We have especial sensitivities, psychic antennae, if you will, alerting us to the presence of others allowing us to identify them, not as individuals but as members of a particular group. It is these sensitivities that make it possible for members of an ethnic group to recognize others despite their having been transformed in subtle ways, through exposure to other cultures manifested by social-behaviour alterations that sometimes conceal their origins.

Most Jews, for example, can pick up signals, in speech patterns, in physical characteristics, in mode of communication that the stranger before them, wherever they come across them, in their own country or on foreign visits shares their heritage. Just as there are patterns often visible or identifiable that betray gays who prefer to remain gender-anonymous. We also become skilled, through no inclination or effort to do so, but through simple observation for no evident purpose, in identifying other backgrounds that present throughout the course of normal human interaction. All of these perceptions can enrich the store of our knowledge as long as they are absorbed neutrally.

One of the cashiers at the supermarket where I shop regularly in my neighbourhood for my groceries has facial characteristics of a kind fairly typical of the Middle East, and I am of the certainty that she is of Semitic origin, an Arab. I do regularly come across others like her, wearing the traditional headscarf, in similar such settings, and their religion and origin is thus readily identifiable. This woman working in the grocery supermarket wears no outward manifestation of religious adherence; she may be Christian, she may be secular.

It seems clear to me that just as I recognize her origins, she recognizes mine. She and I representing an ancient inheritance, and one rife with suspicion, fear and strife between Arab and Jew. Our relationship is cordial and neutral, as it should be, with verbal courtesies exchanged, just as they are between myself and others, neighbours reflecting like origins. Of course, it is primarily because we live in a country that stresses its pride in pluralism and equality that makes these facades possible, but I would like to believe there is depth to the facade, transcending suspicion, fear and worse. Simply because we cannot ever discount the human traits that many people exhibit leaving them open to cordial relations with anyone.

While at the same time I know that this society like most others has more than its share of those who clasp their belief in the inferiority of those whom their clans, tribes and religious affiliation classically term the despised other.