A Cultural Basis for Arab-Israeli Accommodation (1970)

Written in the late 1960s and published in 1970, before I conducted the fieldwork on which most of the chapters in this volume are based, this reflective essay offers an overview and interpretation of the Arab-Israeli conflict. It was written soon after the June 1967 war, at a time when the future of the Arab territories occupied by Israel was uncertain and changes in the leadership and ideology of the Palestine Liberation Organization were only beginning to take shape. Accordingly, this chapter is set in an important historical moment, a moment of transition in the aftermath of the June 1967 war that structured the regional environment within which Jews in Tunisia and Morocco and Arabs in Israel resided. Attention is paid to the rise of Arab nationalism and Arab aspirations, to the Zionist project and Zionist aspirations, and to the ways that Arabs and Israelis view one another. Somewhat idealistically, perhaps, but hopefully not naively, the chapter also considers whether parallel political aspirations and comparable internal debates about ideology might provide a basis for Arab-Israeli cooperation. In any event, beyond whatever might be the prospects for greater mutual understanding at the level of the broader Middle East, attention to the symmetries in Arab and Israeli aspirations will contribute to a deeper understanding of the normative and political environment in which Jews in Tunisia, Jews in Morocco, and Arabs in Israel found themselves during the early and mid-1970s.