Pulitzer Winner Shipler Reflects on ‘Arab and Jew’

David Shipler’s second book was not a best seller like his first. But it won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction last week.

And it provided ample excuse to open a tin of caviar fresh from Moscow.

Shipler had made his lucky purchase when the New York Times sent him to the Soviet Union to cover Secretary of State George P. Shultz’s trip there. He won the Pulitzer for “Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land” (Times Books, $22.50), a lengthy anecdotal study of relationships between Arabs and Jews in Israel.

Since its publication last fall, Shipler said by telephone from Washington late last week, “Arab and Jew” has sold about 30,000 hard-cover copies in bookstores. That is about 20,000 fewer than his 1983 book, “Russia: Broken Idols, Solemn Dreams,” which briefly broached best-seller lists.

More Interest in Soviets

“Interest in the Soviet Union’s a lot broader” than interest in the Middle East, Shipler said.

Nonetheless, the Pulitzer was the latest in a series of pleasant surprises that Shipler--Jerusalem bureau chief for the New York paper from 1979 to 1984--has had from a project that he began out of personal curiosity.

Although it didn’t make the top of the book charts, “Arab and Jew” was a best seller of sorts, becoming the volume leader for its publisher last year.

Also, the 596-page book was widely reviewed in this country and often evoked personal responses from reviewers who had been stimulated to “think about these issues (regarding Arab-Jewish relations) in a different way,” he said. Moreover, reviews often were more favorable than he expected, given the fact that he was dealing with controversial topics, Shipler said.

On a recent visit to Los Angeles, Shipler explained that he set out to write a book that examined largely unexplored territory.

The ‘Psychological Landscape’

“The process of stereotyping between Arabs and Jews is not something that much research has been done on, as far as I can tell,” he said. “You find an occasional sociological study, a public opinion poll, a survey or questionnaire, but nothing that’s comprehensive. . . .

“I felt that it (stereotyping) was close to the core of the conflict, not in political or military terms but in psychological terms. I was trying to chart the psychological landscape where Arabs and Jews confront each other.”

What emerged were portraits frequently unflattering to both Arabs and Jews. The book chronicles widespread, deeply ingrained prejudice in both groups. It also documents what Shipler--a New Jersey native who is not Arab or Jewish--said is a failure by Israel to integrate its Arab citizens, as well as Arabs living on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, acquired in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War.

In the process, Shipler tells stories of mixed marriages, examines the assumptions behind what is written in textbooks, autopsies the emotions and attitudes behind Jewish settlements on the West Bank, and even draws a brief sketch of the friendship between two partners in a used car lot, one Arab and one Jewish.

“What I find disturbing is that there’s not enough debate in Israel about the role of the Israeli Arab in society,” Shipler said. “The Israeli Arab is practically an invisible character. . . .

Military Mind-Set Prevails

“Israeli kids in school are sometimes surprised to learn that Arabs have the vote in Israel. They think of Arabs as being under military occupation and rightly so.”

Shipler sees this military mind-set as one of the major barriers to reconciliation between Israel’s 3.5 million Jews and 2 million Arabs.

“The Establishment of Israel has to come to terms with Israeli Arabs as members of that society first and then as a security question, and really a side question at that,” he said.

One key to reconciliation, he said, would be for Israelis to give greater weight to Arab feelings about the 1948 war between Arabs and Jews that created Israel and forced many Palestinian Arabs from their homeland.

“In the Palestinian mind, that is the great divide,” he said. “. . . It’s a bit like us and the Indians. It’s only recently that we came to grips with the what the white men did to the Indians.”

Book Might Upset Americans

The book paints a picture that would not please many American Jews, Shipler said, noting that some of his newspaper stories from Jerusalem often prompted angry letters. One letter, he recalled, accused him of branding Israel’s armed forces with a fascist stamp even though he made no mention of Nazism in a story about the arrest and detention of Arab youths.

“There’s an overreaction, especially on the part of American Jews who are devoted to Israel’s morality and to the idea of Jewish morality,” he said. “When they see stories about Israeli soldiers acting in a brutal manner, they think that you’re drawing a parallel, which you’re not drawing.”

Shipler said that by writing “Arab and Jew,” he hoped to spark discussion about the reality of modern Israel.

‘Other Truths’ About Israel

“It’s very difficult for a lot of people to reconcile themselves to the fact that Israel is a real country with real people with real problems with real weaknesses,” he said.

“They’re stuck on the idea that Jewish pioneers built this country out of nothing, drained the swamps and made the desert bloom. That’s true. But there are other truths that accompany that, and they’re not as pretty. The time is past, it seems to me, when Israel can be seen only as a web of perfect dreams.”

Israel, Shipler said, is a country “struggling to find a balance between openness and security. . . . A friend of mine (in Israel) who was talking about attitudes toward Arabs with me said the challenge was to raise his son to be ferocious enough to be a soldier and gentle enough to be a citizen.

“That struck me as being the dilemma there.”