Politics and Sociolinguistic Reflexes: Palestinian Border Villages (review)

Palestinian society in Israel and in the West Bank has faced social upheavals during the past half century that have included migration, forced divisions, modernization, a growing urbanization, and increased contact of various sorts with both the larger Arab world and Israeli culture. Political upheavals have included the split of the Palestinian population after 1948 into the West Bank (under Jordanian control), Israel, and the Gaza Strip (largely under Egyptian control), the Israeli hegemony over these groups of Palestinians since 1967, and the Palestinian uprising (the Intifada) against Israeli rule in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

The work under review investigates the sociolinguistic manifestations of the political and social changes that have affected the Palestinians in Israel and the West Bank. In particular, the author focuses his study on two (Muslim) Palestinian border villages—Zalafa and Barta’a. Both are in the Ara Valley on the border between Israel and the West Bank. Zalafa is an Israeli Palestinian village while Barta’a is a divided village. Western Barta’a is in Israel (within the ‘Green Line’, i.e. the Israeli border that emerged out of the 1948 war), but Eastern Barta’a is in the West Bank. Physical barriers were erected after 1948 separating Western Barta’a under Israeli control from Eastern Barta’a under Jordanian control.

How have the different social and political realities of the past half century affected the sociolinguistic patterns of these Palestinian border villages? In the first chapter the author lays out the background and scope of his study, previewing for us some of his major findings. The author’s work is a product of ten years of fieldwork (from the mid 1980s to the mid 1990s) that he along with some colleagues undertook in the villages. The book brings together findings from his own previous work (including his dissertation from Bar-Ilan University) as well as his collaborative work with Bernard Spolsky and others regarding the sociolinguistic situation of contemporary Palestinian society. Chs. 2–6 lay out the political, historical, social, economic, and educational differences between Palestinians in Israel and in the West Bank. An important difference is the orientation toward Israel of the Israeli Palestinians as opposed to the orientation toward Jordan among the West Bank Palestinians. This is seen for example in the different educational systems and is manifested by a knowledge of fluent Hebrew among most Israeli Palestinians. Politically, West Bank Palestinians were active in the Intifada, risking arrest by the Israeli authorities for their action, while Israeli Palestinians did not directly participate in the Intifada although many offered moral and financial support. The author suggests that the reactions of the Israeli Palestinians to the Intifada reflect a growing double identity (a ‘double consciousness’, we might say): Israeli with respect to politics, economy, and certain sociocultural aspects, but Palestinian with respect to identity and cultural uniqueness.

Chs. 7–13 are the sociolinguistic heart of the book. Language information in the border villages was gathered through recorded observations, structured interviews, tasks involving reading passages, word lists and picture naming, questionnaires about language identity and attitudes, and language diaries kept by secondary students in the border villages under the author’s guidance. (Details of these are provided in the appendices.) Given the number of people recorded and interviewed, the author amassed a large database on which to establish his findings. For example, structured interviews were carried out with 81 people from the village of Zalafa, 40 from Eastern Barta’a and 41 from Western Barta’a. The interviewees from each sector were matched for gender, education level, occupation, religious observance, and amount of contact with Israeli Jews. The specific linguistic variables that the author looked at were various features of the rural Palestinian dialect shared by the villages and the use of Hebrew lexical items in their Arabic speech. The variables of the rural vernacular dialect that the author examined involved features of pronunciation—the use of [č] for standard Arabic /k...