My poor cousin, my feared enemy: The image of Arabs in personal narratives of former Soviets in Israel

The goal of this essay is to analyse some cultural antecedents of stereotyping of Arabs by immigrants to Israel from the former Soviet Union. The material used in the essay is part of larger project devoted to personal narratives of the immigrants of the 1990s. It is based on 115 in-depth interviews. Unlike Oriental Jews who had lived side-by-side with Arabs before emigrating to Israel, Soviet Jews had had no contacts with them in the Old Country. While Arabs have always populated the folklore of oriental Jews, Soviet Jews have formed their attitude on the basis of the mass media (both Soviet and Israeli) and on limited personal contact after immigration. Immigrants who have had no personal contacts with Arabs perceive them as hostile Others, and transfer to them the negative stereotypes formed in the USSR. A more contradictory image evolves on the basis of personal experience; some narrators make parallels between Israeli-Arab and Russian-Chechen conflicts, while others perceive the situation of the Arabs in Israel as similar to the discrimination Jews had suffered in the USSR.