<div dir="ltr"><h1 id="headline">The Irony of Erasing Arabic</h1>
<h3 class="">Making Hebrew Israel's Only Language Ignores History</h3>
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<img src="http://forward.com/image/2/630/0/5//assets/images/articles/hebrew-article-100614.jpg" alt="Blocked Out: A vandalized street sign in Israel that blots out Arabic.">
<div class="">Parrhesia Art Collective</div>
<div class=""><strong>Blocked Out:</strong> A vandalized street sign in Israel that blots out Arabic.</div>
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<h4>By <a href="http://forward.com/authors/liora-r-halperin/">Liora R. Halperin</a></h4>
<div id="article-date">Published October 06, 2014, issue of <a href="http://forward.com/issues/2014-10-10/">October 10, 2014</a>.</div>
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<p>In late August, a group of Knesset members from the right flank of the Likud party, Yisrael Beiteinu and the Jewish Home party <a href="http://www.haaretz.co.il/news/education/1.2416209">proposed</a>
a bill that would make Hebrew the only official language of Israel,
annulling a requirement in existence since the British Mandate period
that all official documents be published in Arabic as well as in Hebrew.
Similar bills to eliminate or demote the official status of Arabic were
proposed in 2011 and 2008. Critics have pointed out that this bill is
part of a broader effort to affirm the “Jewish” character of the state
(as opposed to its democratic character) by enshrining Jewishness into
Israel’s basic laws. Israeli President Reuven Rivlin, for one, has
spoken out against it.</p>
<p>A historical perspective is worth adding to the
discussion, one that highlights a contradictory Zionist view of language
that has existed since the British ruled Palestine: As Zionists
advocated forcefully for the very principle of national language rights,
they fantasized about a society in which there would be no national
competitors to Hebrew. Israel still is navigating between these two
positions.</p>
<div class="">
<strong>Related</strong>
<ul><li>
<a href="http://forward.com/articles/187585/">Did Adam and Eve Speak Hebrew in the Garden of Eden?</a>
</li><li>
<a href="http://forward.com/articles/154253/">Memo to American Jews: Learn Hebrew</a>
</li><li>
<a href="http://forward.com/articles/13312/">Israeli Arabs and Hebrew</a>
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<p>The very British Mandate-era law that the bill’s
promoters now want to overturn was one for which Zionists themselves
(more than any other group) strongly advocated. Given the demographics
of Palestine, it was established that Arabic would be deemed an official
language by the British; less straightforward was the supposition that
Hebrew should be given that status as well. After all, Hebrew was
nominally the language of only 8% of the population when the British
arrived, and in practice it was not even the dominant language among
that Jewish population that claimed it as their own. The British
rationale for recognizing Hebrew as well as Arabic was their
understanding of Palestine as being the home of two nations, each of
which had a national language.</p>
<p>Zionist activists were quick to remind the British of
those language rights at any point when the official regulation, first
promulgated in 1920, seemed to be violated. Frederick Kisch, head of the
Zionist Executive in Jerusalem, called attention in 1923 to the
language situation of Jewish settlements in the Beit She’an Valley
region, arguing that although the 792 Jews in that area were far below
the 20% threshold for Hebrew to be deemed official, he asked that the
government nonetheless accede to the demands of “villages of Jews who
can’t use any other language but Hebrew.”</p>
<p>To justify the Knesset bill, its sponsors point to
international norms. As Shimon Ohayon, the main organizer of the
proposal, put it, “In most countries around the world the language of
the country is the language spoken by the majority of the population,”
suggesting that such a policy “contribute[s] to social solidarity.”
Indeed, countries with a unifying civic nationalism, such as France,
ensured since early days that the national language was energetically
spread to the far corners of the country (and that regional languages
were demoted to secondary status in the process), out of the assumption
that national belonging was premised on language unity. But Israel,
understanding itself as a Jewish state, has never assumed that every
citizen is an equal member of the nation — this is the reason why
current citizenship policy makes a strict division between “Jewish” or
“Arab“ and the high court has invalidated demands that nationality be
listed as, simply, “Israeli.”</p>
<p>Zionists were comfortable vocally and persistently
demanding their language rights as a national minority in Mandate
Palestine — but did not often consider openly what sort of language
policies they would put into place if and when they received
independence, or if they should become a majority. If anything, the
working assumption seemed to be that they would have little tolerance
for languages other than their own. The Tel Aviv municipality would
regularly castigate those who wrote letters in languages other than
Hebrew, reminding them that they should treat the municipality like any
monolingual country. For example, the city hall’s reply to a Mr. Fritz
Epstein in March 1940 stated, in response to a routine request for
municipal services sent in German, that he needed to write in Hebrew.
