In the Shadow of Two Languages

About the Author
Analysis

Marzuq al-Halabi is a journalist and writer, a poet, and a literary and cultural critic. He has a regular column in the daily al-Hayat, published in London, Beirut, and Saudi Arabia. He edited the culture pages in the daily al-Ittihad and held various editing positions.

Al-Halabi studied comparative literature, political science, and law. He has participated in, organized, and mentored discussion and research groups on Jewish-Arab relations. In this capacity he has also conducted several studies on relations between the two peoples, including relations in the workplace (published by the Ofek Institute of Management and UNESCO Publications), and he has facilitated meetings between groups in conflict.

Al-Halabi has published many essays and articles, most of them in Arabic, on a variety of topics, including Jewish-Arab relations; the Israeli-Arab and the Israeli-Palestinian conflicts and possible solutions to them; Arabic culture and literature; political science and philosophy; the philosophy of ethics and law; the Holocaust and the Nakba; and communications and civil society. In addition he is a social activist and an organizational and strategic adviser to local governments, civil society organizations, and political organizations.

In Other Words

Introduction by Zohar Kohavi

A mother tongue is familiar, warm, and comfortable. When people speak a language other than their mother tongue, they tend to be not quite themselves. They are constrained by syntax and the limits of their vocabulary. Often one can hear nonnative speakers of English using “yes,” “well,” and “hmmm” too often, to fill a vacuum, gain time for thought, or demonstrate understanding. They smile and nod more often. Israeli lyricist Ehud Manor aptly described the primordial nature of language in his song “Holem be-Sfaradit” (Dream in Spanish), which tells about a man writing, becoming excited, growing angry, and cursing, all in Hebrew, but still dreaming at night in Spanish. Speaking a foreign language one has not yet mastered is like sight-reading a musical score while maintaining the tempo. Speakers are not only trying to convey a message, but also trying not to get stuck or hit a false note in pronunciation and intonation. Many make mistakes while trying to be precise, because they are relying on a naïve, subconscious notion that there is a universal language to which their mother tongue should be translated and that makes universal translation and deciphering possible.

“Deciphering” and “interpretation” are key words; they encompass the nonverbal meanings more easily than does the word “translation.” They capture the semiotic whole, which includes things that are not said and signs that are not heard, such as hand and facial movements that accompany particular expressions. The other language is a fundamental obstacle to the self-expression of the speakers. As the Israeli poet Agi Mishol once said, “For a poet it is best to be born American, because he is born already translated.”[1] But in addition to getting in the way of projecting oneself “exactly as I am,” the foreign language is also an obstacle to deciphering the others who speak it (and this also has implications for the native speaker with whom the nonnative converses).

Hebrew is my only mother tongue, and therefore when I converse with a native speaker of English it is harder for me to understand who the person is than when I speak to a native speaker of Hebrew. Is that person authentic? Is that person well educated? To what class does the person belong? What are that person’s intentions? A task that is routine and largely subconscious becomes an obstacle

Marzuq al-Halabi’s text describes his attempts, as a native speaker of Arabic, to cope with a space in which Hebrew is the dominant language. One of the central themes of al-Halabi’s text is the transformation of the local person, the native, into a kind of immigrant in his own country. Naturally, the immigrant must learn the language of the place, the language in which “things happen.” Sometimes immigrants must do this in partial fulfillment of the conditions of citizenship; they always have to do it to become integrated in the new place. Hebrew, like a foreign species invading an ecosystem, has taken over the linguistic space. Therefore the natives must, at the very least, translate for themselves and sometimes disguise themselves in order to be accepted, even at the most minimal level of acceptance.

Although Arabic is one of Israel’s official languages, it has almost no official expression in the public space.[2] True, Israel has Arabic media, but the mainstream media, for example, operate in Hebrew and thus, in a very broad sense, mediate the way in which Arabs in Israel experience the place. In addition, Arabic is a “suspicious” language, a language that marks its speakers who are Israeli citizens as more than merely non-Jews. It marks them as a potential enemy. Israeli Arabs receive “special” security treatment at the airport, the very place where they hold in their hand an Israeli passport testifying to their Israeli citizenship. In other words, they are treated like foreigners in their own country. But even before they get near the airport—a place that symbolizes a border, where edges are exposed—their otherness is evident even in the heart of the country. In May 2012 it became known that in the pedagogical center in Meir Hospital in Kfar Sava, in violation of Education Ministry regulations, the management had forbidden Arab teachers and students working there to speak Arabic among themselves.[3] In December 2010 it was reported that the principal of a mixed Jewish-Arab school in Jaffa had forbidden the speaking of Arabic in the school.[4]

These are unacceptable phenomena, but there are also instances of a different nature: in June 2012 a court acquiesced to the request of two Arab litigants that it cover the cost of interpreting the sessions because both sides, their lawyers, and the witnesses were all Arabic speakers, and thus it was the court that was in need of an interpreter. The judge accepted their argument on the grounds that Arabic is one of the official languages of Israel and pointed out that a decision requiring the litigants to bear the cost of interpreting would have entailed discrimination between Jewish and Arab litigants in realizing their basic right of access to the courts.[5]

