Why Israel’s Arab-Jewish coexistence is stronger than its racists - opinion

SEPTEMBER 4, 2026 13:50Two incidents occurred this week: one that filled me with despair, and one with hope.Hope is always better, so let’s start with the experience at Hadassah Ein Kerem Medical Center, where a dear friend has been on-and-off fighting for his life over the last year.This week, he was in for another operation, and I volunteered to be part of the rotation of family and friends keeping watch on him post-op.It’s a well-known cliché, but Israeli hospitals are a stalwart of coexistence among Arabs and Jews. The usefulness of clichés is that their simple truth can be staggering. A Jewish patient was being cared for by an Arab doctor, Arab nurses, and Arab orderlies.Through a mixture of Hebrew, English, and sign language, the act of saving lives and making patients suffer less was paramount. What a country to live in, I gloated to myself, getting on the light rail, where Jewish and Arab residents of Jerusalem shared a ride on the efficient line running from Hadassah back into town.Light Rail in Jerusalem (credit: Arnon Busani)Later that night, I got back on the light rail at the same time as four young, white-shirted youth wearing black kippot. Bespectacled, thin, and immature, the teens were jostling with each other and joking in American English peppered with some Hebrew they might have learned in yeshiva.They took up roost opposite where I was standing at the end of a car, and one of them, the smallest with braces on his teeth, sat down next to a young Arab woman, while the others remained standing around him.She might have been 18, wearing a hijab, but dressed in jeans and wearing lipstick. Some other female friends or family members were sitting spread out on a few seats behind her.She stared out the window as the boys exchanged frivolous banter in a language she probably didn’t understand totally, if at all. They seemed to ignore her presence even though they were more or less surrounding her on three sides.At some point, I heard the word “Arab” being uttered, followed by laughter, and I began to pay more attention. The woman looked harder out of the window. A few seconds later, the short kid with braces blurted out “F***ing Arab,” and then repeated it.I realized that something needed to be done or said. In the next 1.5 seconds, here’s what happened: I realized there were four of them, but I also surmised that they didn’t seem to be the fighting types, what with the glasses, braces, and svelte forms.Me, I’ve been working out, and like Kenny Banyas of Seinfeld fame, in my mind at least, I’m huge. So I was semi- confident there wouldn’t be any physical violence. Also, were they really going to attack a senior citizen, no matter how good a shape he was in?I contemplated trying to diffuse the situation with humor and a smile, engaging the youth via our common American bond and appealing to their innate humanistic values. Instead, in the final nano-second of my 1.5 seconds of contemplation, I took another route.I uncharacteristically shouted out, “Shut the f*** up, a**hole! Show a little respect.”'I hate all of them'Instead of cowering, which I had hoped would be the desired response, Braces yelled back, “Respect for who? Arabs? I hate all of them.”His friends chuckled and shifted uncomfortably, and the Arab woman exchanged glances with her companions behind her, who were all staring at me.Not really having a coherent script planned out, and with my heart pounding like a sledgehammer, I managed a weak retort along the lines of, “It looks like you’re going to have a busy Yom Kippur this year, atoning for what a horrible person you are.”Two middle-aged men in haredi (ultra-Orthodox) light garb – one of whom had offered me his seat minutes earlier – got up and moved away, not wanting to engage on either side of the conflict.Braces muttered something about Arabs all being terrorists and then piped down, and the altercation seemed to be stuck in neutral. The four disembarked at the next stop (ironically, probably headed to slihot prayers at the Western Wall), brushing past me with glares but without saying a word.No words were exchanged with the Arab woman either, but we briefly made eye contact. I imagined that there was a glint of gratitude, but it could have easily been hate, that I was no different from the racist louts who had just made her ride a nightmare.Or maybe she had no idea what had transpired, didn’t know a word of English, and thought I was a crazy person for yelling at the kid she was sitting next to.The rest of the ride, I was lost in thought and tried to avoid the comparison – but I kept returning to the feeling that they reminded me of residents of a fascist regime somewhere, sauntering around like they’re in charge, dehumanizing and humiliating the others in their midst.And these are the weaklings! Has the Itamar Ben-Gvir era emboldened these racists to unleash their venom without regard for societal norms?I don’t know what they were taught in their American homes, or in their Israeli yeshivas, but if their mindset is indicative of even a small minority of Jewish thought out there, we’re in deep trouble.I wish I hadn’t exploded at Braces and his friends, and instead had tried to reason with them. I wish I had told them about the Arabs they so deride that I had spent time with that morning at Hadassah, and the holy work that they are doing each and every day.The recent pairing of Mansour Abbas and Yoav Segalovitz at the head of the Ra’am ticket in the coming election is a long overdue move that acknowledges the inevitable fact that Jews and Arabs live in Israel and share some of the same concerns.Arabs may not be part of the Jewish narrative, but they play an integral role in the Israeli narrative. The sooner we all realize that neither of us is going anywhere and that we need each other for Israel to survive and thrive, the less the racist element in our midst will be able to fester and metastasize.Follow us on Google