The article focuses on the intercultural role played by translator footnotes in translations of Arabic literature into Hebrew. It is claimed that the ongoing Israeli-Arab conflict has led to ignorance of Arabic culture on the Israeli side and that footnotes have been used by translators to try and 'educate their readers in this regard and decrease their hostility towards Arabs and their culture. The corpus studied here includes 25 novels (translated 1931-1990), 64% of which are folowed by footnotes. Translator footnotes are subdivided by the author into linguistic, cultural and intertextual ones.