The violent intensity of the month-old war between Israel and Hamas raises the question of whether Israelis and Palestinians have any empathy for each other.
A generation ago, they used to routinely rub shoulders.
Just how tense things are between Israeli Jews and their Arab neighbors is something my colleague Daniel Estrin recently witnessed at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem.
In the waiting room, he found two Israeli women shouting at a Palestinian mother whose son was being treated for a beating he received from a Jewish mob.
"Go away you trash," one yells. "I would bury you in Gaza."
Two other Israeli women try to comfort the Palestinian mother. But she is in no mood for reconciliation and retorts: "What good will your apologies do?"
Such lack of empathy is widespread in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza these days, even in the few communities where Jews and Arabs mix, like Jerusalem.
An Abstract View
Menachem Klein, a former adviser to Israeli peace negotiators at Camp David, fears the abstract view many Jews and Arabs here have of one another has brought the conflict to a new low.
"It's very easy to move from a person that you know, that you see the face and the suffering and everyday care and concerns — a human being like you like me — and an abstract, a general enemy, a demon," Klein says.
Klein traces the mutual vilification back to Israel's policy of separation, which started 23 years ago during the first Palestinian uprising, or intifada, when Israel started setting up road blocks and controlled their movements with a permit system.
The segregation intensified during the second intifada a decade ago, leaving Israel, Gaza and the West Bank physically isolated from each other by heavily guarded fences and walls.
Big red signs were erected on borders to Palestinian territory warning Israelis that it's illegal for them to go there, Klein says.
"So for safety of the Israeli Jews, the regulation came in force," he says. "The problem is that it cuts off many connections personal relations between Israelis and Palestinians."
Hind Khoury, a former Palestinian Authority Minister of Jerusalem Affairs agrees. She says many younger Palestinians have never interacted with Israeli Jews other than soldiers. Nor have they traveled to any cities or towns Israel controls the borders to, many of which are only a short drive away
"I know for a fact that in Bethlehem, we have a whole generation of young people who don't know east Jerusalem, which is seven kilometers away ... [and] don't know the holy sites," Khoury says.
The separation came in the workplace as well. As Israel shut the door on Palestinians, it brought in other foreign workers to do the agricultural and construction work Palestinians once did.
Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics shows the 116,000 work permits issued to Palestinians in 1992 dropped to one-tenth that number in 2005.
Despite the dehumanizing effect, Israeli Jews continue to want separation, says Tamar Hermann, a senior fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute who specializes in public opinion polling.
"My own children, I suppose, they have never met a Palestinian, they've never visited a Palestinian village, they never went to Ramallah, they never went to Jericho," Hermann says. "This is why they imagine things and this imagination normally is not positive under the circumstances of conflict, a protracted conflict in particular."
A Lost Perspective
The generational gap in empathy is striking in Jamila's home in Jerusalem's walled Old City, which has Arab and Jewish neighborhoods. She's a 48-year-old Arab homemaker, and fearing retribution, asked NPR not to use her or her children's last name.
The air is thick with tension on her crowded Muslim Quarter alley, where stern Israeli policemen keep watch and settler flags flutter off several rooftops.
Jamila says she's worried about the current ethnic tension, but views her relationship with Jewish residents of the city as "normal." She even chats on the phone with her 23-year-old son's Jewish girlfriend, a relationship considered scandalous on both sides here.
Jamila says that while she doesn't have Jewish friends, she shops at Jewish-run stores and goes to Jewish doctors. She says hello in Hebrew to her settler neighbors.
Nearby, her daughter Nadia, who says she doesn't speak Hebrew and avoids contact with Israeli Jews, looks a tad annoyed with her mother. Soon, the 26-year-old and another sister are arguing with Jamila.
Nadia says that "Israeli Jews are bad human beings. They kill every day."
When Jamila tries telling her that not all of them are bad, Nadia cuts her off and says: "Our principles do not allow us to kill the way they are killing."
Lost Friendships
In the hilltop Jerusalem suburb of Moza a short drive away, the sentiment 24-year-old Shakhaf Vahaba expresses is similar, but in reverse. She believes Palestinians won't rest until they oust all Jews from Israel.
"I think they hate us because they are taught to hate us," Vahaba says.
Vahaba is not sure that she's ever met a Palestinian, and says she rarely speaks with two Arab college classmates. She says another Arab student, who recently posted on her Facebook page that she wished all Israeli soldiers would die, caused an uproar that led to the girl being banned from campus.
Vahaba's 51-year-old mother says she isn't surprised.
"I think it made them feel she is enjoying the benefits and then spitting into the well she's drinking from," she says.
Dalit Vahaba says her daughter's views are in part shaped by a traumatic childhood during the second intifada, when bus bombings and mall attacks in Israel were commonplace.
Dalit, on the other hand, recalls driving to Gaza with her father when she was a child, and dining on chicken and rice platters at his Palestinian friend's home in Ramallah.
As a young woman, Dalit Vahaba worked at a Tel Aviv café, where she befriended three Palestinian co-workers from the West Bank.
"We used to laugh together. Even I invited them to my wedding," she says. "And I have pictures of them and they came to visit me after Shakhaf was born here in Moza."
But the intifadas took a toll on their relationship, Vahaba says. She never saw her Palestinian friends again save for a brief reunion in Israel last September.
"I think we were aware of the problems even then, but I think then we had more hope," she says. "I thought there can be peace between us and we can live together and everything."
Vahaba says she doesn't believe that anymore.
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