1 Israeli Arab and 2 Israeli Jews walk into a bar

From the outside, the intensely charged Arab-Israeli conflict can be baffling. He said, she said, they said, we said. But we often don’t ask—we assume. And based on our media outlets of choice or the friends in our Facebook feed, we see only one side to the violent and deadly con-flict that has been roiling Israel for the past month.

These are the facts on the ground: From Oct. 1 to 25, 11 innocent Israeli Jews were killed and 126 were wounded (13 seriously), according to Magen David Adom, Israel’s national emergency re-sponse organization. This includes 54 stabbings, five shootings, and five car-rammings in what has become known as the Palestinian “stabbing intifada.” Continuously compiled unofficial sta-tistics paint an even grimmer picture.

“The recent series of attacks against Israelis is the direct result of incitement by radical Islamist and terrorist elements, calling on Palestinian youth to murder Jews,” writes the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs. 

What’s next?

JNS.org reached out to three Israeli scholars—a self-proclaimed “left-wing” Jewish academic, self-proclaimed “right-wing” Jewish academic, and self-proclaimed “centrist” Israeli-Arab aca-demic—and asked each of them the same questions. Their responses indicate that sometimes, those three camps have more in common than one might think.

Here are the scholars (speaking for themselves and not the academic establishments at which they work):

• Dr. As’ad Ghanem (centrist Israeli Arab), Department of Government and Political Philosophy, School of Political Science, University of Haifa.

•Eli Pollak (right-wing Israeli Jew) Department of Chemical Physics, The Weizmann Institute of Science, vice chairman of Israel’s Media Watch.

•Prof. Sammy Smooha (left-wing Israeli Jews), Sociology Department, University of Haifa.

JNS.org: Why is genuine dialogue and finding a resolution to this conflict so elusive?

Ghanem: We are farther from finding a solution to this conflict than we were in 1993 …because of some major developments in the conflict over the past 20 years: