This chapter looks at the interpretations of the series by the Arab/Palestinian Israeli state minority audience in Uhm Al-Fahm. Half decoded “Jews”; one-third decoded Palestinians. All concluded there were “Arab” characters in Sesame Street, meaning Arab/Palestinian Israelis. Drawing on assumptions about language, physical features, or attire of characters, they typically converted Jewish Israeli characters into “Arabs,” moving them from the national to the civic axis, still Israeli but specifically Arab/Palestinian Israelis like themselves. Palestinian characters moved from the civic to the national on the continuum, and were interpreted as just “Arabs.” A majority held negative to very negative attitudes about Jewish Israelis, and very positive to very negative attitudes about Palestinians, their other shared other. In some cases they negatively stereotyped the former as “police” and the latter as “dirty, primitive or poor.” Optimistically for peace-building, most nonetheless adopted positive attitudes toward all the characters they had “correctly” decoded as pro-social and nice, and were able to generalize those mediated experiences to the other characters on screen and to the real world. This suggests there is some room for Sesame Street to influence the Arab/Palestinian Israeli audience’s inter-grouping attitudes towards these shared others.

This chapter parses the study’s conclusions: it took only five years for these young stateless nation, state-bearing nation, and state minority audiences to become militarily, politically, economically, and socially encoded by the global interstate system. The children unwittingly replicated the violence of the conflicts surrounding them and expressed political opinions that their partners’ elimination was the sole solution. The glocal, hybrid, open and closed mediated text imagined the achievement of what each audience defined peace to be—justice of an independent Palestine; security of a safe Israel, and equality inside Israel. But it sidestepped the structural and narrative realities of the political conflicts and so could not address and change political beliefs. While communicating peacebuilding, the text did not communicate peacemaking. And even much of its peacebuilding thrust was “lost upon” audience members when they resisted the texts pro-social depictions of friendships between and among Palestinians and Israelis, in particular, between Palestinians and Jewish Israelis.

This chapter offers a theoretical overview of the modern world system: a system ordered by states rather than nations. The normative acceptance of the unit and design of the state internal to this, the interstate system, proscribes that people should live sedentarized lives within clearly demarcated state borders, governed by statebearing nations ruling over them. Sesame Street’s adaptation of the interstate system, in turn, meant that Israeli citizens (Jewish and Palestinian citizens of the state of Israel) were bound to their street-state, Rechov Sumsum, and later, Sippuray Sumsum, and Palestinian citizens (Palestinians citizens of the non-state institution of the Palestinian Authority), to Shara’a Simsim, and later, Hikayat Simsim. If citizens crossed one-street-state into the other, the assumption was that they would necessarily return “home” to their own bordered street-state.

In an effort to explain why the audience members interpreted Sesame Street in the manner they did, in Part III I ground their responses in the multi-sited ethnographies I conducted within each of the ethno-political grouping community contexts, moving beyond my analysis relating their reception to inter-“group” stereotypes and attitudes. I link the children to their specific communities of residence and discuss how the glocalization of interstate systemic forces at that level socialized them and, in turn, how their everyday lives became quietly and discretely reshaped by their respective conflict zones, altering their readings of the text. This allows me to elaborate on what the resultant segmented audience decodings tell us about their Palestinian, Jewish Israeli and Arab/Palestinian Israeli cultures-in-the-making, and trace the pathways that altered their interpretations and why, as well as to offer redesign recommendations.

My first mission as I evaluated Israeli and Palestinian Sesame Street as a PeaceComm intervention was to understand the logic behind how it was designed. In order to assess whether what the Sesame Street audiences interpreted was indeed a direct (or even an indirect) result of the producers’ intentions, and so whether the intervention was effective precisely because of the producers’ efforts, I conducted an encoding study alongside my decoding study. This additional analysis outlines what features comprise the symbols the authors of these texts (in this case, the television producers and all those involved in the Sesame Street coproductions) attempted to include in the series, and what was rendered ultimately in the finished text. An encoding study aims to achieve this inasmuch as a text state can ever be assumed to be stable, given that audiences, or readers, do not necessarily read the text as planned.

Part II describes how the audiences of practice—the stateless nation, or Palestinians, the state-bearing nation, Jewish-Israelis, and the state minority, Arab Palestinian Israelis—decoded the text, as their interpretations related to their respective conflict-resolution outcome goals of justice, security and equality. Chapter 4 outlines how the majority of the stateless nation audience did not “see” Jewish Israeli characters, referring to them as “Jews,” and negatively stereotyped them an “army of infidels.” These Palestinian children actively resisted the text regarding their Jewish Israeli others and did not observe the series’ encoded pro-social relations between Jewish Israelis and Palestinians. Most interpreted those characters to be “Palestinians” or “Arabs,” generalizing their positive attitudes toward all Palestinian and Arab/Palestinian Israeli characters to their wider grouping on screen and off. Cognitive imbalance explains why 20 percent who decoded good-natured “partial Jews” did not generalize them to “Jews”. Sesame Street is unlikely to alter their inter-grouping attitudes toward Jewish Israelis or their policy-relevant political beliefs, even more crucial to managing the region’s ethnopolitical and multi-state conflicts. The majority constructed Arab/Palestinian Israelis as like them but living elsewhere, and held positive to very positive attitudes toward them. But their initial attitudes render this development less important.

Describes the logic behind Sesame Street interventions’ design and goals, through the performance of concise encoding and production studies of the text of Israeli and Palestinian versions. Compares how the producers intended, negotiated, and expressed the text’s encoding with how the child audience decoded the series after broadcast, thereby revealing how the PeaceComm interventions may have “worked” on the children. The glocalized hybrid series—produced in the euphoric period of the Oslo Peace Accords in the mid-1990s by separate but intertwined Israeli, Palestinian and American teams, later joined by a Jordanian crew, in multiple zones—interpreted and negotiated the American team’s, Sesame Workshop’s, global concept to fit local concerns, incorporating original Sesame Street segments dubbed into Hebrew or Arabic during both optimistic and crisis conflict phases. They created two separate street-state sets and series, privileging the intersection of the axis of ethnopolitical “group” identity and state-based citizenship rights to populate each street-state. The closed text of a “mediated contact effects” PeaceComm model illustrating pro-social interactions between and within the two streets operated in tandem with television’s open text that allowed children to read it on different levels. This inherent contradiction complicated the series’ potential to effectively build and make peace.

For the state-bearing nation audience, Palestinian characters were absent from the series, only 25% of those who responded clearly seeing them. Chapter 5 describes how these Jewish Israeli children from Alfei Menashe argued that since Palestinians are “terrorists,” the “Israeli” producers, Jewish Israelis just like they are, would not have allowed them onto Sesame Street to harm them. They used production-based conventions to reinterpret what they perceived as the imbalance of encoded characters who were both “good people” and their partners to conflict. The majority converted both the national and civic identity of Palestinian characters: 80 percent transformed them into Jewish Israelis, or simply “Israelis”; 25 percent into Arab/Palestinian Israelis. 56% decoded their shared others, Arab/Palestinian Israeli characters. These children interpreted all the characters as “good people,” whether defined as Jewish Israeli, Arab/Palestinian Israeli or Palestinian, though none generalized their mediated experiences about their other out-grouping, or Palestinians, to additional characters and real-world scenarios. Where their shared other was concerned, Arab/Palestinian-Israelis, only a minority generalized those experiences, such that at least regarding their shared other, the series could potentially move this audience attitudes, which otherwise ranged from negative to neutral.