The Politics of Palestinian Multilingualism: Speaking for Citizenship 9781138563308, 9781138563315, 9780429260230

Citation preview

The Politics of Palestinian Multilingualism

The Politics of Palestinian Multilingualism: Speaking for Citizenship provides an essential contribution to understanding the politics of Israel/ Palestine through the prism of sociolinguistics and discourse analysis. Arabic-speakers who also know Hebrew resort to a range of communicative strategies for their political ideas to be heard: they either accommodate or resist the Israeli institutional suppression of Arabic. They also codeswitch and borrow from Hebrew as well as from Arabic registers and styles in order to mobilise discursive authority. On political and cultural stages, multilingual Palestinian politicians and artists challenge the existing political structures. In the late capitalist market, language skills are re-packaged as commodified resources. With new evidence from recent and historical discourse, this book is about how speakers of a marginalised, contained language engage with the political system in the idioms at their disposal. The Politics of Palestinian Multilingualism: Speaking for Citizenship is key reading for advanced students and scholars of multilingualism, language contact, ideology, and policy, within sociolinguistics, anthropology, politics, and Middle Eastern studies. Nancy Hawker (DPhil University of Oxford 2013) has finished a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Oxford, UK. She is a research fellow at the Aga Khan University’s Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations, London.

Politics of Language Series editors: Deborah Cameron, University of Oxford, UK and Alexandre Duchêne, University of Fribourg, Switzerland

The Politics of Language series publishes radical and innovative texts in the area of language, social and cultural theory. Recent shifts away from purely formal, analytical approaches have raised new questions about the role of language in the social, political and ideological realms. The series will seek to address these questions in a clear and informed way, illuminating the central role language plays in individual and public life in societies around the world.

Titles in the series: Moral Talk Stance and Evaluation in Political Discourse Joe Spencer-Bennett The Politics of Palestinian Multilingualism Speaking for Citizenship Nancy Hawker For more information on any of these and other titles, or to order, please go to https://www.routledge.com/Politics-of-Language/book-series/POL Additional resources for Language and Communication are available on the Routledge Language and Communication Portal: www.routledgetextbooks.com/textbooks/languageandcommunication/

The Politics of Palestinian Multilingualism

Speaking for Citizenship

Nancy Hawker

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Nancy Hawker The right of Nancy Hawker to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-1-138-56330-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-56331-5 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-26023-0 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

To Alaa, who understands what people seem to want to say.

Contents



Acknowledgments

x

Introduction: a discourse-analytical exploration of the citizenship of Palestinians

1

Between ideologies of monolingualism, practices of bilingualism, and aspirations to multilingualism  6 The discursive elements of citizenship  9 Vocal leftist multilinguals, silent rightists  12 Other sources of primary material  14 Fieldwork limitation: no ‘right-wing’ Arabs  15 Elections as the structure of the fieldwork, but not its object of interest  18 Building on and reframing the existing scholarship on Arabic in Israel  20 Notes 25 1 The contestation of Arabic on Zionist stages Knesset beginnings: translating and negotiating national boundaries 32 The institutional Arabic silence  37 Breaking the Arabic silence on Zionist stages  39 Who do you think you are talking to? Addressing Arab audiences from Zionist platforms  50 Speaking ‘Israeli Arabic’: a military language for Jewish Israelis  53 Speaking languages to power: contesting linguistic and other hegemonies  55 Notes 56

29

viii Contents

2 Linguistically navigating ‘mixed’ social settings in contexts of segregation 63 The ‘Arab-radar’  65 Creating Arabic spaces with Jewish Israelis  69 The stubbornness of the principle of Arabic avoidance in ‘mixed’ company  70 Who’s the boss?  75 Claiming equality when there is none  77 A self-governing ‘Palestinian autonomous area’ and its Jewish Israeli visitor  80 Language choices in the context of inherited power dynamics 83 Notes 86 3 Expressing styles for discursive authority

88

‘Rule’ Number 1: create your audience: alternate codes  91 ‘Rule’ Number 2: show your expertise: mix in loanwords  94 ‘Rule’ Number 3: show your seriousness: use Educated Spoken Arabic  99 ‘Rule’ Number 4: be funny: use Hebrew in paradoxical situations for ironic humour  106 ‘Rule’ Number 5: park your patriarchy (in the parliament)  110 Notes 115 4 Anxious attitudes, confident practices: the ambivalence of late capitalism Anxieties about borrowing  119 Late capitalism, consumerism, and the new Palestinian multilinguals 122 Avoiding Arabic in the ‘mixed’ company of the shopping centres  124 Representations of Arab multilingualism in popular cinematic productions  126 Multilingual cosmopolitanism versus monolingual nationalism  131 Notes 137

118

Contents 

Conclusion

ix

141

The political scientist is the sociolinguist’s friend  141 Cross-disciplinary approaches to Arabic in Israel for understanding the politics  143 Reintroducing ‘class’ as an overhauled sociolinguistic term 145 Notes 148

Epilogue: a personal journey through language teaching and learning ideologies Appendix 1: transcription conventions Appendix 2: list of fieldwork sites with map Appendix 3: list of transcriptions from February and March 2015 field recordings Appendix 4: list of videos and films analysed as primary material Appendix 5: list of official records of institutional speeches analysed as primary material Appendix 6: list of online news articles and other online sources referenced as a secondary sources Bibliography Index

