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Actually, both Jews and Arabs are, as the following cultural examples will show.

Both Jews and Arabs fear ayin hara (evil eye) or the ill wishes of those that envy us. Jews deal with it by saying ‘kin ayin hara,’ ‘bli ayin hara’ or spitting three times before praising someone. Arabs deal with it by either dressing up their infant sons as girls, or allowing them to become filthy and unkempt playing naked in the streets. Same concept. Different manner of handling it.

Both Jews and Arabs, on the birth of a child, affix a picture of an inverted hand over the door. Jews have kaballistic writings or psalms written on the fingers of the hand. Arabs just have a hand, probably because literacy is a rare thing among them.

Both Jews and Arabs honor scholars. But only Jews have studiousness and scholarship as commonplace. Arabs will honor a scholar, but won’t bother learning to read themselves.

Both Jews and Arabs believe that human speech can create reality. Jews will say ‘chas vesholom,’ ‘lo aleinu,’ or ‘chas vechalila’ before discussing death and other misfortunes, as a ward against it, and will not say the name of the ‘big C’ out loud, and will not say such common things as ‘you’re going to die for that’ or ‘if they hang you, your eyes will bug out,’ instead speaking in the third person as a matter of policy. Arabs will do the exact opposite, cursing people they hate with the most graphic, hideous terms they can muster, and also say the most outrageous lies and slanders, knowing them to be untrue, because they believe that their utterance creates the reality.

So in many respects, Arabs and Jews share common cultural traits that can be called ‘semitic,’ but in the case of Arabs, they differ from Jews in that they lean towards vile venality, whereas Jews try to lean as far away from it as we can.