Al-Halabi describes more than one instance in which the presence of Arabic undermined the control of Hebrew and of its Jewish speakers, but he points out that the native speakers of Hebrew rejected this analysis. When Arabic is spoken in a space that is accustomed to the dominant presence of Hebrew, the Hebrew speaker has very limited ability to understand and decipher it. The Arabs, as a minority, are used to navigating in a Hebrew-dominated space, though that does not mean it is easy for them. When Jews who do not speak Arabic must navigate an Arabic-dominated space, and they are not used to doing so, it is the turn of the Hebrew speakers to do the deciphering while exhibiting unnatural facial expressions, perhaps smiling with embarrassment or appearing confused—at least in their mind’s eye. In such situations it is the Jews who must reduce the space between themselves and their shadow selves, which appear whenever they speak a foreign language and threaten to dominate them and represent them. The Hebrew-speaking Jews now become the inferior ones, not in relation to a neutral other but rather in relation to an other that the stereotype characterizes as the ultimate other, or as a potential enemy. The “reversed” situation described above would not exist—at least, not in Israel—if Arabic were replaced by English, even if the Jews in question did not understand English. That is because English is not really perceived as threatening the Hebrew space. On the contrary, whereas the use of an Arabic expression in a Hebrew sentence is seen as creating a low or colloquial register, the use of an English expression is seen as expressing sophistication, which in turn reflects the provincial perspective of Hebrew speakers.

The denial of those involved can be understood (though not justified), and is not unique to the linguistic space. Studies in the United States show that when names that were traditionally given to boys were also given to girls, a process of separation took place: parents stopped giving those names to male infants.[6] Another example is the move of African Americans in the United States into all-white neighborhoods. The white residents gradually leave the neighborhood altogether (white flight).[7] The open expression of otherness undermines the existing order. These phenomena of symbolic and physical segregation simultaneously express and realize social conventions. Use of Arabic in the Hebrew public space is the expression of such an “other” because it is the local realization of an existential alternative in Israel, and thus it is deemed forbidden. Again, I do not mean a legal prohibition against it but rather a balance that it would appear to upset. Whites leaving their neighborhoods because of the appearance of African Americans tell themselves all kinds of stories—their friends have left, or they say that the property values will drop—but for the most part they will not admit to racism. Most of us are blind to our erroneous zones and only rarely, when the defensive carapace is cracked, are we willing to be exposed to them.

Al-Halabi expresses an optimistic view on both the personal and general levels. According to him, the Arab community is more reconciled to Hebrew today because the Arabic speakers are not interested in cutting themselves off “from important cultures that border on Arab culture.” This motive for getting to know the language, like other motives that al-Halabi writes about, is worth exploring.

The Jewish community does not have a unified view on learning Arabic, but the wind is blowing in a general direction of disinterest with Arabic As Dr. Abd el-Rahman Mar’i argues in an interview on the seepage of Hebrew words into Arabic:

Israel wants to see itself as part of the West, and Arabic is seen as an Eastern language, the language of the enemy, and an inferior language. No one will come out and say this, of course, but in education there are overt goals and covert goals. The covert goals are, for example, for Jews to remain unilingual. They should not get to know the other, because if they get to know the Arabs too well, they might hear about their suffering and even understand them.[8]

In this context, which also links up with the issue of the motive for learning a language, one must note that a substantial number of Jewish speakers of Arabic acquire the language as part of their service in the security forces. In many cases their vocabulary is focused on military, security, and political matters. They are at home with Arabic words such as “arena,” “strategy,” “terrorism,” and so on but less so, if at all, with phrases like “scent of a flower” or “beautiful sunset.” In other words, the Arabic they know was learned because of suspicion of the other and not because of curiosity about the other’s culture.

Mar’i adds the following:

Not only do they [Arab students] not have a problem learning Hebrew, on the contrary—[they] love to learn Hebrew and invest in it more than in Arabic. . . . Arab students have a negative stigma regarding Arabic. . . . They ask, “What will it give me?” Just as the Jews invest in English because they want be integrated in the West, so Arab students want to be integrated in the life of the state and to succeed. Arabic does not grant them mobility.[9]

In various circles there is an expectation—not always conscious and not unwarranted, but also not unromantic—that the Jews will learn Arabic and in that way “we will meet each other halfway.” This expectation does not accord with the dialectic of master and servant to which we are witnesses, a dialectic that emerges from both al-Halabi’s and Mar’i’s texts and that enfolds a whole universe of power relations at both the linguistic and general levels. It is therefore possible that contrary to the expectation—which, as noted above, is not unwarranted—and perhaps as reality shows, the suspicion will begin to dissipate precisely through the Arabs’ learning of Hebrew.

Notes

[1] Agi Mishol, interview by Lisa Peretz, “Ma she-mekharmen be-milim” [What Is a Turn-on in Words? (OR: How Words Turn Me On)], nrg, February 2, 2001, http://www.nrg.co.il/online/archive/ART/111/382.html.

