Dr Ashraf Abul Saud
Can the Arab-Israeli conflict ever truly end?
This question echoes around the world. However, finding an answer requires confronting a deeper issue: how Israelis and many in the Jewish diaspora have been taught to perceive Arabs.
Over decades of conflict, Israeli school curricula, media, and propaganda have systematically shaped a highly negative image of Arabs.
They are frequently depicted as backward, violent, and inherently terroristic, a people driven by deception, betrayal of agreements, and a desire to destroy the Jewish presence and “throw the Jews into the sea”.
This portrayal contrasts sharply with the self-image promoted in Israel: a civilised, innovative nation chosen by God, whose people love life and contribute inventions that benefit all humanity.
Historical and geographical facts have often been blended with biblical narratives to strengthen claims to the land.
Examples include referring to Al-Aqsa Mosque as “the Temple” and the Buraq Wall as the “Western Wall.”
Such framing has helped embed a narrative that justifies Israeli policies, while casting Arabs as an existential threat to Israel’s security.
This stereotype appears in multiple forms. In Israeli society and among many Western Jews influenced by Zionism, Arabs are commonly shown as primitive, fanatical, and dangerous.
Western cinema and literature, exaggerated by Zionist messaging, have long reinforced the image of the Arab as an enemy of civilisation, drawing on older Orientalist tropes.
In Zionist thought and Israeli literature, the Arab is further dehumanised as the ultimate enemy: irrational, underdeveloped, and mentally inferior.
This serves to justify control and security policies under the banner of a “permanent threat”.
Media and educational materials frequently link Arabs to terrorism and senseless violence, portraying them as the main obstacle to peace and progress who must, therefor, be subdued or removed.
These mechanisms rely on a powerful, self-reinforcing system: education that plants seeds of fear and superiority from a young age, combined with lavish media production that disseminates the narrative globally.
The result is the transformation of the Arab into a “sacred military target” in the Israeli collective imagination, an enemy whose very existence threatens Jewish survival.
Ultimately, this deliberate cultivation of hatred and fear across generations undermines any genuine attempt at peaceful coexistence.
As long as such psychological, social, and religious barriers remain deeply embedded, the prospects for ending the Arab-Israeli conflict remain dim.
Dr Ashraf Abul Saud is a writer and an international relations scholar.
