Posted on 02/25/2017 1:24:40 PM PST by nickcarraway
Every street sign in Israel is in Hebrew and Arabic, but many Israelis can’t understand a standard conversation in Arabic. In a moving letter to Haaretz written this week by Lital Lam, a student at Tel Aviv University, headlined “Israelis, Speak Arabic,” Lam expresses the alienation she feels because she does not speak Arabic fluently. She notes that 40% of the university’s students speak Arabic as a mother tongue — and she can’t understand her classmates.
The specific issue she raised is the role of Arabic in Israel’s education system. Today in Israel, Arabic is taught in grades 7 through 9, and in a few schools, in grades 5 and 6.
“Why is the instruction done at such a late age?” Lan, the letter-writer asks. She also questions why Arabic is offered along with French and Spanish, instead of giving it its proper importance as one of Israel’s languages. She is not the first to suggest that Arabic should be an integral part of Israeli education, from an early age.
In October 2015 the Knesset approved “the preliminary reading of a proposed bill that would compel schools to teach Arabic, starting from the first grade,” Haaretz reported. And in 2016, the Knesset held its first Arabic Language Day, “which saw Arab and even a few Jewish lawmakers speak in the plenum in Arabic with simultaneous translation into Hebrew, and committee meetings dedicated to the use of Arabic in the public sphere,” according to the Times of Israel. Arabic Language Day was started by Joint List MK Youssef Jabareen, a former law professor who specialized in minority rights at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.
Brian's Story: Finding a Treatment for Type 1 Gaucher Sponsored In recent years the debate over Arabic illiteracy has come up among younger Israeli writers, who have expressed dismay over their personal lack of familiarity with the language, and pledged to do something about it as adults.
There are also grass-roots efforts to teach Israeli adults Arabic, such as Yaffa, an Arabic-and-Hebrew bookstore café in Jaffa that offers language classes. Arabesque, located in in Acre’s Old City, soon plans to offer “an Arabic immersion program (one week to one month) that combines classroom learning with “street” learning by pairing participants with local families,” according to its website.
x In addition, there is a growing amount of translation of contemporary Arabic literature into Hebrew — especially by writers identifying as Palestinian or Israeli Arabs. “Nakba Lite and Other Stories,” an anthology of Palestinian short stories, translated into Hebrew from the Arabic and edited by Yossi Gronovsky and Alteeb A’naim, was published in 2014. The Arab Israeli writer Odeh Bisharat, recently profiled in The Forward, had his first novel translated from Arabic into Hebrew, and represented Israel this past fall at The University of Iowa’s International Writing Program.
Lam, the letter-writer and student at Tel Aviv University, focuses on the power of words and language to create understanding.
“When Jewish children will know how to speak Arabic and will be used to hearing it,” she writes, the intimidation factor will decline. “There won’t be fear from the conversation taking place on the side and instead perhaps inclusion and connection.”
Maybe if people understand each other on a word level, they will find common interests,” Lam writes. “Maybe it will even be possible to solve some divisions with the help of words.”
I got a better idea. Arabs learn Hebrew or leave.
Do the Arabic residents of Israel feel compelled to learn Hebrew??????
The arabs should be required to speak Hebrew.
Like this division? "Oh, Muslim, there is a jew hiding behind me, come slay him!"
Why, so they can hear their killers coming at them sooner?
NBC = Nothing But Counterfeit
You need a common language, not a bunch of equal different languages.
The Austrian empire greatly increased their ethnic problems when Latin was dropped as the common administrative language in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
Go to the West Bank and every street is in Arabic, named after a suicide bomber who killed Jews.
The common language in India has been English since the 1830s. Before that it was Farsi. (Persian)
The US is headed toward Babel with Mexicans leading the charge.
If she wants to learn Arabic she should learn Arabic. Nobody is stopping her. Leftists always want to push their personal agenda on others, regardless of how the others feel about it.
Many of them do. I live in Jerusalem, and every day I interact with arabs in the grocery stores, hotels, working as dentists, taxi drivers, etc. They all know Hebrew
Thanks Nick. Lends a little more credibility to the story.
They’re lucky to have English!
I think Ireland was crazy to resurrect Gaelic.
In the Austrian empire, Joseph II, an 18th-century “enlightened despot,” replaced Latin with German in the 1780’s (because he was a modernizer and thought the Germans were the most advanced nationality in the empire), although Latin was still used in the Hungarian part until the 1840s.
At which point the Hungarians, realizing that their language was difficult to learn, replaced Latin with Hungarian to keep Germans from other parts of the empire out of the gov’t jobs.
Overall in the empire, the dropping of Latin for a modern language of a particular ethnic group, made the other ethnic groups more aware of being different, and led to much greater conflict.
I was told that the initial plan was to replace English with Hindi after 15 years (after independence) but the people in southern India who speak one of the Dravidian languages objected to Hindi (an Indo-European language) and preferred English.
Used to be there was something like a million Israeli Jews who came from families that spoke Arabic as a first language.
I suppose some libtards in the Israel government finally noticed that the descendants of those refugees from Arabic-speaking countries didn’t keep it up as a first or even second language. I’m sure there will be a bureaucracy with nice patronage jobs added to alleviate this problem.
Another leftist Israeli with a suicide wish, and near total ignorance of what Islam is and will do to him and his family etc. Here we have brains full of mush; there, they have brains full of taqyyia.
What a cunningly clever idea. One language for all the commerce and daily social exchange within the country.
Other countries should try it as well. Start with Canada....
The only reason to learn Arabsick is to know what evil they may be plotting against you.
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