[2] There is no agreed-upon legal definition of “official language” in Israel or for the protections deriving from that phrase. See Meital Pinto, “Zekhuyot safa, hagira ve-miutim be-Yisrael” [Language rights, immigration and minorities in Israel], Mishpat ve-mimshal 10, no. 1 (2006): 243.

[3] Jacky Hugi, “Horim she-yaldeyhem ushpezu be-Beit Holim Meir: Al hamorot ba-mosad neesar ledaber Aravit” [Parents of children who were hospitalized in Meir Hospital: The teachers in the institution have been forbidden to speak Arabic], Haaretz, May 18, 2012, http://www.haaretz.co.il/news/education/1.1710819.

[4] Hassan Sha’alan, “Hafgana be-beit sefer be-Yafo: Ha-menahel asar ledaber Aravit” [Protest in Jaffa school: The principal forbade the speaking of Arabic], ynet, December 29, 2010, http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-4005830,00.html.

[5] Mustafa v. Ali, Civil Case (Jerusalem Magistrates Court) 2636-09, June 24, 2012, published online at http://www.nevo.co.il.

[6] Stanley Lieberson, Susan Dumais, and Shyon Baumann, “The Instability of Androgynous Names: The Symbolic Maintenance of Gender Boundaries,” American Journal of Sociology 105, no. 5 (2000): 1249–1287.

[7] Thomas C. Schelling, Micromotives and Macrobehavior (New York: Norton and Company, 1978), 137–166.

[8] Dr. Abd el-Rahman Mar’i, interview by Avraham Tzlil, “Walla Yoffi” [Wow, great], Yedioth Aharonoth, December 6, 2013.

[9] Ibid.

About the Author: Marzuq al-Halabi is a journalist and writer, a poet, and a literary and cultural critic. He has a regular column in the daily al-Hayat, published in London, Beirut, and Saudi Arabia. He edited the culture pages in the daily al-Ittihad and held various editing positions.

Al-Halabi studied comparative literature, political science, and law. He has participated in, organized, and mentored discussion and research groups on Jewish-Arab relations. In this capacity he has also conducted several studies on relations between the two peoples, including relations in the workplace (published by the Ofek Institute of Management and UNESCO Publications), and he has facilitated meetings between groups in conflict.

Al-Halabi has published many essays and articles, most of them in Arabic, on a variety of topics, including Jewish-Arab relations; the Israeli-Arab and the Israeli-Palestinian conflicts and possible solutions to them; Arabic culture and literature; political science and philosophy; the philosophy of ethics and law; the Holocaust and the Nakba; and communications and civil society. In addition he is a social activist and an organizational and strategic adviser to local governments, civil society organizations, and political organizations.
Analysis: In Other Words

Introduction by Zohar Kohavi

A mother tongue is familiar, warm, and comfortable. When people speak a language other than their mother tongue, they tend to be not quite themselves. They are constrained by syntax and the limits of their vocabulary. Often one can hear nonnative speakers of English using “yes,” “well,” and “hmmm” too often, to fill a vacuum, gain time for thought, or demonstrate understanding. They smile and nod more often. Israeli lyricist Ehud Manor aptly described the primordial nature of language in his song “Holem be-Sfaradit” (Dream in Spanish), which tells about a man writing, becoming excited, growing angry, and cursing, all in Hebrew, but still dreaming at night in Spanish. Speaking a foreign language one has not yet mastered is like sight-reading a musical score while maintaining the tempo. Speakers are not only trying to convey a message, but also trying not to get stuck or hit a false note in pronunciation and intonation. Many make mistakes while trying to be precise, because they are relying on a naïve, subconscious notion that there is a universal language to which their mother tongue should be translated and that makes universal translation and deciphering possible.

“Deciphering” and “interpretation” are key words; they encompass the nonverbal meanings more easily than does the word “translation.” They capture the semiotic whole, which includes things that are not said and signs that are not heard, such as hand and facial movements that accompany particular expressions. The other language is a fundamental obstacle to the self-expression of the speakers. As the Israeli poet Agi Mishol once said, “For a poet it is best to be born American, because he is born already translated.”[1] But in addition to getting in the way of projecting oneself “exactly as I am,” the foreign language is also an obstacle to deciphering the others who speak it (and this also has implications for the native speaker with whom the nonnative converses).

Hebrew is my only mother tongue, and therefore when I converse with a native speaker of English it is harder for me to understand who the person is than when I speak to a native speaker of Hebrew. Is that person authentic? Is that person well educated? To what class does the person belong? What are that person’s intentions? A task that is routine and largely subconscious becomes an obstacle

Marzuq al-Halabi’s text describes his attempts, as a native speaker of Arabic, to cope with a space in which Hebrew is the dominant language. One of the central themes of al-Halabi’s text is the transformation of the local person, the native, into a kind of immigrant in his own country. Naturally, the immigrant must learn the language of the place, the language in which “things happen.” Sometimes immigrants must do this in partial fulfillment of the conditions of citizenship; they always have to do it to become integrated in the new place. Hebrew, like a foreign species invading an ecosystem, has taken over the linguistic space. Therefore the natives must, at the very least, translate for themselves and sometimes disguise themselves in order to be accepted, even at the most minimal level of acceptance.

