Terrorists, their motives, and their victims as perceived by Israeli Jewish and Arab children and adolescents

Abstract

This paper examines how terrorists, their motives, and the possible implications of terrorist acts are perceived by Israeli secular and religious Jewish and Christian Arab children and adolescents. Content analysis was conducted on the responses of 471 elementary and high school students to a semi‐structured questionnaire. Although complexity of thinking increases from elementary to high school for all groups, the magnitude of this increase depends on nationality, religiosity and issue. Political perceptions crystallize during the transition from elementary to high school, creating both greater differences between Arab and Jewish students concerning the perceptions of motives and possible solutions to the conflict, as well as less nationalist, one‐sided perceptions of the victims. Moral, practical, and educational implications of the findings are discussed.

Keywords:

• terrorism
• intergroup relations
• political socialization
• political conflict
• terrorist concept development

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by grants from the Levinsky College of Education and the Mofet Institute of Professional Training. The authors wish to thank Sylvia Sa’adi and Tagrid Seydi for their support and translation of the questionnaires, Itzhak Gilat for help with the statistical analyses and Dr Aharon Bizman for helpful comments.

Notes

1. Unless indicated otherwise all chi square reported, are tests of association.

2. One‐way chi square test of fit.