Stacking the Blame

...Integration is a logical solution, but it is not the usual pattern in the Middle East...

...It might have been assured during Shipler's five years on the scene, but no political system is oriented only toward the present...

...Israelis— not to mention friends of Israel—ought to and probably will be disturbed by Shipler's findings...

...Shipler was the New York Times correspondent in Israel from 1979 to 1984, so it is understandable that he has had more contact with Jewish than Arab society...

...Second, whatever happens between Arabs and Jews in what was once Mandatory Palestine will not eliminate the real grievances that exist between Israel and the Arab states...

...Bad relations among individual Palestinian Arabs and Jews are the effect, not the cause of the conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbors...

...Finally, the author neglects the importance of the Arab states...

...Without question, the clash of Arab and Jewish nationalism has been an ugly business for over 60 years, but Ship-ler's would-be evenhandedness, which actually makes the Jews look more cul-pablethan the Arabs, is surely a misrepresentation of history...

...Yet there is much that is unsavory on the Palestinian Arab's side, too, and Shipler pays it relatively scant attention...

...Some day, perhaps, Israel will succeed in bringing its Arab minority into all aspects of political and social life...

...Vehicles that convey these images —language, textbooks, literature—are carefully examined...

...Shipler might respond that A rab and Jew is about a struggle between competing nationalisms within the same territorial unit, and that internal adjustments aimed at enhanced mutual recognition are the best means of resolving such a struggle...

...Another failure of Shipler's has to do with his comprehension of regional customs and traditions...

...Shipler never makes the point of his exercise explicit, but its cumulative effect leaves us appreciating the range of stereotypic images through which members of the two communities see one another...

...No doubt the quality of Israel's society and its political system could be better, as many Israeli critics have pointed out...

...This is a novel and, at first blush, promising method...

...The author particularly stresses patterns of Jewish behavior arising from the invidious stereotypes he uncovers, such as the brutality and oppressiveness of Israeli forces in the occupied territories and discrimination against Israeli-Arabs...

...Shipler's lack of comparative perspective is further evident in his attempt to liken the unequal status of Arabs in Israel to the plight of American blacks...

...Especially disturbing is the light mention given the PLO, the organization that claims to represent them, and that is most responsible for the introduction of terrorism as a fact of everyday life in the modern world...

...In the Moslem countries minority communities have not fared well, especially when they have had political ambitions...

...Shipler might have seen this had he asked why Israeli Jews harbor anti-Arab sentiments, instead of simply compiling expressions of these sentiments...

...Since the Jews do hold power in Israel, however, and are thus in a position to lord it over the Arabs Shipler speaks to, considerable attention is given to the unsavory side of an admittedly difficult circumstance...

...that it has thus far not done so is less a reflection on Israel than on Middle Eastern mores...

...What about the PLO's systematic intimidation and murder of Arab opponents and moderates...

...To get at the human dimension, Shipler conducted extensive interviews with ordinary Arabs and Jews during his stint in Israel...

...Even in democratic countries it is rare that peace is achieved via demands directed upward from individuals to their governments—there is little reason to expect this from the nondemo-cratic Arab states...

...In these circumstances, is it any wonder that Israel is uncomfortable with the expression of Palestinian nationalism inside its modest borders...

...David K. Shipler opts instead for a microlevel approach: He focuses on the problems of Palestinian Arabs and Jews as individuals...

...The author of Arab and Jew (who rightly does not use the term "Israeli" here) is critical of both groups for perpetuating an intractable situation, but he seems to come down harder on the Jews...

...Even a partial accounting of such incidents would have provided a more meaningful context...

...Shipler's goals may be admirable, but his expectations are excessive...

...And how many more massacres have been prevented by the alert intervention of the Israeli Army or the Shin Bet...

...Shipler employs it with conviction and flair to illuminate a number of important truths about Arab-Jewish relations within the area controlled by Israel, truths that may be difficult to face and certainly do not augur well for a peaceful future (although he finds some hope in small projects designed to promote mutual understanding...

