As the Zionist Rudy Rochman repeats all the time, Palestinians and Jews are cousins.

Even back in the day, the situation and views were more diverse than you think.

But judging from Jonathan Marc Gribetz’s new book, “Defining Neighbors: Religion, Race, and the Early Zionist-Arab Encounter,” religion has long been central to the conflict, and apocalyptic narratives about a new holy war may be over-hasty. To be sure, the neighbors in question lived roughly a century ago, and the way Zionist and Arab intellectuals understood each other in late-Ottoman Palestine can only indirectly color how we understand current events. Further, Gribetz, a professor of Near Eastern studies at Princeton, places careful chronological limits on his argument that early Zionists and Arabs saw each other “not as perfect strangers, competing for territory,” but as religious and racial cousins with “intertwined histories, cultures, beliefs, even blood.”

About 20% of Israeli citizens are Palestinians with equal rights. Sure there’s discrimination and also racism, but Palestinians living in the Galilee for example are doing pretty well over all. Of course the West Bank is worse and Gaza terrible. 

Reducing it to black and white racism creates a very distorted picture of the reality in the country.