Peace and Conflict Studies - Spring 2014

Peace and Conflict Studies Volume 21, Number 1 9 1977, ending the dominant Labor Party-led regime and bringing the Likud Party to power for the first time, was the important factor (see Eisenstadt, 1989; Kimmerling 1998; Smooha, 1993). Regardless of causation, the Jewish–Arab conflict inside Israel underwent an important transformation. Even though the conflict had been there for almost a century, particularly since the establishment of Israel as a Jewish state and the 1948 War, its intensity increased at the time. It is therefore not surprising that a new generation of Arab-Palestinian Israeli citizens, born in the 1970s, would become unprecedentedly demanding in its struggle against the Israeli establishment. This new generation, labeled by Israeli sociologists as the Stand-Tall Generation, grew up during the 1980s and 1990s with no illusions of being able to achieve the civil equality that their parents had thought they could acquire (Rabinowitz & Abu Baker, 2005). 3. Relations between Israelis and Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank – During the 1980s crucial changes occurred in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. These included an increase in violence, Israel Defense Forces’ harsher policy against the Palestinians, a crisis of the Palestinian economy, and the establishment of a local Palestinian leadership as opposed to the traditional exile leadership (Kimmerling & Migdal, 1999; 2003). These components were some of the factors that led to the outbreak of the Intifada in late 1987. The Intifada itself was a very important milestone in the relations between the rival sides and influenced the beginning of the peace process which started in the 1990s. Yet, even more important than the Intifada itself was the growing realization by Israelis that the Palestinians could no longer be seen as isolated groups fighting for local rights. Rather, they must be perceived as a people or a nation struggling for an independent and autonomous state (Kimmerling & Migdal, 1999; 2003). Israelis’ Ethos of Conflict and Psychological Inter-group Repertoire These changes in the conflict led to a dramatic change in the Israeli ethos of conflict, psychological inter-group repertoire and in the perception of the image of the Arab (Bar-Tal & Teichman, 2005). Oren (2009) shows that it is during the late 1970s and through the 1980s, and until the beginning of the 1990s that Israel’s ethos of conflict changed. For example, in the late 1970s delegitimization of Arabs in Israeli textbooks had significantly dropped (Firer, 1985) and less pejorative terminology was used in describing the Arab violent resistance to Jewish immigration and settlement (Podeh, 2002). Public polls of the time show that