The Vanity of Conversion Therapy: The Delusion of Metastasizing Israeli Arabs

A prevailing thought since the beginning of Zionism has falsely assumed that if the settling Jews in Palestine soothed the Palestinians by peaceful conduct and demonstrated good intentions of cooperation, the Arabs would be mollified enough to accept Jewish immigration and settlement in Palestine towards the establishment of a Jewish state.

However, these assumptions proved delusory, since exactly the reverse happened.

The more Zionism advanced in Palestine, and then Israel, the more the Palestinians perceived it as a threat to their own existence. They turned to an aggressively hostile attitude, which provoked wars and spread this thinking to the rest of the Arab world.

The reasons for this are many: political, cultural, and religious. Hence, an unfeasibility exists for a peaceful way to settle the conflict and search for alternative solutions.

The Vanity of Conversion Therapy: The Delusion of Metastasizing Israeli Arabs covers the period since Israel was founded in 1948 to present day.

(About the Author)

Raphael Israeli has taught Islamic, Chinese, and Middle Eastern history at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. A graduate of Hebrew University in history and Arabic literature, he earned a Ph.D. in Chinese and Islamic history from the University of California, Berkeley. Now retired, he has been a Fellow of the Harry Truman Research Institute at Hebrew University and the Jerusalem Center since the 1970s, and is the author of over 70 research books, a dozen edited books, and 100 scholarly articles about Islam.