Although Arabic is one of Israel’s official languages, it has almost no official expression in the public space.[2] True, Israel has Arabic media, but the mainstream media, for example, operate in Hebrew and thus, in a very broad sense, mediate the way in which Arabs in Israel experience the place. In addition, Arabic is a “suspicious” language, a language that marks its speakers who are Israeli citizens as more than merely non-Jews. It marks them as a potential enemy. Israeli Arabs receive “special” security treatment at the airport, the very place where they hold in their hand an Israeli passport testifying to their Israeli citizenship. In other words, they are treated like foreigners in their own country. But even before they get near the airport—a place that symbolizes a border, where edges are exposed—their otherness is evident even in the heart of the country. In May 2012 it became known that in the pedagogical center in Meir Hospital in Kfar Sava, in violation of Education Ministry regulations, the management had forbidden Arab teachers and students working there to speak Arabic among themselves.[3] In December 2010 it was reported that the principal of a mixed Jewish-Arab school in Jaffa had forbidden the speaking of Arabic in the school.[4]

These are unacceptable phenomena, but there are also instances of a different nature: in June 2012 a court acquiesced to the request of two Arab litigants that it cover the cost of interpreting the sessions because both sides, their lawyers, and the witnesses were all Arabic speakers, and thus it was the court that was in need of an interpreter. The judge accepted their argument on the grounds that Arabic is one of the official languages of Israel and pointed out that a decision requiring the litigants to bear the cost of interpreting would have entailed discrimination between Jewish and Arab litigants in realizing their basic right of access to the courts.[5]

Al-Halabi describes more than one instance in which the presence of Arabic undermined the control of Hebrew and of its Jewish speakers, but he points out that the native speakers of Hebrew rejected this analysis. When Arabic is spoken in a space that is accustomed to the dominant presence of Hebrew, the Hebrew speaker has very limited ability to understand and decipher it. The Arabs, as a minority, are used to navigating in a Hebrew-dominated space, though that does not mean it is easy for them. When Jews who do not speak Arabic must navigate an Arabic-dominated space, and they are not used to doing so, it is the turn of the Hebrew speakers to do the deciphering while exhibiting unnatural facial expressions, perhaps smiling with embarrassment or appearing confused—at least in their mind’s eye. In such situations it is the Jews who must reduce the space between themselves and their shadow selves, which appear whenever they speak a foreign language and threaten to dominate them and represent them. The Hebrew-speaking Jews now become the inferior ones, not in relation to a neutral other but rather in relation to an other that the stereotype characterizes as the ultimate other, or as a potential enemy. The “reversed” situation described above would not exist—at least, not in Israel—if Arabic were replaced by English, even if the Jews in question did not understand English. That is because English is not really perceived as threatening the Hebrew space. On the contrary, whereas the use of an Arabic expression in a Hebrew sentence is seen as creating a low or colloquial register, the use of an English expression is seen as expressing sophistication, which in turn reflects the provincial perspective of Hebrew speakers.

The denial of those involved can be understood (though not justified), and is not unique to the linguistic space. Studies in the United States show that when names that were traditionally given to boys were also given to girls, a process of separation took place: parents stopped giving those names to male infants.[6] Another example is the move of African Americans in the United States into all-white neighborhoods. The white residents gradually leave the neighborhood altogether (white flight).[7] The open expression of otherness undermines the existing order. These phenomena of symbolic and physical segregation simultaneously express and realize social conventions. Use of Arabic in the Hebrew public space is the expression of such an “other” because it is the local realization of an existential alternative in Israel, and thus it is deemed forbidden. Again, I do not mean a legal prohibition against it but rather a balance that it would appear to upset. Whites leaving their neighborhoods because of the appearance of African Americans tell themselves all kinds of stories—their friends have left, or they say that the property values will drop—but for the most part they will not admit to racism. Most of us are blind to our erroneous zones and only rarely, when the defensive carapace is cracked, are we willing to be exposed to them.

Al-Halabi expresses an optimistic view on both the personal and general levels. According to him, the Arab community is more reconciled to Hebrew today because the Arabic speakers are not interested in cutting themselves off “from important cultures that border on Arab culture.” This motive for getting to know the language, like other motives that al-Halabi writes about, is worth exploring.

The Jewish community does not have a unified view on learning Arabic, but the wind is blowing in a general direction of disinterest with Arabic As Dr. Abd el-Rahman Mar’i argues in an interview on the seepage of Hebrew words into Arabic:

Israel wants to see itself as part of the West, and Arabic is seen as an Eastern language, the language of the enemy, and an inferior language. No one will come out and say this, of course, but in education there are overt goals and covert goals. The covert goals are, for example, for Jews to remain unilingual. They should not get to know the other, because if they get to know the Arabs too well, they might hear about their suffering and even understand them.[8]

In this context, which also links up with the issue of the motive for learning a language, one must note that a substantial number of Jewish speakers of Arabic acquire the language as part of their service in the security forces. In many cases their vocabulary is focused on military, security, and political matters. They are at home with Arabic words such as “arena,” “strategy,” “terrorism,” and so on but less so, if at all, with phrases like “scent of a flower” or “beautiful sunset.” In other words, the Arabic they know was learned because of suspicion of the other and not because of curiosity about the other’s culture.

