This chapter looks at the interpretations of the series by the Arab/Palestinian Israeli state minority audience in Uhm Al-Fahm. Half decoded “Jews”; one-third decoded Palestinians. All concluded there were “Arab” characters in Sesame Street, meaning Arab/Palestinian Israelis. Drawing on assumptions about language, physical features, or attire of characters, they typically converted Jewish Israeli characters into “Arabs,” moving them from the national to the civic axis, still Israeli but specifically Arab/Palestinian Israelis like themselves. Palestinian characters moved from the civic to the national on the continuum, and were interpreted as just “Arabs.” A majority held negative to very negative attitudes about Jewish Israelis, and very positive to very negative attitudes about Palestinians, their other shared other. In some cases they negatively stereotyped the former as “police” and the latter as “dirty, primitive or poor.” Optimistically for peace-building, most nonetheless adopted positive attitudes toward all the characters they had “correctly” decoded as pro-social and nice, and were able to generalize those mediated experiences to the other characters on screen and to the real world. This suggests there is some room for Sesame Street to influence the Arab/Palestinian Israeli audience’s inter-grouping attitudes towards these shared others.

Part II describes how the audiences of practice—the stateless nation, or Palestinians, the state-bearing nation, Jewish-Israelis, and the state minority, Arab Palestinian Israelis—decoded the text, as their interpretations related to their respective conflict-resolution outcome goals of justice, security and equality. Chapter 4 outlines how the majority of the stateless nation audience did not “see” Jewish Israeli characters, referring to them as “Jews,” and negatively stereotyped them an “army of infidels.” These Palestinian children actively resisted the text regarding their Jewish Israeli others and did not observe the series’ encoded pro-social relations between Jewish Israelis and Palestinians. Most interpreted those characters to be “Palestinians” or “Arabs,” generalizing their positive attitudes toward all Palestinian and Arab/Palestinian Israeli characters to their wider grouping on screen and off. Cognitive imbalance explains why 20 percent who decoded good-natured “partial Jews” did not generalize them to “Jews”. Sesame Street is unlikely to alter their inter-grouping attitudes toward Jewish Israelis or their policy-relevant political beliefs, even more crucial to managing the region’s ethnopolitical and multi-state conflicts. The majority constructed Arab/Palestinian Israelis as like them but living elsewhere, and held positive to very positive attitudes toward them. But their initial attitudes render this development less important.

This chapter examines religious claims and aspects within Palestinian nationalism from the time of the British Mandate to the present. Since such endeavor necessitates an engagement with Zionism, the chapter starts by refuting a common misperception that seeks to equate Palestinian nationalism with Zionism in the latter’s use of religion to attain its political ends. The distinctions between the two regarding their “use” of religion can be conceptualized on the basis of two guiding notions: functionality and centrality of religion and/or religious claims in either respective projects. Each uses religion differently in terms of the purpose (function), and the assigned place (centrality) within the subsequent discourse and practice. The conceptualization of these two notions is offered in this chapter as a framework for analysis in discussing the specific case of Palestinian nationalism. In undertaking the analysis of the Palestinian national movement over more than a century, the chapter is divided into three parts: the decades of the British Mandate; the decades that followed the creation of Israel up through the late 1980s; and finally the decades where Palestinian Islamism has become an integral part of the Palestinian national project – from the emergence of Hamas in December 1987 to the present.

This chapter explores how Jews and the indigenous inhabitants came to see themselves as members of national communities. It begins with a description of “culture of nationalism” –– a collective belief in society that the assumptions that undergird nationalism are part of the natural order. It then describes how the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine and the Jews of mainly Eastern Europe, embedded within empires undergoing transformations that imbued them with structures associated with modern states, came to see themselves as a homogeneous grouping. In the case of the indigenous population of Palestine, that grouping was imperial in scope. The Jews of Eastern Europe, however, were “othered” by the majority community, and thus came to see themselves as a people apart.

The chapter looks at the geography of the territory west of the Jordan River, and describes how competing nationalist narratives –– Zionism and Palestinian nationalism –– have inscribed meaning not only in that geography, but in the pre-national history of the two “peoples” with rival claims to the land.