In May this year, a few weeks before the terror attack at the Dolphinarium, Assi Sharabi, a student of social psychology at the London School of Economics arrived in Israel with a great idea for a thesis.

The last year of Sharabi’s life was one of political upheavals that he viewed in shock through the BBC. (In August 2000 the prime minister, Ehud Barak, spoke of an “end to the conflict,” in August 2001, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon speaks of a “policy of assassinations,” etc.)

Sharabi, a former officer in the counter-terrorism unit, did his army service, as he puts it, “with a knife between his teeth,” teaching combat units to “make surgical operations.” […] A year after arriving in London, Sharabi removed his Zionist fighter’s glasses, and replaced them with those of a European intellectual. What he found alarmed, angered and shook him.

To understand Sharabi’s research, and his disturbing findings, we have to first understand the theoretical basis of his work. This is something known as “social tokens.”

The idea is simple: Our social reality, the theory goes, is a function of our social activity. Every society creates for itself a system of values that allows it to comprehend the reality around it, no matter how crazy this reality is.

Take a prison, for example, a place that is illogical in terms of free people, where the most important commodity (if we are to believe American gangster movies) is cigarettes. The cigarette takes the place of money, of which there is none, and gives rise to a value system where people are judged more or less according to their access to cigarettes. The cigarettes are the “social token.” They enable the prisoner to get by, to remain sane.

That is the idea Sharabi brought to Israel. His goal: to find out how Jewish children in Israel aged eight and nine years old, in three types of communities (city, kibbutz, settlement) grasp the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and how they survive it on a daily basis.

Sharabi, in other words, went to see what kind of cigarettes our children deal in to survive the psychological prison of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“The Israeli reality,” Sharabi says, “is a tough one. I don’t think anyone will disagree with that. How can a mother send her child on a bus thinking there is a chance they may blow up? When you live here, you know that something is wrong, but you live in this wrong way and you make sense of it by the social tokens you give your surroundings, until it appears logical to you. You lose your best friend in Lebanon and it makes sense – ‘yes, people lose their friends in war.’ That is what I studied.

“I went to Israeli children to see how they grow up completely normal in the eyes of their surroundings, which I see as abnormal. I wanted to see how they feel, how they explain, how they experience the reality of the conflict.”

Sharabi spoke to 84 children a few days after the Dolphinarium terror attack. He submitted his findings last week to the University in London. His conclusions, simply put, are this: the social token that enables Israeli children to exist in the harsh reality around them is burning, blazing, sometimes monstrous hatred of the Palestinians. Children see eight-year-old Arab children as deformed, with sharp bristles and teeth, who should hopefully die of AIDs and who are sentenced to burn in the fires of hell to the very last man.

On the other hand, all the children want peace. This peace (to quote Sharabi) is a “hollow peace.” For the children, the fact that there should be peace does not mean that shouldn’t kill them, down to the last man. […]

“Wherever I went, the kibbutz, the city and the settlement, I explained to the children that I’d come from London to ask them about the fighting with the Arabs, and asked them to write to a Palestinian their own age, and after that, on the other side of the paper, to draw him or her. The children immediately asked two questions. The first question was: ‘draw a good Arab or a bad Arab?'”

Question: And the second question?

“If they could use curse words.”

In contrast to what one might expect, the most hate-filled letters were not from the settlement children (a secular settlement not far from Rosh Haayin) but from the city (in central Israel). The settlement children were angry and used stereotypes. The city children genuinely hated. For them, at the young age of eight, a good Arab was a dead Arab.

Following are a few examples:

“Shalom,” an Israeli girl wrote, “I hope you die and are sick. I’m waiting for you to die, I hope your whole family dies.”

“Stinking Arab, shalom,” wrote another girl. “I really really really don’t like what you’re doing to us and we will pay you back even if there is a cease-fire. I hope you die!”

“Shalom girl from a bad people,” wrote another. “I want to ask you to tell your father that he should stop the bombs and then there will be peace. I also hope you die and that you get old quickly.”

“Disgusting Mohammed,” wrote a boy who drew an 8-year-old Palestinian with a beard and sharp teeth. “I wish you’d die and that you don’t have a good life. I don’t like you and I hate you because of all the attacks you do to us and I hope you burn. Sincerely.”

“Ugly Yasser shalom,” wrote a boy. “If you think you’ll win, you’re making a big mistake. Here’s my advice: take an ugly knife and stick it in yourself and in your ugly mother and father and sister and blow yourself up with a grenade.”

Another girl: “I hope you die and are sick. I am waiting for you to die and for your whole family to die.”