Mar’i adds the following:

Not only do they [Arab students] not have a problem learning Hebrew, on the contrary—[they] love to learn Hebrew and invest in it more than in Arabic. . . . Arab students have a negative stigma regarding Arabic. . . . They ask, “What will it give me?” Just as the Jews invest in English because they want be integrated in the West, so Arab students want to be integrated in the life of the state and to succeed. Arabic does not grant them mobility.[9]

In various circles there is an expectation—not always conscious and not unwarranted, but also not unromantic—that the Jews will learn Arabic and in that way “we will meet each other halfway.” This expectation does not accord with the dialectic of master and servant to which we are witnesses, a dialectic that emerges from both al-Halabi’s and Mar’i’s texts and that enfolds a whole universe of power relations at both the linguistic and general levels. It is therefore possible that contrary to the expectation—which, as noted above, is not unwarranted—and perhaps as reality shows, the suspicion will begin to dissipate precisely through the Arabs’ learning of Hebrew.

Notes

[1] Agi Mishol, interview by Lisa Peretz, “Ma she-mekharmen be-milim” [What Is a Turn-on in Words? (OR: How Words Turn Me On)], nrg, February 2, 2001, http://www.nrg.co.il/online/archive/ART/111/382.html.

[2] There is no agreed-upon legal definition of “official language” in Israel or for the protections deriving from that phrase. See Meital Pinto, “Zekhuyot safa, hagira ve-miutim be-Yisrael” [Language rights, immigration and minorities in Israel], Mishpat ve-mimshal 10, no. 1 (2006): 243.

[3] Jacky Hugi, “Horim she-yaldeyhem ushpezu be-Beit Holim Meir: Al hamorot ba-mosad neesar ledaber Aravit” [Parents of children who were hospitalized in Meir Hospital: The teachers in the institution have been forbidden to speak Arabic], Haaretz, May 18, 2012, http://www.haaretz.co.il/news/education/1.1710819.

[4] Hassan Sha’alan, “Hafgana be-beit sefer be-Yafo: Ha-menahel asar ledaber Aravit” [Protest in Jaffa school: The principal forbade the speaking of Arabic], ynet, December 29, 2010, http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-4005830,00.html.

[5] Mustafa v. Ali, Civil Case (Jerusalem Magistrates Court) 2636-09, June 24, 2012, published online at http://www.nevo.co.il.

[6] Stanley Lieberson, Susan Dumais, and Shyon Baumann, “The Instability of Androgynous Names: The Symbolic Maintenance of Gender Boundaries,” American Journal of Sociology 105, no. 5 (2000): 1249–1287.

[7] Thomas C. Schelling, Micromotives and Macrobehavior (New York: Norton and Company, 1978), 137–166.

[8] Dr. Abd el-Rahman Mar’i, interview by Avraham Tzlil, “Walla Yoffi” [Wow, great], Yedioth Aharonoth, December 6, 2013.

[9] Ibid.

In the Shadow of Two Languages

Marzuq al-Halabi

(Translated from Hebrew)

All the inhabitants of my village named Muhammad before the year of the Nakba acquired different names, like Ibrahim or Yusuf, except for my neighbor Muhammad who kept his name until his first son was born, after which he became Abu Shadi. And my mother, may she be blessed with long life, would sternly warn my sisters who picked olives at Kibbutz Hazorea not to call my brother Jamal by his name in the presence of Jews from the kibbutz, lest they frighten and upset them, because he was named after the Egyptian president at the time, Jamal ‘Abd al-Nasir, who was anathema to Israel’s leaders. In keeping with the same behavioral code, merchants from my village, who had a lot of dealings with the occupied territories via the city of Jenin, used to wear a kaffiyeh and an agal when they arrived at the East Megiddo Junction on their way to the market in Jenin. But on the western side of the same junction, on their way through the surrounding kibbutzim to the Carmel Mountains, they would replace the kaffiyeh with a black European beret-like hat.

These would seem to be simply three entertaining, esoteric stories of villagers encountering a new political reality that they had to navigate on their own, relying on native skills or instinctive intelligence. The first stories are about the language itself, the names rooted in the language and the culture, and everything that is derived from the two. The last story is about clothing as visual language adapted to space. Each of these cases points to the ways in which the Druze community navigate a a changing linguistic situation. At one time the transition from the Arabic space to the Hebrew reality was something that required appropriate preparation—a change of names. This changing continues even to this day.

