regarding the Israeli characterisation of Arabs as only being culturally able to understand the use of force, this attitude seems prevelent in Isreali media discourse also.
Robert Blechers article
Converging Upon War (worth readin in it's entirety) in the middle east report online makes reference to this, or at least a related characterisation of Islam as hateful & radical.
This is similar to the Bush administrations reductionist mantra of 'they hate our freedoms', because they are essentially'ignorant' & hate filled due to their essential Islamic nature, whilst taking no account of specific circumstances & grievances - this is understandable, but regrettable in U.S. politics though, given the huge influnce of what has come to be termed the 'Israel Lobby' - as investigated by Mearsheimer & Walt in their fairly recent article, which made huge waves in the states.
For many in Israel, the two fronts are conjoined in a war against a unified "axis of terror and hate created by Iran, Syria, Hizballah and Hamas," in the words of Tzipi Livni, the Israeli vice prime minister and minister of foreign affairs, "that wants to end any hope for peace." Ben Caspit, one of Ma‘ariv's leading columnists, put it more colorfully: "Israel is dealing with radical, messianic Islam, which extends its arms like an octopus, creating an axis from Tehran to Gaza by way of Damascus and Beirut. With people like these there is nothing to talk about. The fire of a war against infidels burns in them." The only fitting response in this situation is a military one, claimed Ron Ben-Yishai in the newspaper Yediot Aharonot, in order to "create a new strategic balance between us and radical Islam." This belief has wide support among Israelis
As Blecher then writes:
But radical Islam is not the defining or unifying factor that links the south with the north: Hamas and Hizballah have different bones to pick with Israel. Hamas' struggle is against occupation, and more specifically, about how to achieve a mutual cessation of hostilities and formalize, in one way or another, its right to govern the territories of the Palestinian Authority as the Palestinians' elected government. Hizballah's goals in the current fighting are more limited: to secure the release of Lebanese and Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails while simultaneously flexing the movement's muscles to stave off pressure to disarm. By lumping together these different struggles, and tying them to Damascus and distant Tehran, Israel casts resolvable political disagreements as unfathomable, irrational hatred, thereby justifying its broad and violent offensive
This blanket labelling, with no historical context (Hamas for instance never carried out operation's within Israel & only started the horrendous practice of suicide bombing
after the Baruch Goldstein massacre at the temple of the rock & Hizbollah rose to prominence in response to the illegal occupation of southern Lebanon by the Israelis & later their proxy the Maronite South Lebanes Army) is similar in many respects to the neo-con labelling of various different Islamic (some islamist, some fundamentalist) movements as 'fundamentalist terrorists', even though they had helped to fund & create many of them, especially in the resistance in Afghanistan to the Russian occupation). This is also similar to Israeli intelligence funding & suppport of Hamas initially as a foil to the more moderate & democratic native movements active within the first intifada & as a counter to the PLO (A freankensteins monster if ever there was one).
For more information on the idealogical links between the neo-cons (whose anti fascist idealogical father Leo Strauss basically proposed a form pf 'beign' & 'moral' fascism in order to stave off 'true' fascism') the three part documentary 'The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear' is a good starting point.