Lucy Aharish
Lucy AharishHadas Parush/Flash 90

Lucy Aharish, Israel's best known Arab TV anchor who hosts the daily English edition on i24news television, told CNN in an interview on Thursday that Jews and Arabs no longer trust each other.

Aharish also said that there was a lack of an initiative on both the part of the leadership of Israel and the Palestinian Authority to end the current terror wave.

"For a long, long time we have been seeing that Israeli and Palestinian society are going more and more further from one another," she told CNN. “The Israeli and the Palestinian society, although we are living on the same land, the ideas, the lack of diplomacy, the lack of initiatives, peace initiatives, is creating a vacuum.”

“When you have a vacuum, you have terror,” Aharish continued. “When you have a vacuum you’re giving the stage to extremists on both sides, the extremists from the Jewish extreme side and from the Muslim extreme side. And when you don’t have leaders with a path, with a direction...when you don’t have a father and a mother who tell you, 'Hey, stop doing it because I said so!', it seems that we are starting to act like children, but we’re starting to act like terrorist children, and we’re doing whatever we want and however we want, because nobody is telling us not to.”

Asked about the lack of willingness on both sides to do something to stop the violence, Aharish replied, "Somebody needs to do something. The silence that is coming from the United States, this is something that you cannot stay silent on.”

“This time it’s different,” she continued. “People are afraid in the streets of Israel. I usually say to people, ‘What you’re watching on TV is not the same as what is happening on the streets. We are not stabbing one another, we are not killing one another.’ We are [now] killing one another! We are killing ourselves, Jews and Arabs. We lost control. And it seems that the United States is not doing anything.”

“Maybe the United States has given up on us, but I can also say today that it seems that also our leaders - and I’m talking to you as an Israeli, as a Muslim, as an Arab - it seems that our leaders from both sides gave up on us,” said Aharish.

Aharish was asked what motivates young 13-year-old Palestinians to carry out stabbing attacks in Israel, and replied, "When people don’t have hope, when they are not going to school, when in their school or in their neighborhoods they are seeing martyr posters and posters of terrorists portraying them as heroes - this is what you will get.”

“When a 13-year-old boy doesn’t have a playground, even a PlayStation or he doesn’t have an iPad, or he doesn’t have a book to interest him in other things, he will find himself another path to idolize. And this is what happens when there’s a vacuum. For these boys - they don’t have a persona to see and look up to,” she added.