It is interesting to see which names are currently most common in the Druze community as compared with those that were popular in the 1930s, the 1940s, and the 1950s, and even as compared to those that were prevalent in the nineteenth century. I believe that after three or four generations many Hebrew names have entered the Druze community’s name pool. This may be part of a process of trying to resemble the hegemonic community, and even part of the aspiration to assimilate into it, or it may be simply the assumption of modernity and power through the sounds of a name. This phenomenon is characteristic of other communities in a situation like that of the Druze in Israel. Other Arab communities too are headed in the same direction; Hebrew names or half-Hebrew names have become popular among Arabs in Israel.

The internal Arab critique was not long in coming. Much ink was spilled in the debate and in the self-deprecating humor about the name changes. Thus we were witnesses to a process of readjustment. More and more people started giving their sons and daughters dual names as an act symbolic of the dual identity that had developed among the Arabs in Israel. Thus, for example, we had an abundance of the names Razi, Rami, and Adam. Even names that were more Western, such as Natalie, Eden, and Mira, received a warm welcome. Such names became naturalized in Arabic and perfectly proper. Of course there was a strong backlash in conservative and religious circles, which started adopting names from the religious or cultural heritage as steps toward the construction of an Arab, national, or Islamic identity, or the particular identity of a community, such as that of the Druze community.

I think the attitude of the Arabs in Israel toward Hebrew is no different from the attitude of natives in other places toward the language of the colonial community. And, on the same plane, one might say that the attitude of the Jews toward Arabic is similar to that of colonial communities toward the language of the natives. The hegemonic side tries to present its language as the language of the new reality and to persuade the natives to adopt it. This proposal is not made innocently; it conceals the desire to control and to minimize the disruptions the hegemony creates. If the natives adopt Hebrew, it will constitute a sign of acceptance and acquiescence. It is also likely to be interpreted as the immigrant’s act of enclosing the native, which is actually co-optation with kid gloves.

The Arabs as a native minority are different from other minorities in the old colonies. The simple linguistic reason for this difference lies in the fact that they are not the only ones who speak their language—so does a nation of several hundred million, a nation living in a space that stretches from the Fertile Crescent to the Atlantic Ocean. Therefore, the Arab minority in Israel will always be centered on the axis between the two languages, Hebrew and Arabic. As a result their attitude toward Hebrew, like their attitude toward Arabic, would be expected to change over time. These changes can be seen in the collective experience of the Arab community in Israel, as well as in the lives of individuals. The community that for the most part did not know Hebrew when the state was established has been changed into a bilingual Arab community. Now it is an Arabic-Hebrew linguistic community, a linguistic status that largely reflects the dual identity of the Arab collective in Israel. This duality is not merely a formal development, if only because of the significance of the language and its social and political roles.

I can say that my own attitude toward Hebrew has changed over time. I remember the first Arabic-Hebrew dictionary I bought in an attempt to strengthen my connection to the Hebrew language and to improve the Hebrew compositions the teacher asked me to write as part of my studies. It is impossible to describe the joy I felt when that same Hebrew teacher walked through the schools where he taught, holding one of my Hebrew compositions and showing the students the quality he expected in their essay writing. My warm attitude toward Hebrew continued in the university, in the second half of the 1980s, when I found myself chief editor at the Israel desk of the daily al-Ittihad. I became an expert on Hebrew and everything Israeli, thanks to my attitude toward the language and thanks to that same Hebrew teacher. Unlike me, my colleagues, some of whom were trained in former communist countries, had only basic knowledge of Hebrew.

In other words, for the purposes of work and career, I had to develop a particularly warm relationship with Hebrew. No wonder that over the years there were more and more shelves in my library devoted to books in Hebrew about every area that my work as a journalist led me to—economics, trade unions, literature and culture, security and the military, political science and philosophy, law and communications—that is, just about everything. But in all those years, I did not write in Hebrew. I did not even try. Hebrew was the field of knowledge and culture of the other, to a certain extent that of the enemy. I was completely dedicated, in Arabic, to the confrontation with Hebrew, which at the time seemed to me eternal; I knew Hebrew in order to defend myself from it, not to adopt it for myself. I delved into it to remove its sting, because the military censor to whom we sent reports that had to pass under his eagle eyes and terrifying scissors spoke to us in Hebrew even though he had a reasonable knowledge of Arabic.

In the depths of this experience I discerned a difference between the use of Hebrew as a tool for work and its use for creative writing. It was as if I had given myself the legitimacy to use the language of the other, who was not just a neutral other, so as to confront him, yet I could not allow myself the right to use it for any other purpose, such as creative writing. At the same time, I refused job offers from the Hebrew press because my place was not there but rather in my Arabic language and culture and in my experience as a young man aspiring to change the world with a single stroke of the pen in the weekend edition.

I found support for this exacting approach when I started facilitating Jewish-Arab dialogue groups and discovered the social and political functions of language. Language can reveal itself as identity, as space, as strategic depth, and as a mechanism of control. Thus, for example, when the Arab group felt pressured, its members reverted to speaking Arabic, and as a facilitator who knew both languages, I had to translate. When the Arab participants reverted to their language, the Jewish group suddenly took offense and fell silent; its members did not understand the language and therefore perceived the Arab group as toying with them and not having serious intentions. Our explanation as facilitators was that the Arab group was taking the initiative and liberating the space of the room from the control of Hebrew and of the Jewish group; this was something that the Jewish group experienced as loss of control. That is, in the framework of the meeting, language took on crucial significance in the power relations between the two groups. And so it is in the everyday life of the two communities: the space that is managed in Hebrew ceases to be an Arab space, and vice versa.

