It was, to put it mildly, foolish of the veteran Democratic party strategist James Carville to say the other day, when asked about the pro-Israel position of the great majority of Republican voters, “It’s really about the racism that drives the thing. . . . The reason I suspect that most of these people describe themselves as pro-Israel is because the Jews [in Israel] are whiter than the Palestinians.”

As was pointed out in the wake of Carville’s remarks, Israelis are not demonstrably “whiter than Palestinians”; nor, since both groups vary greatly in skin color, would it be feasible to come up with a metric that might enable a comparison to be made. There are light-skinned, darker-skinned, and dark-skinned Palestinian Arabs, and light-skinned, darker-skinned, and dark-skinned Israeli Jews—and while Israelis and Palestinians can usually tell at a glance which of the two groups one of them belongs to, they do not do so on the basis of skin color. What they instinctively look for are other indicators, such as body language, facial expression, hair style, clothing, and head garb, and sometimes they guess wrong.

It is commonplace to observe that, when applied to skin color, white and black are as much sociological as physical categories. Many so-called whites are far from white; many blacks are not at all black. Nor does it necessarily have to do with ancestry. As we all know, Barack Obama’s mother was white and Kamala Harris’s was a native of India. If both Obama and Harris are considered, and consider themselves, black, this is because they identify with the African American community and because this seems natural to most Americans. As the Columbia University linguist and New York Times language columnist John McWhorter noted in a recent column:

Imagine how strange it would be if someone called [Obama] white. Imagine how strange it would be if he called himself white. . . . My maternal grandfather was light enough that he could easily have passed for white. My mother was quite light-skinned, too. Yet I have never considered myself anything but Black, nor did my grandfather or my mother. To look at photos of the three of us and see three “Black” people makes perfect sense to me because I have never known anything else.

True, many younger Americans with histories like Obama’s or Harris’s prefer to call themselves biracial, a relatively recent usage that was not an option in the past. (My 1955  Oxford Universal Dictionary, for example, reprinted with “corrections and revised addenda” from an original 1933 edition, does not even list “biracial” as a word.) The growing popularity of the word biracial reflects profound changes in attitude toward race and racial background in the United States, since traditionally, Americans of mixed ancestry have been expected to identify with the racial affiliation of either one set of their ancestors or the other; moreover, racist attitudes dictated that even in cases of white appearance, such as that of John McWhorter’s grandfather, a single known black forebear was enough to classify the person in question as black (or “Negro” or “colored” at a time when these words were still admissible).

Long before biracial, of course, English had terms to describe persons of mixed racial descent. These were words like “mulatto,” which designated the offspring of one black and one white parent; “quadroon” and “octaroon” for those having one black grandparent or great-grandparent; and “half-caste” and “half-breed” for those descended from unions between white Americans or Europeans and non-originally-African populations such as Native Americans and Asians. All these words, however, had a pejorative or semi-pejorative tone, and individuals almost never used them to refer to themselves. For one thing, there were no mulatto, octaroon, or quadroon communities in America to associate oneself with. For another, as racist a country as America was, mulatto indicated an even lower status than black, since, there being very few interracial marriages, which were outrightly illegal in many American states, mixed racial descent almost always meant one or another degree of illegitimacy. It was often better to be considered black, even if one’s skin color was brown, tan, or nearly white, than mulatto, which had a whiff of scandalousness that black did not.

And Israel? Contemporary Israeli Hebrew has nothing like any of these words. Israelis speak of Ashkenazim, Sephardim, and Mizrahim, of rusim, teymanim, gruzinim, etyopim, and other nationalities in their midst (by which they often mean native-born Israelis whose parents or grandparents came from Russia, Yemen, Georgia, Ethiopia, or elsewhere), but they do not use words designating skin color; nor do they have terms for the offspring of intermarried couples, such as the child of a Russian father and an Ethiopian mother. There admittedly was a period—or more accurately, two of them—in which the word sh’ḥorim, “blacks,” was used derogatorily by some Israelis for groups of new immigrants: the first in the 1950s, when it was applied to Jews arriving in Israel from Arab countries, and the second, in the 1990s, to Jews coming from Ethiopia. In both these cases, however, public disapproval of such language banished it from everyday speech fairly quickly.

In general, it can be said of Israelis that, while they are as capable of prejudice as anyone else, their prejudices are not racial. They notice skin, eye, and hair color, of course (who doesn’t?), and use them to make distinctions—this blond, blue-eyed person is an ashkenazi, this person of swarthy complexion person is a mizrahi, this tan-skinned person is a teymani, this brown person is an etyopi—but these distinctions do not confer a sense of Otherness. As an American-born Israeli acquaintance once said to me, “When I see a black person in America, I see a black person. When I see a black person in Israel, I see a Jew.”

Toward whom are many Israeli Jews prejudiced? The answer is obvious: toward Arabs, and specifically, toward Palestinian Arabs. But here, too, it is important to emphasize: there is nothing racial about this. The prejudice that the light-skinned Israeli Jew feels toward the dark-skinned Palestinian Arab is no different from the prejudice that the dark-skinned Israeli Jew feels toward the light-skinned Palestinian Arab. In both cases, there are the same feelings of superiority, disdain, fear, and distrust—feelings, it needs to be said, that are very much the same as those that most Palestinian Arabs harbor for Israeli Jews.

You can call such prejudice nationalist, or culturalist, or religionist, but it is not racist. It is the prejudice that conflicted groups and peoples have felt toward each other throughout history, whether they have been Greeks and Turks, Chinese and Japanese, or Apaches and Comanches, and it tends to end or dissipate only when, after decades or centuries, the conflict itself does. It is rarely the case that changed attitudes lead to changed politics. More often, changed politics lead to changed attitudes: this is what happened in the United States as a result of the civil-rights movement of the 1960s and it is what will happen in the Middle East when a Palestinian-Israeli peace is achieved. Americans like James Carville should not project their problems onto peoples who already have enough of their own.