149 160 161 164 165 168 170 176 190

Acknowledgments

This book is the confluence of thoughtful contributions of many minds, for which my writing is a channel. I have benefitted from the expert and editorial comments of Professors Deborah Cameron and Alexandre Duchêne on drafts of this book: thank you. Questions and suggestions addressed to me at numerous conferences and in many professional correspondences have stimulated my thinking; to mention but a few people to whom I owe intellectual debts, I list: Alfonso Del Percio, Anita Sujoldžić, Brian Klug, Charles Tripp, Clive Holes, Emilie Durand Zúñiga, Enam Al-Wer, Hassan Jabareen, Hebatallah Taha, Isabelle L’Église, Kathryn Dean, Lauren Banko, Leena Dallasheh, Lily Kahn, Mahmoud Kayyal, Maria Rosa Garrido Sardà, Monica Heller, Mtanes Shihadeh, Nadia Jamil, Noa Vichanski, Ron Dudai, Rosemary Hall, Shir Hever, Shira Robinson, Sibo Kanobana, Stefano Manfredi, Uri Horesh, William Cotter, and Yonatan Mendel. Additionally, Helal Alosh and Alaa Owaineh offered me their own understandings and insights pertaining to situations we were witnessing while I was conducting fieldwork. Knesset archivist Gilad Natan assisted my research with professional diligence when I was looking for early Knesset documents. Proofreaders Chloë Massey and Nigel Hawker came to the rescue of my grammatic and orthographic dignity. Most of all, I am grateful to all the participants in the field research, whether as named politicians, as anonymous engaged citizens, or as organisers of meetings and events which I was invited to attend. In particular, candidates Aida Touma-Suleiman (Democratic Front for Peace and Equality), Issawi Freij (Meretz), Zuheir Bahloul (Labour), Talab Abu Arar (The Islamists), and their aides, enabled my work in the field. Mariam Farah (then of the National Democratic Assembly), Fadi Msamra (of the Regional Council of Unrecognised Villages), and staff of I‘lam, were also supportive of my fieldwork by notifying me of opportunities for attendance and recording. They lay the basis for this book. The Leverhulme Trust funded the research with Early Career Fellowship ECF-2013-624, and the University of Oxford provided an academic home, access to libraries, and travel insurance: this has cushioned my embodied existence in ways that I greatly appreciate. The

Acknowledgments  xi

writing would have been impossible without the unpaid childcare labour provided by my family and friends, and the thinking was greatly enhanced by curious questions addressed to me by a child’s voice from the area beside my left elbow as I was typing (‘Is this about how people are trying to make the government better?’). All mistakes and omissions are mine.

Introduction A discourse-analytical exploration of the citizenship of Palestinians

In early 2015, two billboards beamed at drivers from the verge of Ayalon Highway nearing Tel Aviv, bearing messages intended to scare them into voting in the parliamentary elections on 17 March 2015. One said, sarcastically, ‘Thank you, Salim’, and displayed the picture of Russian Israeli politician Avigdor Liberman in sinister hues. The other, identical in tone and design, stated ‘Thank you, Bat-El’, and showed Palestinian politician Hanin Zoabi. Underneath each face was the explanation: ‘When you don’t participate in elections, your vote goes to someone else’.1 The prospect of Avigdor Liberman continuing to find a place in the government of Israel would be alarming for someone with an Arab name like Salim. Liberman’s Yisrael Beytenu party’s proposed solution for the territorial conflict between the Palestinians and Israel involves stripping some Palestinians and other Arabs of their Israeli citizenship, and demanding that those who would want to retain the legal status of citizen under these conditions should express allegiance to Israel ‘as the homeland for the Jewish people’.2 Liberman, his party, and the Likud-led government, in which Liberman had served as foreign minister, advocated for years the Basic Law ‘Israel – The Nation-State of the Jewish People’ which was passed by the Knesset on 19 July 2018, which among other Jewish Israeli nationalistic provisions demoted Arabic from official language to ‘language with a special status’.3 As both scholarly and popular perceptions see language policies as litmus tests for ideologies of social inclusion and exclusion (Piller, 2016), mainstream media commentators of Middle East politics have analysed this new Basic Law in terms of opening the door to the potential political exclusion of Palestinian and other Arab citizens of Israel, though it actually enshrines in law practices and ‘facts on the ground’ that have been entrenched for decades.4 On 26 February 2015 in a televised election debate, when presented with the fact that some 20% of the legal citizens of Israel are Palestinians or other Arabs, Liberman muttered, bentayim bentayim ‘for now, for now’ (Figure 0.1).5 Hanin Zoabi did not expect any position of governmental power that could materially affect the hypothetical Jewish Israeli voter, the Bat-El of the

2 Introduction

Figure 0.1 'Thank you Salim' election billboard, February 2015 ©Private.

billboard: opposition parties such as her National Democratic Assembly, which support Palestinian collective national and minority rights, and individual human rights, have never been included in a governing coalition. Her position has always been one of dissent. She sailed with the Gaza blockade protest ship, the Mavi Marmara, in May 2010, on which nine Turkish citizens were killed by the Israeli navy (another one died later). Her participation defied expectations that citizens and their representatives pay allegiance to the armed forces even when these violate international law (Human Rights Council, 2010; Amnesty International, 2011). As a result, in June 2010 the Knesset voted to remove three of her parliamentary privileges, and ‘the Israeli Minister of Interior accused Ms. Zouabi [sic] of treason and requested authorization from the Attorney General to revoke her citizenship’ (Human Rights Council, 2010, p. 52). Animosity against her persisted for years: Knesset colleagues on the Central Elections Committee banned her from running as a parliamentary candidate on 12 February 2015. She had already spent six months since the end of July 2014 suspended from her parliamentary post, barred from addressing any Knesset debate, while she faced an investigation. Among the reasons: at a demonstration in Nazareth in summer 2014 she had called Palestinians and other Arabs serving in the

Introduction 

3

Israeli police ‘traitors’ after she had witnessed, as she reported, scenes of police violence against young demonstrators. The billboard designers could expect Bat-El to be outraged by Hanin Zoabi’s pronouncements: outrage directed at this target was a shortcut to displaying loyalty to Israeli institutions (Figure 0.2). The Ayalon Highway billboards exhorted citizens to vote on the basis of fear of the electoral choices of members of the other ethnic or national group. The contradiction this posed – between the invitation to elections structured for the participation of voters with equal weight at the ballot on the one hand, and the political culture of erasure of some of their opinions and positions on the other – to the experience of citizenship in Israel remained prominently unresolved. However, it did so in Hebrew only, although the ‘thank you, Salim’ was a transcription of the Arabic šukran Salīm, in orientalising arabesque Hebrew lettering. These language and script choices indicate that the billboard was not really addressed to the hypothetical voter Salim who reads Arabic, but to the Jewish Israeli majority, again, which is not expected to read Arabic. The message to them could be read as: ‘Beware, silent mainstream Jewish Israeli citizen, Palestinians and other Arabs will vote for the outrageous Zoabi, but you have the option

Figure 0.2 'Thank you Bat-El' election billboard, February 2015 ©Private.

