The Brother or The Other: How do Israelis perceive their Arab neighbors?
Recently I watched one of Corey Gil-Shuster's videos and an Israeli said that Arab culture is close to the Israeli culture in terms of family-oriented values and stuff. And I almost choked on my coffee. Because this is not what I expected to hear based on all other stuff that I know about Israel. This to me sounded like something an Israeli new historian would say like "Arabs and Jews lived together and had similar cultures until Theodor Herzl brought European colonialism and Ashkenazim gaslighted Mizrahim that Jews are an outpost of civilization is the sea of barbarism and are superior to Arabs."
Western Zionists still have no shortage of racism against Arabs, whom they view as primitive third world rural people that stand in the way of expanding the great Judeo-Christian civilization. And while I understand that Israel simply tolerates not likes these people given how Europeans and Christians persecuted them the most among all people, I still expected to find in Israel merely some other form of racism and not that.
Ok, so the average person knows nothing. Average Israeli doesn’t knows that he lives on a destroyed Arab village and its former name. Doesn’t knows about discrimination or Israeli Arabs like how they kept on 2% of Israeli land by decades of racist Zoning laws made to prevent the territorial growth of Arab localities. But still, they had to hear enough about what's going on in your country.
So I don't understand. This interviewee was not the only one like that. Others did not expressed it in such words, but I also did not seen them express any "superior West vs primitive East" hostility. So then how do they then go and vote for Netanyahu or other war criminals that explicitly state "when I'll be in power, I will fight against the Palestinian demographic threat and Judaize our cities!". Or (I speculate): "I served in Lebanon and annihilated those civilian homes for Israel, making those Christians hate us for generations!'.
How is this system works? Are Israelis like Americans "I don't care about others, promise me social benefits and you can do imperialism"? Or how does the regime that breaks international laws so much (and probably sponsors whose Western racists or they sponsor it) manufactures consent from chill people who don't disrespect Arab culture? Are they just super vengeful? Like, Israelis are chill until somebody kills a few of them (there were lesser attacks then Oct 7 that still made them massacre thousands almost in a 100 of yours for every 1 of ours revenge ratio), then its time for collective punishments and they don't care about what conditions made Arabs do it? Extreme egoism while appreciating other cultures? Or not even that and they are not really interested in what their army does abroad at all?