“It seems to me that we are allowed to demand of you that you behave
with the same courtesy that you would show in any place where you lived
outside your homeland” — in other words, that he use the single sole
language of the Jewish country-in-the-making.</p>
<p>These prestate institutions were “play-acting”
language sovereignty despite their minority and insecure status. Their
sense of insecurity was warranted in the prestate period; today it
appears as a more anachronistic mode of thinking that reveals an
inability to cease feeling like a minority despite demonstrable Israeli
Jewish national strength. Ohayon is the head of the Knesset “lobbying
group for the promotion of Hebrew.” This group, in its name and mission,
is reminiscent of a series of pro-Hebrew advocacy groups that emerged
during the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s, with names such as “The Union for the
Imposition [<em>hashlatah</em>] of Hebrew,” and “the Central Commission
for the Imposition of Hebrew,” which continually reminded the British of
their language obligations, and reminded fellow Jews of the need to
speak only Hebrew, lest they succumb to the more numerous or more
prestigious languages around them.</p>
<p>These campaigns did have the effect of progressively
turning Hebrew into the dominant spoken language among Jews. With
Israel’s independence in 1948, it seemed to some that the need for
strident language activism was waning, as Hebrew had by that point
become well-rooted and Jewish immigrant languages were indeed being
replaced by Hebrew.</p>
<p>But if Hebrew had successfully exercised the capacity
to displace Jewish mother tongues, Arabic was the linguistic bedrock of
Palestine that Hebrew could not displace. The fantasy of the
mandate-era Tel Aviv municipality could not be wholly put into practice.
The Israeli state, operating from a position of demographic strength
after displacing the majority of Palestinian Arabs in 1948, thus adopted
the liberal strategy of granting nationality rights (as well as a
degree of educational, legal and linguistic autonomy) to the Palestinian
Arab minority. In doing so, they followed in the footsteps of the
British. An increasingly vocal group, however, continues to see this
minority as an unacceptable threat, to see Hebrew (as well as the
state’s Jewishness) as embattled and on the defensive and Jewish
exclusivity as the only recipe for a strong country.</p>
<p>Thus, in addition to ignoring and overlooking
one-fifth of the population and creating distance between Jewish and
Arab citizens, as critics have noted, the bill inverts the very
principle that Zionists themselves tirelessly advocated for decades
before statehood: that a numerically significant group with a
discernible and unified national culture should be granted national
language rights, even if, and precisely because, it is a minority.</p>
<p>
<em><a href="http://www.liorahalperin.com/">Liora R. Halperin</a> is an assistant professor of history and Jewish studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her first book, “<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Babel-Zion-Nationalism-Diversity-Palestine/dp/0300197489/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1411361805&sr=8-1&keywords=liora+halperin">Babel in Zion: Jews, Nationalism, and Language Diversity in Palestine, 1920–1948</a>,” will be published by Yale University Press in November.</em>
</p><div style="overflow:hidden;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:rgb(255,255,255);text-align:left;text-decoration:none;border:medium none"><br>Read more: <a style="color:rgb(0,51,153)" href="http://forward.com/articles/206861/the-irony-of-erasing-arabic/#ixzz3FOxuHomO">http://forward.com/articles/206861/the-irony-of-erasing-arabic/#ixzz3FOxuHomO</a><br></div><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>**************************************<br>N.b.: Listing on the lgpolicy-list is merely intended as a service to its members<br>and implies neither approval, confirmation nor agreement by the owner or sponsor of the list as to the veracity of a message's contents. Members who disagree with a message are encouraged to post a rebuttal, and to write directly to the original sender of any offensive message. A copy of this may be forwarded to this list as well. (H. Schiffman, Moderator)<br><br>For more information about the lgpolicy-list, go to <a href="https://groups.sas.upenn.edu/mailman/">https://groups.sas.upenn.edu/mailman/</a><br>listinfo/lgpolicy-list<br>*******************************************
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