4 Introduction

to vote for those who act to restrict their rights’. Crass electioneering based on fear-mongering and outrage, misrepresenting and ignoring opposing candidates’ views, is of course not restricted to Israel, and the spread of this type of communication has been analysed by some political philosophers as a challenge to the requirements of (idealised) democracy (Habermas, 2006). In these elections, the racialised and securitised portrayals of Palestinian and other Arab voters and their representatives were seen as a potential obstacle to voter participation (Arab Association for Human Rights, 2015). The rest of this book’s introduction will present the political context for the evidence recorded in interactions between politicians and engaged citizens from all walks of life during the 2015 election campaigns in Israel. The analysis leans on political distinctions of systemic elements that are ethnorepublican, which manage and marginalise linguistic diversity, ethnonationalistic, which exclude identities constructed as ‘other’ including through linguistic difference, and liberal, which provide for equality and political access of different groups. The cross-disciplinary approach fuses sociolinguistics of language contact and politics. The methods borrow from critical ethnography and discourse analysis, and the argument reframes the existing scholarship on Arabic in Israel, which has mostly examined the potential or non-existent language shift away from Arabic of speakers who have also been exposed to Modern Israeli Hebrew. Concerns with language shift are seen to map onto not linguistic, but rather political, anxieties. Reports of the death of Palestinian and other Arab politics in Israel are grossly exaggerated.6 In a dusty sports hall in the deprived Bedouin township of Šgīb as-Salām7 in the Naqab8 region of southern Israel, a teenager stood up to tell an assembled panel of Palestinian national politicians9 on the campaign trail for the 2015 Knesset elections: intum hēna tǧammʿitu ka ʿuḍu wāḥad u hāḏa ġāliban mā biṣīr, hāḏa l-ʾiši : ‘You came together here as one unit and this does not usually happen, this thing’. She went on to ask: šū muḫaṭaṭātkum la ġalāʾ asʿār il-buyūt fi taʿa ngūl fi n-nagab. ā, u kīf hāḏa rāḥ yiʾaṯṯer ʿala taqalluṣ nisbet il-fukr bēn il-muǧtamaʿ il-ʿarabi:10 ‘What are your plans in relation to the rise in house prices, in, let’s say in the Naqab. Yes, and how is this going to affect the reduction of the poverty rate in Arab society’.11 She sat down; behind her, some of her friends tittered, and their teacher gently scolded them; the politicians fumbled around, stuttering vague answers. More young people rose amidst the rows of plastic chairs to challenge the politicians on unemployment, human rights, and inequality – all discussed in Arabic. Within the margins of the ‘liberal settler state’ (Robinson, 2013), or ‘ethnocracy’ (Yiftachel, 2006), spaces were carved, one question at a time, in which citizenship could be performed. The citizenship at issue here is the political engagement, through shared debate, with questions of the common good beyond narrow self-interest. This is an Aristotelean definition of (one aspect) of citizenship (Aristotle, 1992, pp. 149–155);12 it is not citizenship as legal categorisation, with which

Introduction 

5

political citizenship interrelates through regimes of exclusion and inclusion (Nussbaum, 1990; Heater, 2004). In this book, I explore Palestinian and other Arab experiences of citizenship in Israel discursively; that is, the object of enquiry is how political discourse creates the political engagement that is citizenship. In turn, the structures of citizenship give rise to linguistic expressions in circulation. The particular discursive patterns that are of interest for the Palestinians and other Arabs engaging in a broad sense with Israeli politics are the patterns of Arabic and Hebrew use and the tensions between monolingual and multilingual possibilities. The main question that this book answers is, how do Palestinians and other Arabs in Israel discursively inhabit their experience of citizenship? To answer this, I have recorded interactions between politicians and engaged citizens, and amongst politicians, at public events on a range of scales, during the 2015 election campaigns in Israel. I also looked at debates in the parliament, both historical and recent, and on other political stages including in the broadcast media. The texts collected from these sources are analysed with methods from ethnography and discourse analysis, with an emphasis on contextualisation within relations of power both in the immediacy of the situation and within inherited socioeconomic and political structures. Intellectual stimulus for work in this vein has come from the poststructuralist perspective on ‘negotiation of identities in multilingual contexts’, according to which ‘[…] languages may not only be “markers of identity” but also sites of resistance, empowerment, solidarity or discrimination’ (Pavlenko & Blackledge, 2004, p. 4). The identity under multilingual negotiation is one that I term the emergent Palestinian and other Arab middle class, at a juncture relative both to other dynamic class positions in the political economy and to contested ethnic and national boundaries. The analyses are organised into four substantive chapters. The first outlines the evolution of norms and practices that suppress Arabic on platforms of Zionist institutions, including some political stages, despite the formal, managed, and limited inclusion of the ‘diversity’ of Palestinians and other Arabs. The second observes the practices of Palestinian and other Arab speakers who prefer to avoid speaking in Arabic when there are any Jewish Israelis among the interlocutors. The third lists some stylistic strategies for gaining discursive authority in debates among Palestinians and other Arabs whose political views are various and materially grounded in discrete life experiences. The fourth chapter contemplates some ambivalent trends of language attitudes in late capitalism which on the one hand confidently mobilise multilingualism as a resource, the better to claim a would-be consumerist liberal utopia and to create marketable cultural products by, for, and about Palestinians and other Arabs. On the other hand, explicit language attitudes express anxieties about multilingualism’s unsettling of the ideologically clear-cut one-nation-one-language equation

6 Introduction

(transferred from anxieties about the ‘endangerment’ of the nation and the language per se).

Between ideologies of monolingualism, practices of bilingualism, and aspirations to multilingualism ‘The foundations of linguistic authority are also foundations of identity, community, nation, polity, and citizenship’ (Woolard, 2016, p. 1). Taking this proposition as starting point, this book paints the following picture: ideologies of separate Hebrew and Arabic monolingualisms are constitutive elements of prevalent, sometimes articulated but often taken-for-granted, nationalist sentiments. In Israel, this Hebrew monolingualism animates state symbols, institutions, and public commemorations which are constitutive of the ‘ethnorepublican project’ (Peled, 1992) or of the ‘1948 paradigm’ (Rekhess, 2014), in which the frame of the state is designed to be Jewish Israeli. However, within this frame, what are called ‘minorities’ can operate within somewhat fluid limitations, which are called ‘legal citizenship’. Exclusion from that category hangs as a threat over the Palestinians and other Arabs in Israel, who within living memory have seen dispossession and expulsion in the form of the Nakba (Khalidi, 2005; Robinson, 2013). Their national sentiment identifies them with those more excluded by degrees: the Palestine refugees in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, and Iraq, other Palestinians of the occupied territories, and the emigrant ‘diaspora’. The Palestinians do not have a state that would have the material power to exclude ethnic groups construed as ‘other’, least of all Israeli settlers, but they do have symbols, institutions, and public commemorations, which are animated by the ideology of Arabic monolingualism (Suleiman Y., 2004). Moreover, they do have political factions that have politically and physically excluded followers of competing factions, and that have divided Palestinian symbols and institutions (Baconi, 2018) but not the allegiance to monolingual ideology. The changes in political and socio-economic dynamics brought on by the establishment of the Israeli state, experienced as a settler-colonial takeover, led the Palestinians and other Arabs to gradually acquire Hebrew in addition to their Arabic: they became bilingual; this came to be one of the most popularly commented-upon adaptations of all those that they had to undergo. Their practices include all the phenomena that are commonly associated with bilingualism: borrowing, codeswitching, and code alternation. For a few in the elite of society, their bilingualism reached a degree of proficiency that is conceived of as two parallel monolingualisms: a flexible command of a range of registers and styles in speech and writing in both Hebrew and Arabic (Heller M., 2006, p. 218). The debate that these sociolinguistically unexceptional practices trigger is a product of the monolingual ideologies, amplified by the armed conflict and struggle over land

