Word: arab
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Shipler is also on very shaky ground in asserting parallels between Arab and Jewish terrorism. Violence is fostered by most Palestinian leaders--at least those who wish to stay alive--and is accepted by nearly all segments of Palestinian society. Violence by Jews is committed by fringe elements and is deplored by nearly all Israeli leaders...
...same misguided attempt at evenhandedness underlies Shipler's chapters on the images Arab and Jew have of each other. He tries to prove his point with examples of stereotyping in Arab and Jewish schoolbooks. While Israeli textbooks are guilty of condescension toward Arab culture, Jordanian textbooks used in West Bank schools--and Arab newspapers in general--exhibit virulent militarism and anti-semitism and never mention peaceful reconciliation as a goal. Instead, Arab elementary school children read poems such as "A bullet in the chest of the criminal aggressor/Is more delicate than the whisper of the poem and more merciful...
...pages of text demonstrating that Shipler understands the difficulties Israel faces in trying simultaneously to maintain its security in a hostile environment and to preserve its liberal ideals and aspirations. In describing the lack of awareness of the Holocaust--the basis for the existence of the Jewish state--among Arabs, Shipler captures the underlying tension of Israeli society. But this paragraph, the most important and perhaps the best written in the book, is as isolated in Arab and Jew as Israel is in the Middle East...
SHIPLER holds the Jews to a much higher standard than the Arabs, and rightly so. Still, if his admittedly vague "solution" to the Arab-Jewish problem appears especially pat and simplistic--they will only find peace, he writes, "by looking into each other's eyes"--it is because over the past 40 years, the Israelis have stood much taller than their Arab foes...
There are many problems Israel must grapple with, the sooner the better--how to assimilate Jewish immigrants from Arab lands, how to keep its economy under control and how to deal with the West Bank while maintaining the Jewish identity of the country. There is much that is rotten in Israel...