Yakov M. Rabkin writes:

During a sabbatical I spent in West Jerusalem in the late 1980s, my 7-year-old daughter was enrolled in an Israeli school. One day, she came home and could not find her tricycle anywhere. “Arabs must have stolen it,” she said. We later found the tricycle behind the building, but her immediate assumption gave me pause. Just a few months in, an Israeli school had already planted seeds of anti-Arab prejudice in her young mind. In response, I took her and her younger brother to Egypt for a week. Since then, I have never heard them express anything like that again.

I had originally considered taking my children to East Jerusalem instead of Egypt — it would have been much closer — but the First Intifada was raging at the time, with daily clashes between Palestinian demonstrators and Israeli occupation forces, and it was too dangerous to take children there.

Around that time, a friend of mine was called up for reserve duty. He told me about his experience chasing after children who threw stones at his armored vehicle. Tired of the senseless routine, he once brought a bag of candies with him. When the children began throwing stones again, he tossed the candies their way. They immediately stopped what they were doing and scrambled to collect these treats. The stones stopped flying — but my friend’s commander reprimanded him: “Don’t you know that Arabs understand only force?”

Some eight years later, during my next sabbatical in Jerusalem, I was deeply touched by a moment on the campus of Al-Quds University in the West Bank. After giving my lecture, my hosts stepped away briefly to check if the canteen was open. Here I was, standing alone in the middle of a campus, when a Palestinian student approached me and said in Hebrew, “Shalom! I’ve never seen a Jew with a kippah on his head who wasn’t also carrying a rifle.” His comment moved me. I had never associated my kippah with anything violent — if anything, quite the opposite. Yet the student was clearly referring to the settlers in his midst, who now rampage across the West Bank, terrorizing Palestinians and killing hundreds of them.

These three episodes shed light on the anti-Palestinian prejudice embedded in Israeli society and its troubling reliance on violence. As I write this review, the prejudice that I witnessed in the 1980s and ’90s has hardened into hatred and dehumanization, while the violence has turned into what experts and nongovernmental organizations generally agree is a genocide. Though I have been writing about Israel and Palestine for decades, I find myself observing a drastically worsening situation. This is what prompted me to read three new books published in the wake of the Israeli invasion of Gaza, triggered by the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, 2023— though the destruction of Gaza in fact began in 2006, following the Israeli army’s withdrawal, and escalated dramatically after October 2023. [Continue reading…]