Introduction 

7

(Hawker, 2018a). In particular, the bilingual practices are eagerly examined for ‘deficiencies’ that would signal a contraction of Arabic in the everyday discourse of Palestinians and other Arabs: instances of Arabic in Hebrew script in digital messages, loanwords that do not have ‘pure’ Arabic equivalents, phrases that use calquing, new pronunciations, all are taken to mean a shift away from Arabic that threatens the unrealised claim to national selfdetermination centred on the monolingual ideology (Derrida, 1998 [1996]; for an academic expression of this type of examination, see Amara, 2010). The idea that linguistic innovation, including through language contact, is a sign of linguistic expansion into new domains, rather than contraction, is not compatible with the ideology of monolingualism. By 2018, the second generation of Palestinians and other Arabs socialised in the Israeli educational and professional systems had come into their prime, and the third generation had come of age under conditions of latecapitalist consumerism and other globalised forms of economic neoliberalism (Ram, 2013). Those who aspire to socioeconomic and political equality with Jewish Israelis – a radical challenge to the ethnorepublican structure – have repackaged their bilingual practices as ‘skills’ which could be put to use for displaying critical, humorous, or appreciative stances towards political and everyday problems. What this new socioeconomic, political, and cultural elite knows how to project is multilingualism. The struggle over land is not over, but instead of challenging dispossession with (monolingual) national self-determination, some Palestinians and other Arabs are using international law, human rights, and civil rights discourse (Gordon & Berkovitch, 2007; Payes, 2005) and successful literary and cinematic productions (Suleiman C., 2018, pp. 210–222). To follow that course, their multilingualism is a cultivated asset. One example from my research will clarify the difference between bilingualism and multilingualism. One of the Palestinian candidates for the 2015 parliamentary elections, Zuheir Bahloul of the Labour Party (renamed for these elections ‘The Zionist Camp’), was a retired radio sports presenter reputed for his excellent style in both languages. He delivered his maiden speech to the Knesset – in Hebrew, of course – on 5 May 2015, and ended it with a salutation in Arabic: bārakkum Allah: ‘God bless you’.13 The quality of his delivery and his final words prompted two metalinguistic comments: one from the Knesset session chair, Yitzhak Vaknin, who said: ‘Ahmad Tibi, you have a competitor. I am paying you a compliment’.14 Ahmad Tibi had been a member of the Knesset since 1999 and was considered a skilled orator, and also a Palestinian, albeit from a different, anti-Zionist, political stream: comparing like with like, according to ‘national’ language, is a function of the construction of monolingual borders, notwithstanding what the speakers actually stood for. The other comment came from Zuheir Bahloul’s party leader, Yitzhak Herzog, who said: eyzo ivrit yefeyfiyya. mamaš ka šémen al ha-atsamot. lo šomʾim davar ka ze be-harbe maḫozot

8 Introduction

ḫafets be-artzeinu, zoher: ‘What splendid Hebrew. Really as rich as bone fat in a stew [lit. like oil on the bones]. We don’t hear speech like this in many places that our hearts long for in our country, Zuheir’.15 Zuheir Bahloul smiled, accepted the congratulations of his new colleagues, and seemed to me to play down the compliments by ignoring the Speaker’s dais.16 A Jewish Israeli’s praise for a Palestinian’s command of Hebrew, and especially the use of yefeyfiyya ‘splendid’, the augmentative feminine form of yafá ‘beautiful’, raises questions of discursive authority. If one considers Frantz Fanon’s sarcastic proposition that ‘the Negro of the Antilles will come closer to being a real human being in direct ratio to his mastery of the French language’ (Fanon, 1986, p. 18), and Fanon’s comments on the patronising connotations of complimenting a ‘native’s’ language, then the parallels of that critically perceived colonial discourse with the metalinguistic comments after Bahloul’s speech are striking. Fanon reported that a woman fainted during an electoral speech by Aimé Césaire in Martinique in 1945, because Césaire’s French was so good – ‘the power of language!’ (Fanon, 1986, p. 39) – and that André Breton praised professional wordsmith Césaire in his introduction to Cahier d’un retour au pays natal in these terms: ‘Here is a black man who handles the French language as no white man today can’ (Fanon, 1986, p. 39). These compliments, then, serve to reinforce the boundary between white and black and allocates the prestigious language to the white side: an object of aspiration for the black. It was as if Herzog were saying, Well done, you can speak like us Jewish Israelis because you obviously want to be almost like us (taking into account the Arabic salutation), because we have all the good discourse, which is Hebrew. It might then appear as if the Palestinians and the Israelis were doomed to stay locked in colonial behaviour, however much space might have been created for accommodating diversity, for instance by including a Palestinian on ‘Zionist Camp’s’ electoral list. These questions all fall within the range of bilingualism, and indeed could not be understood without sociolinguistic approaches to the production of ‘legitimate speakers’. It is not good enough to speak well: speech is allocated discursive authority depending on how language ideologies discriminate between gendered, racialised, and classed speakers (Heller & McElhinny, 2017, p. 251). And yet, from the interactions I could record in my fieldwork, I infer that Zuheir Bahloul did not view his language skills in those terms, and neither did any of the other elite ‘double monolinguals’. In an interview with me, prior to meeting Labour party activists in Akka,17 northern Israel, Bahloul called his ability to switch from one language to another, and to find the right term at the right moment in whichever language, ‘a talent’, in Arabic mawhibe, in that he did not strive to prove anything personal by his efforts.18 He said ‘people seemed to like how I spoke, when I was on radio: maybe I can now put that gift to good use, for my community’.19 He was performing modesty, and he thus boasted of his multilingualism even more