In this regard I recall an incident in a joint Jewish-Arab organization. In one of the team meetings, a Jewish colleague confessed that one of the moments in the organization that was difficult for her was when I prepared coffee and gathered the whole team together, Jews and Arabs, in my room, in a friendly forum that served as the start of the work day. The colleague did not explain the source of her difficulty even after we pleaded persistently and offered innumerable conjectures. This incident led me to write an opinion piece in an attempt to solve the riddle that the colleague had tossed into the atmosphere of the organization. In the article I laid out my conjectures, relying on the professional literature in the field: again it was the Arabic language, the jokes in Arabic, the presence of Arabic that took from her as a Jew the preferential status and the control of the organizational space. She was used to enjoying that status as the “natural situation.”

When I submitted the piece I had written in Hebrew to the relevant journal, I encountered suspicion on the part of one of the editors. She simply did not understand, or did not believe, that this could really happen. Lo and behold, one day it fell to me to conduct a study on Arab-Jewish relations in the workplace, and that same editor was my Jewish colleague in the study. As part of the study, we interviewed dozens of Jewish and Arab officials in large organizations. At the end of an interview-filled day, we reached the office of a senior Arab employee who started the conversation with a story that was identical to my story about the coffee. Her Jewish colleague could also not stand the scene of the Arab woman making Arabic coffee and gathering all the gang from the department in her room, and she finally complained to the production manager that her coworker was disrupting work and interfering with production. I gave a sidelong glance at my colleague the editor, willing her to hear with her own ears but without putting her in an embarrassing situation for not having understood my piece, which was based on personal experience that could be duplicated in many workplaces. My colleague displayed magnanimity and came to me at the end of the interview to seek my forgiveness for not having understood the complex reality of the relations between languages and their speakers.

And now we turn to another story. In the college where I studied law, we wanted to post a bulletin board in Arabic next to the many bulletin boards in Hebrew, so we could communicate in our native tongue with the 20 percent of the students in the college who were Arabs. This initiative drew a huge and totally disproportionate response—broad opposition to the presence of Arabic in the shared sphere, a presence that deeply disturbed the protestors. Here it was more difficult to explain the vociferous protest by the Jewish students. We had heard no protest regarding the presence of Arabs in the college, at least not publicly, so why did this protest burst forth following the posting of the bulletin board in Arabic? I had two main conjectures to offer the college’s director. First, the protest was a manifestation of covert racism directed at the Arab students through their language. Second, the majority is willing to accept the presence of Arabic as long as it exists within the language of the majority; the moment it becomes independent and highly visible, it challenges the hegemon and thus is likely to encounter anger. Apparently the sudden appearance of Arabic on the wall signified the Arabs’ desire to be separate and to acquire an independent space within the general space. This act of independence was met with intolerance, or at least a lack of acceptance, by the Jewish majority there, though the Jewish students ultimately obeyed the management’s decision and accepted the presence of Arabic on the college walls. In other words, the attitude of the hegemon toward the language of the minority can change in accordance with the circumstances; in this case it was reflected in the management’s decision, as part of its policy of treating the Arab students well.

During these years of work and movement between the two languages, my attitude toward Hebrew changed again. Again I discovered the power of knowing Hebrew and using it, and I developed the ability to be a proud Arab within the spaces of the Hebrew language. My alienation from Hebrew as the language of the other, who had come to rule over me, changed to close friendship. I began to write in Hebrew, to lecture in Hebrew, and to joke in Hebrew. I could write anything in Hebrew but poetry. I write poetry only in Arabic, perhaps because of the great intimacy required by lyrical writing. I think that anyone who believes, like me, in the power of dialogue to change attitudes and transform dreams into reality has no choice other than friendship with the language of the other.

When I started creative writing, I set out consciously and in keeping with local custom to respond to the evolving Hebrew reality in Arabic, the previous language of the place, of its history, and of its natives. As an act of defiance, I preserved my Arabic not only as a means of writing but also as a space to live in as I pleased and as required by my identity, which is different from that of the immigrant. It was an attempt of sorts to hold on to identity while the place was being pulled out from under my feet. The Palestinian collective that remained in its homeland after the Nakba used to say, “I am staying in Haifa,” like the famous saying of my teacher and mentor Emile Habibi, the author of The Opsimist, the Palestinian who remained in Haifa after the Nakba, who lived there and was buried in its soil.

