A language in conflict: Arabic in Israel and Palestine

The conflict over historical Palestine between the Palestinian national movement and Zionism goes back to the early years of the 20th century. Much has been written on the topic from a political, historical, legal, and social perspective, but it is only in recent years that language has started to emerge as a subject of scholarly interest. Although Zionism considered language as one of its principal pillars, together with the notions of the “return” to the land and Jewish agricultural labour, the latter as an antidote to the urbanized experience of Jews in European societies, this benign neglect of language is understandable. For both the Palestinians and the Zionists, the preservation and acquisition of the land, respectively, was the primary concern. However, through the revival of Hebrew, both instrumentally and symbolically, language had a greater potency for the early Zionists than it did for the Palestinians. The Palestinians had no language project of their own because of their linguistic homogeneity, and this included the indigenous Palestinian Jewry. Arabic in its multiple varieties was a living language in need of no revival, and, in its standard form, it was used in schools, the press, and literary production. However, this situation changed following the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 for two interlinked reasons: a significantly enhanced sense of security in the new state, and the need to deal with the educational and other needs of the Palestinians who remained on their land. And because language is hardly the cause of sustained conflict among nations, it is to be expected that the linguistic reflexes of the political and legal conflict over Palestine would reveal themselves downstream as a delayed phenomenon. Using a medical analogy, the conflict over language in historical Palestine is a case of “referred pain” whose causes lie elsewhere.