Introduction 

9

successfully. He claimed that his well-appreciated speech drew on conscious linguistic skills to be deployed for what he was sincerely convinced of as his conception of the common good: the material improvement of public infrastructure in Palestinian and other Arab districts in Israel, which could be achieved with the accession of a Labour government. His modest smile after his maiden speech meant, to my mind: ‘I know I’m good at rhetoric, not only good at Hebrew per se: I’m good at being a multilingual Palestinian’. He had moved on from Fanon’s black-and-white realities. The discursive strategies of multilingualism are what this class of speakers is concerned with. Their language skills are a resource. Zuheir Bahoul tendered his resignation from the Knesset after the passing of the so-called Nation-State Law in July 2018.20 The Nation-State Law altered the constitution of Israel by overriding provisions in the Declaration of Independence for formal equality of all citizens; it has the potential (pending decisions on Supreme Court petitions and subsequent amendments) to alter the ethnorepublican structure of the state, and turn it into an ethnonational state similar to South Africa’s Herrenvolk (Peled, 1992, p. 435), by excluding all non-Jews and most prominently among them the Palestinians and other Arabs. Opposition to the Nation-State Law (which only narrowly passed the parliamentary plenum vote) has brought together those who want to preserve the ethnorepublican system as well as those who aspire to the actual, rather than formal, realisation of the liberal conception of a state for all its citizens (with its preferable flaws), of which the multilingual Palestinians and other Arabs are the most vocal advocates.21 It is for this reason that studying the actual linguistic practices of middle class Palestinian and other Arab multilinguals at this delicate historical juncture has bearing upon the study of politics, too. These speakers’ ability to cross back and forth across boundaries of languages, which are taken to rigidly index ethnic national groups (Heller M., 2006, p. 15), could have a crucial impact on the political course of Israel, with all the world-wide repercussions this has.

The discursive elements of citizenship How is citizenship inhabited under these conditions? The answers presented in this book will deliberately evade generalisations. The linguistic expressions of citizenship are varied and undetermined. The multifarious forms of citizenship will be presented as a reaction to the generalisations that proliferate in commentaries with regards to Palestinians and other Arabs’ supposed quiescence or insubordination, alienation or loyalty, double life, and ‘fifth column’ threat, etc. (Hawker, 2018a; Ghanem, 2001). The reason for this evasion is that with discursive-analytical tools, I am only in a position to judge political behaviour by standards of nationalism, securitism, or democratic idealism that are emically meaningful to the subjects,

10 Introduction

in their contexts, as observed; and my prioritisation of the analysis of their meanings is why I chose those tools. This is not to presume that subjects are simply as ‘democratic’ and ‘patriotic’ as they say they are – by that measure, no one would ever be a racist tyrant – but that by analysing discursive patterns in real, immediate, situated instances of speech, we can find forms of political engagement with the common good that are beyond categorical judgements. Speech is an element of inhabitations of citizenship: it expresses discursive fragmentation or coherence, shows of authority or deference, humour, politeness, and respect, or anger, cynicism, and challenge. What the bias of the question – limiting the search for citizenship to political engagement – necessarily cannot account for, is silence, anomie, and alienation, those political corollaries of late capitalism and consumerism (Isin & Wood, 1999, p. 31), which will be explored in the fourth chapter. This bias has the advantage of producing a less-dystopic-than-usual account of Palestinian and other Arab politics – without for all that heralding peace and joy – which might at least provide some optimism to the reader. To temper that optimism, however, it has to be understood that defining citizenship as engagement, through political debate, with questions of the common good beyond narrow self-interest, means that citizenship is broadly incompatible with capitalism (Dean, 2003; Mouffe, 1991). Citizenship, in the vignettes presented in this book, grows in the cracks of several articulated hegemonies, of which state-centred Zionism and capitalism are two. And yet, the invigoration of Palestinian and other Arab political self-confidence is in part an aspect of the limited emergence of an aspirational middle class. This class has met its own (narrow) needs for socioeconomic status, and in so doing discovered its non-material needs for citizenship. Claiming this citizenship has been confronted by structural limitations including those created by the conditions for their own material advancement: and so, a dialectic of needs has the potential to drive the dialectics of history (Heller A., 1993). The Israeli state has aligned with global capital, promoting neoliberal policies and consumerist culture at least since the 1980s (Hanieh, 2003), which is the context in which the new Palestinian and other Arab middle class could develop. This does not mean that capitalism replaced Zionism – the intertwinement between the two has been complex since the beginnings of state policy (Kimmerling, 1999, p. 353) – but that the articulation between class and ethnicity/nationality was reconfigured to accommodate neoliberalism, as it was between class and race in the Caribbean and South Africa during different phases of colonialism and apartheid (Hall, 1996). Some aspects of that reconfigured articulation could become more fluid: hence the emergence of the multilingual Palestinian and other Arab middle class. Within that overarching view, it then seems literally academic to discuss whether Israel constitutes an ‘ethnic democracy’ or ‘ethnocracy’, a ‘liberal settler state’ or ‘settler colonial state’.22 The organising of periodic elections