Settlement children also wrote pointed letters, blind with rage. They wrote, as did the city and kibbutz children, what they picked up that week from their nearby environment: parents, teachers, the media. Settlement children, unlike city children, explained their blazing hatred in political terms, and some, unlike city children, expressed a sincere wish for a solution.

“There are no flowers here, only Intifada,” one writes. “You really really really love wars, that means you hate your brothers. After all, we are all human beings, and you are not important to me. Barbarians, fools, retards, we will blow you up until you have no strength left, you like the terror attacks you make on us, you like our dead. Okay, no problem. We’ll bomb you and you asked for it because we offered you a lot. So please, eat what you cooked.”

“Palestinian boy,” wrote another boy. “Why do you have to throw stones and make explosions if we can solve this without violence. When you throw stones you just look like retards and dopes, especially Arafat.”

“I know,” a sensitive boy wrote, “that it’s hard to live without a state. The people who are closest to you could die, like your father, or your mother, or your brother or sister and you too could also die. I don’t like it that your people fights my people and that we fight you and I want there to be peace.”

Another boy: “The thing I hate most is you, Arabs, the men, the women, the children, each and every one, I hate all of you. You’ll see, we’ll beat you, we’ll bomb you and kill you.”

“Stinky Mohammed!!!,” wrote his friend, “I hope you die by an Israeli who shoots you and that your whole family burns in hell (and you too). I hope you have AIDS and die. Live to 21 and then die. I hope all Arabs die, signed, someone who hates Arabs!!!”

Again and again the children’s letters express their inability to comprehend the violent reality in which they live. […] The ones filled with hate make you bite your lips in embarrassment. The ones filled with despair cause you to tear your hair.

“This is how I start my letter,” a kibbutz girl wrote. “Why? Why? Why? Tell me, why? Why? Why can’t you write to your government a letter and say things about peace. Why do they send you, the children, to war? That not how it’s like with us, I feel sorry for you, the children, I see you selling band-aids in the streets and I want to know if they make you do that, but really — why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?”

Another kibbutz girl: “I see what is going on, how we fight each other with violence and every time decide to try without violence, and then with violence, I think it’s time to make a break.”

Like children in the city and the settlement, some of the kibbutz children drew the Palestinian child throwing stones, as violent, wearing a keffiya. The contents, however, were more moderate.

One girl: “I hope you have a good life, without violence and without war. I hope this comes true.”

Another: “We want peace and maybe you do too, at least I want peace, because people die. So maybe you will at least agree to make peace.”

Sharabi: “However pessimistic my study is, and it is definitely pessimistic, there were also buds of something else, and that was among the kibbutz children. None of these children said they liked Arafat, not at all. But there was some approximation of understanding that there are different ways to understand the reality of the conflict and it was amazing to see the independent way they rose to the challenge to decipher the dramatic, sometimes horrific, articles they saw in the papers or what they heard from around them.”

“Only in the kibbutz did I find an eight and a half boy who told me: ‘You know, there are prejudices in Israel too and we think that all the Arabs want to kill us and that every Arab is a terrorist, but that’s not true.’ There is less hate and less fear there.”

Sharabi: “All the children, wherever they lived, have become equal partners in the discourse that says that the Jews are good and the Arabs bad, that Jews want peace and Arabs want war, that the Jews are human beings and the Arabs not. Even before the children understand the factual aspect of the conflict, they are immersed in the ideological contents of the conflict, the ‘us against them,’ the ‘we are the victims and they are the aggressor.’

“The difference between city children, who had very specific and clear wishes for death, and settler children, I explain by the fact that the settler children have some interaction with Arab population, even if they don’t like them too much. They see the Arab, on their way to school, on the way home, and so are aware that the Arabs are people. In the city there is true dehumanization of the Arab, because there is no interaction with them.”

One of the topics Sharabi addressed in his study was the seeming contradiction between the fact that all the children said they wanted peace, but still the overwhelming majority wanted to bomb the Arabs. […]

Sharabi: “There is a yearning for peace. Let it not be understood that these children, or their parents, don’t want peace. But in psychological terms, it’s very easy to see this yearning for peace as some sort of tranquilizer pill, some sort of theoretical light at the end of the tunnel that helps them have a positive perception of themselves — ‘see, I want peace, that means I’m a moral person.’ But as I see it, this is meaningless. When you ask these children what ‘peace’ is, they don’t know what to say.

“One child told me: ‘Peace is when we leave and they stay, or when they leave and we stay.’ If that’s the case, the yearning for peace is offset by the inability to see the Arabs as anything except as people who don’t want us here.”

This article ran on August 24, 2001 in Maariv

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