Preservation of Arabic, which was the role of that first generation of the Nakba that remained in the land, symbolized the stubborn attempt to preserve an identity that was in danger of expulsion. Indeed, I am here and now deeply rooted in my land and in my language. For the Palestinian community, the language constituted the only space in which to exist as Arabs. One must add that in those years military administration was imposed on the Arab communities in Israel, an administration that was abolished only in 1966. With its fences and partitioned areas, the military administration signaled its creation of a barrier between the Arabic and Hebrew spaces. And in order to pass from one area to another, a Palestinian had to know several words of Hebrew, just as a soldier at a checkpoint had to know a few words in Arabic—the former, in order to be released from the chokehold of the military administration, and the latter, to enforce it.

Since then many migrating birds have flown over the country. The relations between the languages and their speakers have changed quite a bit. Arabs in Israel studied Hebrew as a prerequisite for mobility. Courses in universities and in every institution of higher learning were in Hebrew, and anyone who wanted higher education had to adopt Hebrew as a language of knowledge and the acquisition of a desired skill—a skill that is a prerequisite for social and professional mobility. Hebrew constituted the inescapable center of power. It is still the center of power, and now even more so as the Arab middle class expands and strives to maximize its profits and well-being so as to ensure its existential interests. This development in communal life has led to a normalization of the Arabs’ attitudes toward Hebrew.

From this point on the attitudes began to take on another meaning. The Arab community seemed increasingly at peace with Hebrew. Even when the community emphasized its hold on Arabic, the mother tongue and the culture, its speakers still pointed out the importance of Hebrew and the need for openness in relation to other languages and cultures because it is impossible to cut oneself off from important cultures that border on Arab culture. Public and legal activity to strengthen the status of Arabic was accompanied by the development of linguistic duality in the Arab community in Israel. The more this duality took hold within the community, the more the attempts to strengthen Arabic language and culture increased. The two processes took place simultaneously. The attempts of Arab organizations to establish a linguistic policy emphasized the importance of Arabic for the construction of identity and the development of culture; at the same time, documents that expressed this policy also noted that it was important that this activity not come at the expense of Hebrew or English. In the summary document I prepared in advance of a public discussion, it was even emphasized that we want a pupil who knows both his mother tongue and the other relevant languages—including Hebrew, the language of the state, and English, the language of the world. In other words, the Arab community’s insistence on road signs or government publications in Arabic expressed the desire for linguistic equality in the public space and the promise of a proper status for Arabic culture while accepting the process of linguistic duality that was taking place of its own accord.

Moreover, those involved understood that linguistic and cultural isolation might lead the Arab community to a kind of cultural ghetto and to life in the shadow of Hebrew culture. Many activists enthusiastically received the articles I wrote warning against transforming the engagement with the question of Hebrew language in Israel into the raising of walls between the two cultures, although one must understand that this engagement was a response to the exclusion of Arabic from the public space. One could not respond to exclusion, I argued, by isolating oneself within the confines of the mother tongue and transforming it into the holy of holies. This was because such action, as I have pointed out, creates linguistic isolation leading to a cultural ghetto that cannot help improve the situation of Arabic or the Arab community.

These warnings resonated in light of the situation of Arabic in the Middle East and the failure of the Arab countries’ linguistic policies. These policies were based on erroneous approaches: first, a religious approach that sanctified Arabic as the language of the Quran and prevented its development and renewal in keeping with the times; second, the romantic approach that related to classical Arabic as a perfect language to which one must add nothing and from which nothing may be subtracted; third, the fanatical nationalist approach that led to the suppression of neighboring languages of minorities and cultural groups within the Arab world as an act derived from pan-Arabism and directed against the colonial languages (and as part of which, for example, the Amazigh language in North Africa was suppressed); fourth, the approach calling for preference to be given to local or regional spoken languages—spoken Egyptian or spoken Lebanese, for example—over standard Arabic. These approaches were adopted, in tandem or separately, by governments and were disastrous for the Arabic language space.

This disaster left its mark in the attitude of the Arab community in Israel toward the Arabic language. In general the attitude toward Arabic moved between incorrigible romanticism and uncompromising fanaticism. That is why Hebrew was the language of refuge and also a safer place in which to remain, at least some of the time. And that is why the move to Hebrew as a cultural center and as a living space resulted from the weakness of Arabic and not only from the centrality of Hebrew.

I believe that the approach to the conflict influences how the language is perceived. At least in my case, the more my belief—that there was no other way than reconciliation between the two peoples in the land, between the two cultures, and between the two languages—was strengthened, the more time I spent in the Hebrew language. The more I dealt with the idea of reconciliation, the more I became bilingual in practice. The duality gives me equal presence in the two languages and the ability to bring the tidings of reconciliation and the criticism of power and violence to all those who wish to read the works I write and publish, both in Arabic and in Hebrew. And this is another aspect of the close connection between language and politics.

I compared the engagement with language to the involvement with identity. Language and identity must be conceived of as an open harbor and not as a closed fortress. The harbor is open to receive the best the other has and to export to the other the best one has. This is in contrast to the fortress, where a person fights for his existence or goes out to fight about the existence of the other. I consciously opened the gates of my language like a welcoming port to all who seek to enter, and I went out to greet the Hebrew language full of curiosity and affection. I write these words and smile as I think of the stories from my childhood that I brought to mind at the beginning of this essay.