Introduction 

11

for a parliament which is relatively governmentally active (Kimmerling, 1999) is a structure with far-reaching, multifarious consequences for the anthropologically observable experiences of citizenship. In the Bedouin township of Rahat, this structure was behind the logic for an announcer’s monotone reading out of names of tribal leaders who had committed their followers to voting for the Joint List;23 in the town of Baqa al-Gharbiya it created the opportunity for a farmer to explain to the Meretz candidate how political parties could attract material dividends from the treasury;24 and in Kufr Bara it caused a feminist socialist and a conservative Islamist to sit side by side politely praising each other’s efforts in championing the welfare of the most deprived.25 This structure also gave rise to the option of boycotting elections, as expressed by two participants at a townhall debate in another Bedouin township, Hura.26 There is no point in describing these consequences as ironies, paradoxes, or aberrations for democracy: such descriptions would only be valid if we held these performances up to an externally determined standard of what the electoral system (ideally) intended. These performances are all forms of engagement with ideas of the common good under these structural conditions, engagements that happen in the cracks, in fact creating and shaping the cracks, which are spaces of negativity within hegemonic systems. Negativity, in a polyvalent Hegelian sense, is an apt term for the frustration and constriction that Palestinians and other Arabs frequently express in their political speaking, as well as for the motivation it fuels to demand change for the common good (Adorno, 2003). It is because Palestinians’ and other Arabs’ citizenship, however variously inhabited, comes from a crack of negativity, that it is worth studying for its counter-hegemonic possibilities. The ‘neutrality’ of calling a functional parliament ‘merely’ a structure could be seen as overly dismissive by those who put effort into logistically staging elections in such a way as to preclude vote-rigging, for instance, or who maintain the legal constitutional framework, however demarcated, of parliamentary activity. These are (here, unexplored) prerequisites for the structure to allow the performances of citizenship described in this book. However, the equal weight of votes in the ballot box is not translated into equal weight in the political debate over what is a ‘legitimate idea’ of the common good in Israel: Palestinian and Arab views, being counter-hegemonic, are ‘illegitimate’ (Kimmerling, 1999, p. 360) – and this is why I examine them as cracks of negativity. One aspect of the discursive constitution of citizenship is the hyphenated and contested identity labels (Dinero, 2010, pp. 127–133; Rouhana, 1997, pp. 111–113). My term of choice in this book, ‘Palestinian and other Arab’, captures both the idea that ‘Palestinian’ is a kind of ‘Arab’ (just as ‘British’ is a kind of ‘European’), and that there are some indigenous Arabic-speakers (whose ‘native tongue’ is indexically strongly linked to Arab identity) who do not primarily identify with Palestinian nationality, however labelled. Some Arabic-speakers who have lived, and/or have familial roots, in the

12 Introduction

chronotope of the geographical space of historical Palestine (which forms a ‘connection to land’ that is strongly linked to Palestinian identity) prefer to describe themselves as ‘Arab’, sometimes in combination with other descriptors (such as ‘Bedouin’ or ‘Druze’) that denote nested and elastic identities. ‘Palestinian and other Arab’ is therefore used in this book as a generalisation, with more specific political and social descriptions introduced in ways that make emic sense to the subjects in concrete contexts. This solution is a deliberate, perhaps futile, attempt to evade the shibboleths that associate particular labels with particular discourses (e.g. ‘Israeli Arab’ with Israeli state authorities’ discourse, ‘Palestinians of ‘48’ and ‘Palestinians of the Interior’ with discourses that emphasise Palestinians’ diasporic existences, and ‘Palestinian Arab’ with Palestinian collective and human rights discourse). None of these are self-evident geographical or historical terms, but rather are negotiated constructs inherited in the forms of words in current use. I do not suggest that my terminology is superior in its ideological references (Derrida, 1998 (1996), p. 39), but ‘Palestinian and other Arab’ is relatively descriptively precise and succinct, and therefore practical.

Vocal leftist multilinguals, silent rightists The fieldwork which forms most of the new evidence presented in this book took place on 25 sites between 10 February and 14 March 2015 at political events – townhall debates, activist mobilisation meetings, speeches at rallies, house visits, street leafleting – across the geographical space of Israel within pre-1967 borders, from villages in the northern Galilee to townships in the Naqab, and most places in between where there were public meetings. A list and map of the fieldwork sites are in Appendix 2.27 I recorded 18 Palestinian and other Arab parliamentary candidates, most on several occasions (alphabetically by first names as commonly spelt in the English-language press): Abbas Mansour, Abdel Hakim Hajj Yahiya, Ahmad Tibi, Aida Touma-Suleiman, Ayman Odeh, Basel Ghattas, Hanin Zoabi, Hussein al-Rifaʿi, Ibrahim Hijazi, Issawi Freij, Jamal Zahalka, Jumʿa Azbarga, Mahmoud Nujeidat,28 Masʿoud Ghanayem, Said Khroumi, Talab Abu ʿArar, Yusif Jabarin, and Zuheir Bahloul. Four Hebrew-speaking candidates in Arabic-speaking environments were also recorded: Dov Khenin, Merav Michaeli, Noa Levi, and Ilan Gil’on, as well as numerous aides, party supporters, activists, and members of the public who are central to the interactions and remain anonymous in the study. I attended most of the events as would a member of the public – I followed Arabic announcements on public Facebook pages of all the political parties, and signed up to notifications of election-related events organised by I‘lam (Arab Centre for Media Freedom, Development and Research),29 by the Abraham Fund,30 and the Van Leer Institute,31 in order to identify events and speakers that I could record for this project – except for three closed

Introduction 

13

meetings to which I was invited by the candidates themselves. All candidates had been notified by email of the purpose and nature of my research, and after I had answered a few questions seeking clarifications on the linguistic, rather than political, focus, none objected to my presence. In smaller meetings of up to 30 participants, where members of the public were invited to pose questions to the politicians, I was asked to stand up and introduce myself and my research, which was mostly understood as part of the public’s ‘democratic’ right to keep tabs on the transparency and accountability of the politicians’ discourse; once the anonymity of the ‘engaged citizen’ participants was assured, this understanding of my research was approved of vehemently. In fact, my status as a foreign non-voter, and as a visitor from a ‘Western liberal democracy’, whatever I might have thought of it, made the project more likely to be seen as part of the process of checks and balances. Given that this was how the research was perceived, including by my friend Helal Alosh who accompanied me to many of the events as a ‘true’ member of the local citizenry, and whose insights I have benefitted from, I was struck by how readily most of the politicians agreed to my recording them. They were performing their commitment to the voters’ interest in ‘democratic accountability’; or as Meretz candidate Issawi Freij put it when introducing me at a home visit: ‘This researcher, I’m happy for her to check, on your behalf, that I make the same political statements in Shenkin Street [in the reportedly hippest neighbourhood of Tel Aviv] as I do in Umm al-Fahem [a reputedly conservative Palestinian town in The Triangle]’.32 The most guarded, in these terms, was Hanin Zoabi, who quizzed me as to my research aims before agreeing to my recording part of one of her public meetings;33 Ahmad Tibi was also somewhat cautious in indicating that part of his meeting with activists should not be recorded;34 this reserve was understandable in light of the incitement and threats made against both of them (Shamir & Rahat, 2017). The least guarded were those who let me record them with a lapel microphone attached to a voice recorder in their pocket as they moved among their constituents: I thank Aida Touma-Suleiman for allowing me to record her in this way in a marketplace in Tira, central Israel, while I trailed behind her and activists who were distributing leaflets.35 The only other politician who agreed to being recorded ‘free-range’ was Zuheir Bahloul on a visit to Bedouin elders in an officially ‘unrecognised’ neighbourhood of Hura in the Naqab36 – I thank him, too. Both were on the electoral trail for the first time. The other politicians were too busy attending to their campaigns to wonder what my research was about or what kind of material I would collect. I only interviewed those candidates or other participants who came forward themselves to introduce themselves and their propositions; the purpose of my presence was to observe how already-established communities of practice constituted, took, and held the discursive floor of citizenly debate. My establishing another discursive floor – that of the interview – would have, in my view, interfered with the set-up.

