Israeli Arabs Are Speaking More Hebrew, and That’s a Good Thing

Tsvi Barel, the left-wing Middle East commentator of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, has a bone to pick with Israel’s Arabs. They use too much Hebrew and aren’t militant enough in defense of Arabic. Not only, he writes in a July 25 column, are the signs of shops and businesses in Israeli Arab towns and villages mostly in Hebrew, despite the fact that their customers are all or mainly Arabs, but the conversation of Israeli Arabs when talking among themselves is increasingly full of Hebrew words and phrases. At a time when they are up in arms over Israel’s newly passed Nationality Law, one of whose features is the demotion of Arabic from an official language to one merely accorded “special status,” Israeli Arabs are actively collaborating, says Barel, in Arabic’s denigration. “If the status of Arabic,” he declares, “symbolizes the extent to which Arabs are equal citizens, . . . the battle cannot be left to Jewish liberals.”

Arabs and Jewish liberals alike, it would seem, should do all they can to keep the use of Hebrew by Israel’s Arab citizens to a necessary minimum. Heaven forbid that it should be for anything but communication with Jews—and even that could be reduced if only more Jews had the multicultural decency to learn Arabic!

The basic assumption behind this view is that fighting the influence of Hebrew on contemporary Arab Israeli life is a worthy form of resistance to the doctrine of Jewish supremacism that—so its critics contend—the Nationality Law embodies. Whatever one thinks of that law, such an assumption is perverse. Not that Barel’s observation concerning the steadily growing use of Hebrew by Israeli Arabs is incorrect. It’s just that for anyone genuinely interested in Israel’s welfare, this is good news.