“Female Citizens and Male Citizens of Israel!”

“Citizens of Israel!” the country’s president Yitzḥak Herzog began a televised speech this month in which he asked both sides in the current political crisis to take a step back from the brink. Or at least that is how it would translate into English. In Hebrew, what Herzog said was, “Ezraḥiyot v’ezraḥey yisra’el!”—literally, “Female citizens and male citizens of Israel!”

Since Hebrew is a heavily gendered language in which not only nouns but also verbs and pronouns are either masculine or feminine, this might seem an ordinary thing to have done. It wasn’t, though. A grammatical feature of Hebrew is that, when addressing or speaking about a mixed masculine-feminine group, it’s the masculine form of the verb, noun, or pronoun that is used. “Ha’im atem shom’im oti?, “Do you hear me?”, a speaker will ask an audience of men and women, using the masculine pronoun atem, “you,” rather than the feminine aten, and the masculine verb shom’im, “hear,” rather than the feminine shom’ot. And by the same token, one would normally turn to the Israeli public on television simply as ezraḥey yisra’el, using the masculine ezraḥ (construct plural, ezraḥey) alone, it being understood that this includes women, too.

Indeed, this is how it has been done in the past. “Ezraḥey ha-moledet ha-ivrit,” “Citizens of the Hebrew homeland,” Menachem Begin launched his first radio address on May 14, 1948, the day Israel declared its independence. (In reading the declaration aloud that same day, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion plunged right into it without a salutation.) Such has been the custom in recent years, too, even when speakers have felt the need to take feminist concerns about language into account. Thus, in speaking to the nation at the time of Israel’s first coronavirus lockdown two years ago, President Reuven Rivlin addressed it as, “Ezraḥey yisra’el, yakiray v’yakirotay,” “Citizens of Israel, my dear people [masculine] and my dear people [feminine].” Citizens masculine and citizens feminine he left to Herzog.