14 Introduction

By listing the names of the politicians recorded for this research I feel that I have done what could be expected of me in terms of contributing to the ‘democratic transparency’ of attributing responsibility for their discourse. Yet a foreigner coming to verify the ‘democratic credentials’ of Palestinian and other Arab politicians, with all the Orientalist baggage such a verification would carry, is not the story of political accountability that I would like students of politics to take from this book. Those who have read treatises on the supposed cultural unsuitability of Arabs for democratic participation (Kedourie, 2013) should learn, as I did, from the impressive determination of those voters from all walks of life who insisted on being taken seriously by the politicians who claimed to represent them, as I reported above in the questions raised in Šgīb as-Salām, and as will be described in many instances in the pages of this book. What I thought of it was that it was, in fact, me who was learning valuable lessons of citizenship to take home to my own engagements with the ‘common good’, of which writing this book is one example. I learnt particularly from meetings where the politicians sat in a circle, sometimes on the ground, with their hoped-for constituencies, and asked questions in which they intersubjectively positioned the voters as experts on their own political problems, and themselves as the ‘mediators’ of that political voice, as Yusif Jabarin did in the Naqab,37 and Zuheir Bahloul did both in the Naqab,38 and in Akka.39 And though the academic framework of this book provides an analytical distancing mechanism, I am not distant from the responsibilities of mediating political voices: as will be seen in the next sections and in the conclusion, it is where academics fail to conceptualise sociolinguistic findings in their socioeconomic and political relations that I propose to intervene.

Other sources of primary material Recordings of political events available online – mainly rallies and press conferences related to the 2015 elections – were also collected and analysed, in addition to speeches in institutions of the state, such as the video of the hearing on Hanin Zoabi’s disqualification from standing in the elections. Though I cannot categorically vouch for the trustworthiness of videos taken from YouTube, they were analysed for obvious tampering, such as blank segments and voiceovers, and for mistakes in identification of speaker, date, and location, and only those videos which passed those credibility tests were used as source material. Videos of Knesset and other institutional speeches were compared against the official records, which were taken from official websites. In the task of locating records of Knesset speeches from the 1940s and 1950s, and of their translators, the help of Knesset archivist Dr Gilad Natan has been invaluable: the archival services are also part of the story of public accountability that this book can attest to. In total, including both video and audio sources, just under 57 hours of speech have been analysed

Introduction 

15

and coded for transitions between Hebrew and Arabic and their varieties and registers, and correlated with topic, pragmatic function, or (intersubjectively constructed) addressee. The pieces of evidence selected from the bulk of the recordings for their instantiations of transitions will be presented in the chapters of this book in the form of vignettes, with contextual detail and with the Hebrew elements highlighted. The political voices captured in the fieldwork are represented in the book in transcriptions and their idiomatic translations into English. The transcriptions are based on the conventions of academic Semitic orthography, a key to which is in Appendix 1, as adhered to by the Journal of Semitic Studies, the Library of Congress, and by most Arabic sociolinguistic studies, and other sources. In this book, the Romanising transcription conventions have the advantage of being legible to those who know either Arabic or Hebrew script but not both, and who, when reading the transcripts, might recognise words in the other language which would have been inaccessible if not for the Romanisation: the transcripts could thus become multilingual texts for some of the readers, as well as the speakers. The transcriptions also convey some of the phonemes with more precise attention to pronunciation in varieties of Arabic than captured by the Arabic and Hebrew consonantal scripts: though dialect documentation is not the purpose of this book, in some of the cases the variations bear on the constructions of identity – for instance, Bedouin, or rural Palestinian – that have political significance. The variations in pronunciation are not an issue when the source quoted is a written one: in those cases, I have noted the original in its script.

Fieldwork limitation: no ‘right-wing’ Arabs The Israeli Left–Right spectrum is not unidimensionally shaped by positions on socioeconomic questions, but rather, also by attitudes to the Palestinian–Israeli conflict (Shamir & Arian, 1999). This means that the Islamists are positioned as ‘Left’, Shas (in English, ‘Guardians of the Sephardim’) as ‘Centre’, and the United Torah Judaism party as ‘Centre Right’, even though they hold similar views on the role of their religion in public life, on gendered social relations, and on welfare provisions (Arian, 2005, p. 415). Nevertheless, Left/Right tends to be used in the literature as a fairly useful analytical shortcut, also approximated by dovish/­hawkish (see Hazan, 2007, p. 270). The limitation of the method of collecting instances of political discourse (with a lower case ‘d’) rather than accounting for abstract, Foucauldian Discourse (with an upper case ‘D’), and of analysing the former in contexts, relations, and patterns, as is applied here, is that the method cannot account for the linguistic practices of those Palestinian and other Arab politicians who are ‘silent’. Either their public speaking was not accessible to me, because they did not respond to my request for their consent to my attendance at their events, or their speeches were not

