Knowing how to speak and what to say, but perhaps most importantly, to listen, is no easy task for Jews and Arabs in Israel/Palestine. As discussed in the first two chapters, Jews and Palestinians in the country live separate, parallel lives, rarely meeting at all, and when they do, it is usually for instrumental purposes, in universities, shops, or hospitals. The relations between
... [Show full abstract] Jewish-Israelis and Palestinians in the Occupied Territories are much worse; they almost exclusively center on soldier-citizen encounters—at the checkpoints or during military invasions—or between settler-citizen encounters that are either instrumental, as when the Palestinians work for Jewish-Israelis who are settlers, or during a violent encounter (Miftah, April 30, 2010; United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, December, 2008). The laws concerning freedom of movement between Israel and the Occupied Territories (Hamoked, Center for the Defense of the Individual, 2007) also make finding the space and time for dialogue between Jewish-Israelis and Palestinians extremely difficult, nearly impossible. As a result, we peoples who live in the region cannot escape the ways in which the realities of the ‘outside’ always intrude upon our communication.