The Reunion of Isaac and Ishmael

James Peters was a professor of Languages at the Ryerson Polytechnical
Institute.

The intense work of Jack Cohen in Reunion of Isaac and Ishmael spells out the tremendous problems of co-existence between Jew and Arab in the state of Israel. Despite Cohen’s cautious optimism, the reconciliation of Isaac the Jew and Ishmael the Arab would appear to be almost impossible even at the university level where he worked as director of Hillel House at Hebrew University.

Arabs form a minority in Israel, and Israel itself is a small minority in the midst of 200 million surrounding Arabs. This book is not propaganda in any sense, but is a serious and finely detailed socio-political study of the problerns relating to a difficult co-existence.

Jews in the Middle East live in five kinds of relationships with Arabs. They have a common but unequal citizenship in the state of Israel. Israelis occupy and administer occupied territories such as Golan, Gaza, and the West Bank. (This book was written before the current intafada in Gaza and the West Bank.) The Jews of Israel enjoy a shaky recognition by the Egyptian Arabs. The Jews in Israel must face the hostility of all Arabs including millions in Egypt, and there are Jewish communities still in a number of Arab countries.

Cohen concedes that the citizenship status of Israeli Arabs is inferior to that of the Jews who dwell in a “Jewish state” where, for example, interdenominational marriage is not possible.

Cohen more than hints at the seething antipathy of the Arabs for the Jews, and that of the Jews for the Arabs. Nowhere in his book, however, does he account for this Arab hatred as stemming from the conquest of the Jews over the Arabs in Palestine, and their subsequent inferior status. Underlying everything he writes about Arab-Jew relations is the assumption that the Zionists have an eternal, inalienable right to Palestine. The Arabs do not recognize this right for a moment even though many Palestinians now do feel the necessity to recognize tacitly the existence of Israel in their determination to recover a part of the homeland.

Within the university context, Cohen describes his work with Arab and Jewish students working together in Arab and Jewish environments. One of his working groups, two Jews and one Arab, declare that their efforts were based on the assumption that “co-existence and mutual understanding between the two peoples, Jewish and Arab, that live in Israel can be created only by a common activity and search” (p. 164).

This work is useful to any student of the area who wishes to get an insight into the prospects of peace within Israel itself through reconciliation of the two antagonistic elements of the society.