Part 3, Chapter 13 Summary

Part 3 is entitled "Interaction," and begins with the theme, "A Mingling of Cultures." It opens with Shipler describing the striking similarity between an everyday hand washing ceremony he had experienced among the Bedouin of the Negev desert and a Passover ritual experienced in a Jewish apartment. "Suddenly," he observes, "the images merged and time collapsed; history touched the present." Modern scholarship has debunked the myth that Jews and Arabs are ethnically related, he says, but centuries of cultural contact have exerted considerable influence on both societies. The first historical contact between Arabs and Hebrews was as allies fighting the Assyrians in the ninth century B.C.E. The etymology of "Arab" and "Hebrew" is similar. Talmudic literature is filled with references to Arabs, and Israeli archeologists have carefully excavated ruins of Nabatean (Arab) settlements in the Negev.

With the rise of...