Am I doing that right, as far as iterating through the Arraylist goes?
No: by calling iterator twice in each iteration, you’re getting new iterators all the time.
The easiest way to write this loop is using the for-each construct:
for (String s : arrayList)
if (s.equals(value))
// ...
As for
java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException: -1
You just tried to get element number -1 from an array. Counting starts at zero.