Ayelet Movsowitz, a Jewish Israeli, peers out the car window as her ride veers off the highway and follows the signs to an Arab village.

"Are you crazy?" she asks in an opening scene of an episode of Israel's version of the television reality show "Wife Swap." "Don't tell me I am going to have to cook all day, kabobs and what not. Oy. I'm in an Arab village. I just hope it's not a hostile village."

Meanwhile, Amal Ahmed Abdullah, 28, her Arab Israeli counterpart, slowly walks past a large Jacuzzi in Mrs. Movsowitz's house about 90 miles north, in the Galilee region of Israel.

Her mood dampens when she examines the contents of the refrigerator. "There is nothing spicy here," she says, pronouncing this a typical European Jewish home. "A real Ashkenazi fridge. They don't know how to cook."

As gimmicky as it sounds, swapping an Arab wife and a Jewish wife is a radical notion in a country where Jews and Arabs rarely mix, let alone live in one another's homes and care for one another's children.
Jewish Israelis lead separate lives from the Arab Israelis who make up 20 percent of the country. Dealings are usually commercial, not social. Arabs complain that they suffer from discrimination and suspicion because of their identification with Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

The question the show's producers posed is one many Israelis ask themselves: Could Jewish and Arab Israelis get along, absent political and historical tensions? And will those tensions ever truly be absent?