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Stereotypes and Prejudice in Conflict: Representations of Arabs in Israeli Jewish Society

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As a disinterested party, a graduate student writing a paper on a museum topic, I found some of this book quite useful. It is pretty clear that the first two reviewers are incredibly biased (one is from Jerusalem). While I don't agree with everything in the book, and agree that Arabs have tremendous stereotypes for Israelis as well, they seem to dismiss this text from an emotional vantage. The theories on in-group out-group psychology presented therein are solid, as well as psychological understanding of stereotyping.

Steven Plaut from the University of Haifa said: If you think stereotypes dictate and determine all human achievement and conflict; if you believe psychobabble offers the most promising way out of the Middle East conflict-then this tedious book is for you.

The authors, both professors of psychology at Tel Aviv University who have long worked on studying stereotypes, cite the enormous literature on stereotyping in general and in textbooks and the media in particular in a list of references nearly fifty pages long. Their thesis goes something like this: whatever the past causes of the Middle East conflict, today the violence and conflict are being perpetuated by the fact that stereotypes of the "other" are common, inculcated by the schools and the media.

What evidence do the authors provide? Mainly studies of drawings of Arabs made by very young Jewish children, plus some tendentious parsing of the Israeli media. This points to the real problem of Stereotypes and Prejudice in Conflict: it has a thinly-disguised political agenda and bias shows up everywhere.

Bar-Tal and Teichman offer no evidence that stereotypes affect economic achievement and success. While citing negative stereotypes about Chinese held by Americans, they omit reference to the phenomenal educational and economic success by Chinese Americans, who out-earn whites. They offer no evidence that those "reverse stereotypes" found in politically-corrected textbooks about women lumberjacks, Jewish hockey players, and Cherokee nuclear scientists have had any impact on social mobility.

The authors consider stereotypes as racist and as evidence of intolerance, never mind if they are true. That nearly all Palestinians endorse suicide bombers should not be regarded as legitimate empirical grounds for Israelis drawing conclusions about Palestinians. That almost all Israeli Arabs vote for anti-Zionist political parties with Marxist orientations should not serve as empirical evidence. The authors use "prejudice" and "stereotypes" interchangeably, but what happens when an ethnic group actually exhibits certain traits?

Far from looking at both sides, the only stereotypes that matter to these professors, citing Edward Said, are those held by Jews concerning Arabs. Discussions in the Palestinian media of Jews drinking blood for Passover, poisoning Palestinian food, spreading AIDS, etc., do not interest the authors. Not a single cartoon drawn by a Palestinian child of a Jew is included in the book. It is only Jewish stereotyping of Arabs that is an obstacle to peace, not Palestinian text books and radio stations calling for genocide of Jews. And the fact that preschoolers might hold stereotypical images about everything in their toddler world, from teachers to tricycles, has not occurred to the authors, who never examine any preschooler drawings about anything besides Arabs.

And while the learned duo parse Israeli media (which is under the near-hegemony of Israel's far-Left, by the way) and schoolbooks, they just never got around to examining which other stereotypes are inculcated there, such as those about Orthodox Jews, Jewish settlers, kibbutzniks, homosexuals, environmentalists, etc.

Most of the "findings" in the book are old hat. Other previous studies making essentially the same arguments about Israeli schoolbooks include Adir Cohen's An Ugly Face in the Mirror, articles and books by Hebrew University's Eli Podeh,[Elie Podeh, How Israeli Textbooks Portray the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1948-2000 (New York: Bergin & Garvey, 2001)] the Center for Monitoring the Impact of Peace,["Analysis of Israeli Textbooks," Center for Monitoring the Impact of Peace, accessed June 24, 2005] and quite a few earlier articles by Bar-Tal or Teichman themselves.

The authors' bias is not surprising. While Teichman seems to be uninvolved politically, Bar-Tal is smack in the center of Israel's far Left. He joined the anti-Zionist fringe by signing his name to a political petition calling for international armed intervention to impose a settlement on Israel.["Israeli Citizens for International Intervention, List of Endorsements," Oznik.com, Apr. 27, 2001] He has justified Palestinian terrorism,[Daniel Bar-Tal, "Is There a Way Out? Occupation, Terror and Understanding," Counterpunch, Apr. 22, 2002] and his work is cited as "evidence" that Israelis are racists, including by the U.N.'s anti-Zionist report on racism and xenophobia.["Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and All Forms of Discrimination," Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, U.N. Commission on Human Rights, E/CN.4/2002/NGO/152, Feb. 18, 2002] Another indication of this study's bias: the PLO's official website sings its praises for proving how racist Israelis are.["Israeli Textbooks and Children's Literature Promote Racism and Hatred toward Palestinians and Arabs," Palestinian National Authority website, accessed July 11, 2005].

The thesis here is that every Israeli is racist and stereotypes Arabs, that these negative stereotypes create the conflict. However there is a major setback in this research. First of all it doesnt ask the question if any of the stereotyping is based on experience. It assumes all stereotyping is illogical. But what is a stereotype and why is it 'bad'? A stereotype is a beleif of a virtue about a certain group of people based on name or visual association. Let us recall that in Israel of 2153 Israeli civilian deaths by terror since the year 2000, 100% have been caused by arabs using terrorism. Does this make the stereotype of arabs as terrorists logical. According to the authors no. According to the authors one must never stereotype and the fact that a child who has seen his mother stabbed by a terrorist dares to draw a picture showing that terrorists as an arab makes the child racist. The theory of this book is that every Israeli is racist, a stereotype unto itself ironically.

The second setback of this book is that it, of course, ignores the arab stereotypes of Israel. Their are 5 million Israelis and 250 million Arabs. Every Arab also has stereotypes that lend themselves to continuing the conflict. However we dont see the arabs brought in for criticism here. This book is basically a racist text, it argues that based on someone being a Jew they are racist agianst arabs, that every Jew is born hating and that every Jew in Israel is indoctrinated to hate.

The authors never bothered to ask ther question: were not the suicide bombers also stereotyping the Israelis they kill? Does the terrorism create stereotyping? Does the terrorism also lead to continuation of the conflict. The authors are self haters who want to convince the world that Israel, their country, is evil. A sad commentary, a lesson unto itself of stereotyping.

Seth J. Frantzman

repertoire feeds the continuation of the conflict