Stereotypes and Prejudice in Conflict: Representations of Arabs in Israeli-Jewish Society (review)

Bar-Tal and Teichman's Book is the most extensive review and analysis of the recent social-psychological literature on stereotypes and prejudice towards Arabs in the Israeli-Jewish society, especially among the younger generations. Some of its refreshing effect can be seen in its subtitle: "Representations of Arabs in Israeli-Jewish Society." First of all, Bar-Tal and Teichman suggest that we should look at ourselves, our own stereotypes and prejudices, before we accuse the Palestinians about theirs. Secondly, semantically speaking, the name Israeli-Jewish, suggests that there are also Israeli-Arabs, while in the usual daily public discourse we will find people talk about "Israelis," meaning Israeli Jewish people or society, thereby overlooking or undermining the fact that there are also non-Jewish Israelis, and especially Israeli Arabs. The next step, which has not yet happened in this book, is to call them Israeli-Palestinians, as most of them define themselves. That may still be too much for our Israeli-Jewish 'tribal ego' to recognize.

Stereotypes usually have negative connotations: we believe it means saying bad things about others and good things about ourselves. However, Bar-Tal and Teichman rightfully tell us (pp. 234–5) that it is part of a necessary neural process of categorization, or schematization, which is basically neutral: We give names to phenomena we encounter in order to save energy in the brain's information processing about our environment. That is the only way we can function in an ambiguous and uncertain world. The negative aspect of stereotyping and of prejudice starts when we systematically over-generalize certain human categories, especially looking down upon outgroups, while favoring our ingroup. This is one of the cornerstones of Henry Tajfel's social identity theory¹ on which this book is based.

When I was teaching my course in social psychology, I would ask my students to imagine themselves approaching a bus or train station, carrying a big bag on a hot day on their way home from an exhausting week at the university: Suddenly, a man is standing there, reaching out his hand, offering them a cold drink in a can. "Who of you would take it and thank him? Who would ignore him and move on?" As most of my students are female, the majority tend to decline the offer while a minority would accept it. I then ask a representative of each group to state their reasons. My students and I observe together that instantly, within a few milliseconds, each one of them made a decision, based on an implicit or explicit theory-in-use, about why they would decline or accept the drink from the stranger, partly based on earlier real or imagined situations. We then start to construct and manipulate experiments: if the stranger was wearing such and such clothes, would or would not have a mustache, or be of this or that skin color, if he would stand not at the station but in the University—how would each of these variables affect their rate of decline versus acceptance. Now we entered the domain of experimenting in social psychology.

This book goes far beyond such experimentation, dealing with stereotypes and prejudice that we tend to develop in intractable conflicts, and specifically in our local Israeli-Arab one. In order to justify our side of the conflict we are the good guys while they are the bad ones. One could say that intractable conflicts are the cause of such stereotyping, but one could also suggest that severe stereotyping and prejudice may become at some point the momentum that sustains such conflicts. This could account for what happened between Israeli-Jews and the Palestinians after the Oslo Accords, when a political solution was suggested, while both societies' mutual negative "psychological inter-group repertoire" did not change and the latter slowly wiped out the political achievements.²

Bar-Tal and Teichman defined this psychosocial process as the vicious cycle of the ethos of conflict (p. 63) based on eight overlapping aspects which compose beliefs about the justness of one's own group core values and goals...