...But the country has demonstrated an extraordinary capacity for introspection and self-examination, what in Hebrew is called heshbon hane-fesh...

...If the states can make peace with each other, individuals will find a way to live together too, and the problems Shipler describes will be worked out...

...For a new nation to absorb a flood of immigrants, build an econor my, fight several wars, maintain an army ready to go into battle again at any time, and create democratic political institutions in the process, is no mean feat...

...Whereas Shipler dwells at length on the disturbing actions of a Jewish terrorist group discovered a few years ago called the Underground, he ignores PLO massacres at the Munich Olympic Games, Lod Airport, Maalot, the coastal road, and the Savoy Hotel...

...Consider the case of Lebanon, where intercommunity rivalries have, to put it mildly, gotten out of hand...

...It can even be argued that at the root of the Arab-Israeli conflict is Arab unwillingness to accept the expression of Jewish nationalism in a tiny corner of the region...

...The implied argument is that if more realistic views could prevail, the conflict would abate...

...But delimiting his view does not rescue his analysis, for two reasons...

...The most obvious disanalogy is that the Arabs, unlike the blacks, are part of a larger external threat to the state they are living in...

...Shipler's desire for Arab-Jewish amity in Israel and the occupied territories is a noble one...

...Prejudiced attitudes and discriminatory practices do not emerge spontaneously, overnight...

...First, Palestinian nationalism defines itself in terms of the objective of eliminating Israel as a sovereign Jewish state...

...Or has prejudice been eliminated from Britain, Canada and the United States...

...they are the product of years of threats and struggle...

...Few of his subjects are political figures or otherwise well-known (interlocutors like former Chief of Staff Rafael Eitan, philosopher and teacher Rabbi David Hartman, and director of the West Bank Data Project Meron Ben-venisti are exceptions...

...A minority community may be tolerated under certain circumstances, but it would be grossly implausible to characterize the Islamic world as a tolerant place...

...If the atmosphere of hostility could be removed, they would rapidly drop to levels commonplace in other countries with which we are familiar...

...There is certainly no indication that the attitudes he laments are a historical part of the Jewish outlook, or that they are inherently racist...

...Israeli military superiority cannot be taken for granted, whether one looks back to 1948 or forward to the next century...

...For the most part Shipler concentrates on people's everyday lives, rather than their perceptions of governmental relationships...

...On the other hand, improved personal relations are hardly likely to bring about a resolution of the Middle East conflict...

...accordingly, it can never reach a modus vivendi with Jewish nationalism...

...Indeed, the structure of Arab and Jew suggests a parallelism of prejudice and intolerance...

...The United States, established on a quite different basis, has only recently begun to integrate some of its minority groups...

...The Arab states have menaced Israel's existence from the very beginning, yet the reader of Shipler's book gets no real sense of how security threats have shaped Jewish feelings about the possibility of coexistence...

...Few other societies have done so well in so short a time under such trying conditions...

...Can anything comparable be found in the societies of its Arab opponents...

...It is only peripherally related to the goal of peace in the Middle East...

...Still, that is no cause for a national apologia from a young nation struggling to survive in a brutal century...

...His treatment in the final chapter of a four-day encounter between Arab and Jewish teenagers trying to overcome the gulf separating their societies is perhaps the most moving part of a book that grips the reader's interest throughout...

...In the Middle East— and that includes Israel—one is not simply a citizen of a country, but rather a member of a community that, in turn, affords one status in a state...

...On balance, the kind of society Israel has created, even with its warts, represents a remarkable achievement...

...Reviewed by Harold M. Waller Chairman, Department of Political Science, McGill University The conventional way of looking at the Arab-Israeli conflict—what one might call the macrolevel approach— has Israel, the Arab states and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as the main actors...

...regrettably, though, his limited exposure to the Arab world beyond Israel and the occupied territories causes him to miss much that is important...

...In fact, it becomes apparent that, after all, the weakness of A rab andJew is his taking an essentially ahistorical approach to a historical subject...