Arabic in an Ethnic Jewish State

This book is the text of the author's doctoral dissertation which she submitted to the Free University of Berlin in 2003. It consists of eight chapters and a conclusion organised over two parts. Part 1 provides a historical background to the status of the Palestinian Arabs in Israel in relation to Zionist ideology, the 'revitalisation' of Hebrew in Ottoman and Mandatory Palestine and Israel's education and language policies in so far as these effect the position of Arabic in Israel. Part 2 deals with the linguistic consequences of these policies by considering three sites of language contact between Hebrew and Arabic: the lexical diffusion of Hebrew lexical items in Arabic, lexical borrowing from Hebrew into Arabic and the maintenance of Arabic as the language of intra-community communication and national identity marking for the Palestinian Arabs in Israel.

The book is largely derivative: it summarises and comments on the findings of other scholars over the past three decades, particularly in Part 2. In spite of this, the book is of value to readers who wish to gain a global picture of the position of Arabic in Israel. It shows how the subordinate status of the Palestinians in Israel is reflected in the subordinate status of their language in spite of its dominance regionally. Arabic in Israel is the subject of discrimination in funding, curricula, linguistic landscaping and use in the institutions of the state in spite of its status as an official language. It is also negatively perceived by Israeli Jews who see it as the language of the enemy. The book sketches out these and other linguistic-cum-educational consequences of the asymmetric power relations between the Palestinian Arabs in Israel and the Israeli Jews. Lexical diffusion and borrowing are shown to be uni-directional, with Arabic as the recipient language, thus reflecting this imbalance in power relations.

The author could have supported her thesis further by investigating the semantic fields of Arabic borrowed terms in Hebrew which signal very strongly the asymmetrical power relations between the two languages. Had she done this, the author would have added significantly to our understanding of the status of Arabic vis-à-vis Hebrew. Also, had the author engaged the 'cultural/linguistic' politics of the term 'Hebrew revitalisation', rather than accepting it at more or less face value as a replacement for the rival and may be older term 'Hebrew revival', she would have showed how the very discourse in which linguistic politics is framed may itself be political. The debate on whether the re-emergence of Hebrew in Palestine as the national language of the Israeli state is a case of revival or revitalisation is unfortunately left out of consideration in the book. The author should, however, be complemented on avoiding the uncritical acceptance of the terminology that some Palestinian writers use to discuss the Arabic language situation in Israel, a subject worthy of consideration as a research topic. In many places she deftly weaves a linguistic path that is not subordinate to the hegemonic linguistic discourse and its enveloping politics that characterise discussions of the language situation in Israel. Arraf is aware of her subjectivity as a Palestinian scholar from Israel and, to a great extent, succeeds in choosing a discourse that steers away from the ideological on both sides of her argument.

One of the best parts of the book is the discussion of how the marginalisation of Arabic overtly and covertly in Israel and how the Jewish opposition to national integration and the establishment of Israel as the state of all its citizens, equally and without prejudice, have in fact helped turn Arabic into a potent symbol of the Palestinians in Israel as a national minority living on its own indigenous land. The author uses this to question the validity of the basic accounts of linguistic vitality which, in objective terms, would predict a language shift to Hebrew among Palestinians...