Despite universities’ efforts to recruit diverse student bodies, members of different demographic groups remain susceptible to avoiding “the other.”
That situation is particularly striking at this moment on college campuses in Israel, given the groundbreaking developments in the broader Middle East region, which represent the very opposite trend. In 2020 alone, Israel reached historic U.S.-brokered agreements to normalize relations with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco. During the previous 40 years combined, Israel had signed comparable peace deals with only two Arab countries: Egypt (1979) and Jordan (1994).
When I recently traveled to Dubai, I witnessed small groups of Hebrew-speaking Israelis enjoying food or hookah right alongside small groups of Arabic speakers at open-air cafes alongside the Emirati city’s marina. While not a snapshot of deep relationships, these interactions do promise dramatic change for the Middle East.
Yet within Israel itself, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has persisted, and with it comes lingering and often heated tensions between the country’s Jewish majority and its Arab minority (which comprises approximately 20 percent of the population). These dynamics permeate Israel’s college campuses. While campuses are not necessarily hotspots for the Arab-Israeli conflict, the frosty nature of student interactions can be indicative of the barriers to Jewish-Arab cooperation.
According to a survey commissioned by the Abraham Initiatives NGO among 4,697 students and graduates from 12 different academic institutions in Israel, only 15 percent of Jewish students take part in joint projects or seminars with Arab students, while 58 percent of Jewish students report that they do not have any kind of collaboration with Arab students. Additionally, 60 percent of Arab students feel that Jews are favored on campus and 50 percent of Jewish students feel that Arab students are favored.
Gaps in educational attainment also factor into this equation. Although Israel’s Council for Higher Education found last year that Arab enrollment in Israeli higher education institutions had more than doubled since 2007, Arab students’ share of the undergraduate (17 percent), master’s (14 percent) and doctoral (7 percent) student populations in the country continue to lag behind the Arab proportion of the Israeli population at-large.
