Negative stereotypes can be numbing. One that has dulled our senses for years is that Jews and Arabs can’t get along. Many of us simply take it for granted. Read haaretz.com regularly, and you might even conclude that Israel’s Arab population is living miserably under an apartheid-like regime.
Israeli police have arrested nine Jewish teens suspected in a series of attacks on Arabs. The seven minors, including a 14-year-old girl, and two young men have been arrested over the last two weeks, police announced Tuesday after a gag order on the case was lifted. The Jewish teens reportedly had the girl seduce the Arabs and lead them to various meeting places, including Independence Park, where they would attack them with stones, glass bottles and pepper spray. Several of the Arabs required hospitalization. The suspects confessed to police that their acts were nationalistically motivated, according to reports. They are under house arrest; more arrests are expected.
Some 53 percent of Israel\’s Jewish population believes that the state can encourage Arabs to leave the country, a new poll found. The Israel Democracy Institute\’s 2010 poll released Tuesday also found that 86 percent of the Jewish public, constituting 76 percent of the total public, believes that critical decisions for the state should be made by the Jewish majority. In addition, 43 percent of the general Israeli public believes that it is equally important for Israel to be a Jewish and democratic country, while 31 percent believe the Jewish component is more important and 20 percent say the democratic element is more important.
Some charges criticizing Israel are distortions and slanted, based on faulty information and half-truths, animus, and even classic anti-Semitism.
However, the situation and history are complex, and unfortunately, Israel is not perfect.
Divorce, dissolution, divestment: These are words that spell the end of a relationship and of what might have been — through time and patience — a meaningful and inspiring marriage.
Students at the Hand in Hand Max Rayne Bilingual School in Jerusalem didn\’t know they were meeting a celebrity. They weren\’t born when the films \”Officer and a Gentleman\” and \”Terms of Endearment\” garnered Debra Winger her Oscar nominations.
know there are many Palestinians out there who are sickened and ashamed by what happened in Gaza to the remains of the six dead Israeli soldiers.
I don\’t hold them responsible; I don\’t associate them with those acts just because they are Palestinians or Arabs, not in any way.
In fact, I think it\’s important now to remember Arabs like the Palestinian man who drowned in the Sea of Galilee a couple of years ago trying to save a drowning Israeli boy. I remember a Jaffa Arab who was killed in 1992, I think, trying to stop a wild man from Gaza who was slashing at Jewish children with a saber.
Arab spokesmen regularly complain about what they call \”the Israeli occupation\” of the Judea-Samaria-Gaza territories. But the truth is that there is no such \”Israeli occupation.\” To begin with, nearly all Palestinian Arabs currently live under Yasser Arafat\’s rule, not Israel\’s. Following the signing of the Oslo accords, the Israelis withdrew from nearly half of the territories, including the cities where 98.5 percent of Palestinian Arabs reside. The notion that the Palestinian Arabs are living under Israeli occupation is false. The areas from which Israel has not withdrawn are virtually uninhabited, except for the two percent where Israelis reside.
Secretary of State Colin Powell spent a week in the Middle East and managed to extract from Israeli and Arab leaders concessions that were promising and far-reaching — for 1991.
The only thing Jerusalem\’s Jewish and Arab shopping malls had in common when news broke last Friday of the Wye II deal was that no one was dancing in the streets. There was relief that something at last was about to move on the Israeli-Palestinian front, but it takes more than Madeleine Albright playing what she fetchingly called an American \”handmaiden\” to disperse the suspicions of half a century.
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