate each other and or wish to expel one another from Israel. Two key factors are provided about people feeling negatively towards a possible two state solution. One of them being politics which seems to be the biggest instigator among the groups. And the second are those who reflect their views on the peace processes and its failure. Not only does politics divide Jews, Arabs, Druze, and Christians it even divides the Jews among themselves. As recently as 2013, roughly three-quarters of Israeli Arabs (74%) said a peaceful two-state solution was possible. As of early 2015, 50% say such an outcome is possible. Israeli Jews and Arabs are both highly skeptical about the sincerity of the Israeli government in seeking a peace agreement as well as the Palestinian government. These surveys are very reliable because not only do they use the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics’ definition of the Israeli population, which includes Jews living in the West Bank as well as Arab residents of East Jerusalem, They also conducted through face-to-face interviews in Hebrew, Arabic and Russian among 5,601 Israeli adults (ages 18 and older) from October 2014 through May 2015.this article did a very good job on staying neutral on both sides and staying to their statistics. I felt no biases in this article.

Perhaps the image of the two groups not getting along is what the news media and government want us to believe in order to keep Israel from peacefully coexisting with the Arabs. Contrary to what may be shown on TV I think the most important information we can pick up within these three sources of evidence is that the results show that the more interaction between the two groups the more positive and the less interaction between the groups the more negative. This shows that perhaps the majority of the reason as to why these two groups don’t like each other is because there isn’t enough interaction among them as a whole.