Word: shipler
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Arab and Jew is the result of his search. In examining the human dimension of the Arab-Jewish conflict, Shipler pays only passing attention to its diplomatic, military and political aspects. Instead, he focuses on Arab and Jewish images of one another and how the two peoples interact where they live together under Israeli authority...
...book, though, is greatly flawed. Shipler argues that there is an underlying parallelism to Arab and Jewish perceptions and treatment of each other. Stories of ills inflicted upon Arabs by Jews mingle with tales of the woes inflicted by Arabs upon Jews. Chapters on Jewish stereotypes of Arabs follow discussions of Arab stereotyping of Jews. But the analogies he draws and moral conclusions they lead him to make are, at best, forced...
...SHIPLER'S THESIS is that "both people are victims." True. But what he doesn't seem to understand is that the cycles of violence and animosity which have made victims of Palestinians and Israelis have their source in the betrayal of the Palestinian people by other Arabs and their own leaders...
...Arab-Jewish problem is geographic--who will live where, under whose sovereignty--and the only solution to it is political. Real, apolitical hatreds may not run as deep as Shipler suggests. On the Israeli side, at least, animosity toward Arabs is not generic. A poll Shipler cites in another context showed that while Syrian Arabs were perceived as being violent by 57.6 percent of Israelis, only 20.7 per cent viewed Egyptian Arabs as violent after Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel. That's roughly the same percentage of Israelis who viewed Israelis as violent...
...Shipler constructs a matrix of allegedly analogous abuses of Arabs and Jews by each other. The book begins with four chapters on the forces Shipler says drive the Arab-Israeli conflict: war, nationalism, terrorism and religous absolutism. Now one of the strong points of the book is its unscholarly nature. It's the work of a talented and sensitive reporter, not of an academic. Still, the lack of rigor in his argument is astounding. What's especially disturbing is Shipler's imbalanced cast of characters. He introduces the reader, with few exceptions, to radical Israelis and "moderate" Palestinians...