Stacey Maltin
צילום: Chris Macke
Racial tolerance?
Most Israelis I’ve met have been raised to either fear Arabs or think that they are less worthy in society, and vice versa with how Arabs are brought up to view Israelis and Jews in general
I hate to admit it to myself, even more so to put it down on paper, but since I have been living in Israel, I find racism to be a much easier pill to swallow. Now I realize that I grew up in a quasi-bubble regarding this subject, and I know I am just beginning to understand the deep racial bruises that can divide a large country like America and keep a small country like Israel in turmoil for so long.
I have to say that my high school in San Francisco painted a pretty rosy picture of racial, religious, ethnic, and sexual/gender tolerance. We had clubs that represented every minority and each week we had an assembly during which those kids presented what life was like from their perspective successfully bridging the gap between the minority and the majority. To take you a step further into my world, my algebra teacher was a black, Jewish, female, lesbian. I had friends with two moms or two dads, friends that were half Chinese half Jewish, and friends that were half black half Hispanic Catholics. I guess you can say that tolerance and humanism were high on the school’s agenda.
Then 9/11 happened. I’m not saying that I had never encountered racism in America pre the attack on the World Trade Center, but it had always been easy to brush off bigotry as something for those with less education, easy to negate hate to small minded folk with no world experience. All of sudden "Arab" and "Muslim" were dirty words that because of the violent acts of a group of extremists were now acceptable to hate in mainstream society.
Still, even though I had moved to New York, in the midst of the city that was the focus of the attack, I tried to remember that Muslim extremists aren’t the majority of the Muslim population. This wasn’t always easy, especially having been brought up in a staunchly pro-Israel household, which influenced my perspective on the Arab world before I ever set foot in the Middle East.
Fear and paranoia
When I went to work on President Obama’s campaign, I was shocked at how many people were terrified of him because they thought (wrongly) that he was a Muslim. When my friends and I were in Pennsylvania campaigning for him we had people yelling at us on the street that we were socialist Muslim lovers. It was shocking that this was then, and continues to be an acceptable insult.
Since I have been in Israel I have encountered so much fear and paranoia regarding Obama’s Middle Eastern Policy, and maybe rightly so. Most Israelis I’ve met have been raised to either fear Arabs or think that they are less worthy in society, and vice versa with how Arabs are brought up to view Israelis and Jews in general. Both groups make it easy to hate the other. Arab Israelis live much worse than Jewish Israelis and Jewish Israelis equate Arabs with terror attacks.
I understand the fear that Israelis have of their Muslim neighbors. When the people who speak for a country are extreme it is near impossible to remember that the majority of the people who live in that country are just people who want to live their lives unconsumed with hatred.
Obama is reaching out his hand to the Muslim world in an effort to show that we don’t have to hate each other. In a recent speech he said, "We open our hearts and our minds to those who may not think like we do or believe what we do - that's when we discover at least the possibility of common ground."
The possibility of discovering common ground within our own nations as well as between hostile nations is a viable option. Maybe we should push our fear aside and see if we can, in the words of John Lennon, "Give Peace a Chance." If it doesn’t work out I think that the military response will be swift and hard, but at least we can say to the world hey, we put it all out there.