16 Introduction

recorded on online fora that I had been monitoring, or they simply did not speak in public very much at all. This is not to say that their, and their supporters’, citizenly engagement with conceptions of the common good is not a valuable object of study.40 For this book, their existence is worthy of note precisely because of their relative inaccessibility and inaudibility. These ‘silent’ Arab politicians in Israel belong to parties that are ‘hawkish’ on the issue of resolving the conflict over land between Israel and the Palestinians. As individuals, they speak as many languages as the Palestinian and other Arab politicians who are on the ‘dovish’ end of the spectrum. Yet as participants in institutions (parties, parliament, or government), they are relatively inaudible: this silence allows for the relative (multilingual) vocality of the Palestinians and other Arabs on the ‘left’ to be institutionally heard as a ‘different’ political voice; they, but not the institutionally silent ones, can therefore be construed as the ‘other’ of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, with consequences for their delegitimisation in the eyes of those who see that conflict as a zero-sum ethnic/national contest. This is similar to the construal, for instance, of women politicians as voicing the ‘difference’ of their gender (Cameron & Shaw, 2016, p. 15). Those who ‘speak out’ as Palestinians and Arabs with their multilingualism41 are therefore, within those discursive references, seemingly expressing their ‘essential’ difference. If the institutional multilingualism had been distributed throughout the political spectrum, this construal would not have been possible to uphold in such simplistic terms; conversely, it is the power of the simplistic essentialist terms that place the multilingualism of Arabic and Hebrew on the Left, and of the monolingual Hebrew on the Right, that also ‘silences’ the Arabs in the pro-Zionist parties. Part of the aim, here, of documenting various ways of speaking multilingually, and of inhabiting citizenship, is to demystify that essentialism. This book is about the institutional (rather than the individual cognitive) multilingualism of Palestinians and other Arabs in the Israeli political system, without deducing political generalisations on the back of it. Nevertheless, the absence of the right-wing parties’ Arabs’ discourse, in this book, is also the result of the limitations of my own position within social networks. The March 2015 elections were called early as a result of the dissolution of the governing coalition in December 2014 – elections for the 20th Knesset had been expected to take place in 2017 – and consequently, I quickly mobilised my contacts, which are mostly in left-wing and human rights circles, to reach candidates (whose names were only settled on 29 January 2015) and their aides who could facilitate my access to meetings. I did spend a few hours on the telephone to office-holders in Yisrael Beytenu, trying to reach their Arabic-speaking candidate Hamad Amar. Each time I was passed back to the switchboard, and I asked for the office of Hamad Amar there, I was met with a baffled counter question: ‘who?’ I once tried to ask for his business contact in Russian (of which I have limited command),

Introduction 

17

because Yisrael Beytenu mostly represents Russian immigrants to Israel: this did not help either. He was re-elected to the Knesset on 17 March 2015, where he had served since 2009, but the Knesset records do not show that he has expressed himself verbally with regards to his ideas of citizenship in any language, though he has spoken (in Hebrew) regularly in his role of deputy speaker to keep time and call parliamentarians to order. There were no answers from the offices of other Arabic-speakers Akram Hasson (Kulanu party) and Ayoob Kara (Likud – subsequently chosen for Minister for Communications). The Kulanu party made it not only into parliament but was also included in the coalition with Likud in government; Akram Hasson has been a champion of the Hebrew language, even receiving a literary prize for its promotion. Upon receiving the Golden Inkwell Word Prize (which usually goes to fiction and poetry writers), Hasson said to the press: ‘This [Hebrew] is our national language. […] You hear kids today who are putting English words all the time into their speech. The language is losing its prestige’.42 Annette Haskiya (an Arab candidate for the ultranationalist Jewish Home party), who was placed 25th on the electoral list43 and therefore did not, in the event, make it into parliament, did not respond to my interview request.44 The fact that Hamad Amar only expressed himself in Hebrew in the Knesset, as far as could be observed, did not prevent others from addressing him in Arabic. On 29 June 2016, in the course of a heated plenary session on Israel’s relations with Turkey, Hanin Zoabi had the floor and Amar (who was chairing the session) had to defend her right to speak for three minutes from repeated interruptions from Likud parliamentarian Oren Khazan, who wanted to evict Zoabi from the Knesset. Each time Khazan interrupted Zoabi, Amar asked Khazan to be quiet until it was his turn to speak, returned the floor to Zoabi, and gave her additional time. Exasperated, Khazan said to Amar: ḫalaṣ ‘enough’ (in Arabic). Hamad, lo matʾim leḫa ‘Hamad, this does not suit you’ (in Hebrew).45 Presumably, the choice of ḫalaṣ over the Hebrew equivalent dayy was a strategy to relate to Amar ‘as an Arab’, who could be addressed with familiarity (not with the title required for his position) in order to build common grounds based on shared political objections to Zoabi. Even though ḫalaṣ is used in Hebrew slang contexts, according to some sources it is commonly known to be an Arabic word (Kizel, 2017, p. 747). The Nation-State Law might be the undoing of the ‘right-wing’ Arabic silence: in an unprecedented breaking of party ranks, Hamad Amar and Akram Hasson voted against the law in the early hours of 19 July 2018 (only Ayoob Kara voted in favour).46 Indeed, leaders of the Druze community instigated demonstrations against the Nation-State Law and submitted a petition to the Supreme Court. While they might have supported the ethnorepublican constitution of Israel, they could not stomach its ethnonational restructuring.

18 Introduction

Elections as the structure of the fieldwork, but not its object of interest Many Palestinians and other Arabs have stakes in questions of the common good: not only politicians, other public spokespeople, and their audiences. Focusing the evidential base on interactions with parliamentary candidates might appear to skew the research towards searching for discourse that could prove or disprove that an abstract ‘democratic culture’ exists in Israel or amongst Palestinians and other Arabs in Israel (Kalberg, 2000); rather more modestly and concretely, those speakers that I could record engaged discursively with ideas of the common good, but the material effect of their discourse came up against structural limitations, of which they were perfectly aware, and which were, in fact, the object of their engagement. Yet for the practical purposes of the fieldwork, I have treated the staging of elections, whether labelled democratic or not, as a structure that gives rise to certain types of political conversations, namely those exchanges between political ‘elites’ and curious, skeptical, enthusiastic, or critical citizens (but not the indifferent ones), with more urgency and salience than when elections are not taking place. Election campaigns are not the only possible settings for engagements with citizenship: as defined here, these happen in all political structures (albeit with varying mediatic or public exposure depending on the structural disposition towards freedom of expression). Where relevant, I shall reference conceptions of the common good to be claimed from Israeli institutions expressed by Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, even though they cannot vote for the Israeli parliament, due to differential legal statuses of the population under Israel’s control. This citizenship, albeit under different legal regimes, is mediated by layers of geography, gendered life experience, and community (Yuval-Davis, 1999); and one of the life experiences that Palestinians and other Arabs in the whole region of Israel/Palestine have in common is negotiating with, around, and against Israeli authorities. This negotiation, among other factors, is the experiential basis for their forms of citizenship. Those who came to the rallies and meetings where I conducted my fieldwork in Israel were those who took seriously the responsibility of casting a vote, or of deliberately not doing so,47 and for them, the voting was therefore a transformative experience. For those in the West Bank that I had interviewed in previous years, the transformative experience had been that of organising a trade union for Palestinian workers employed by Israelis, of protesting against arbitrary Israeli military restrictions on freedom of movement, and of withstanding the methods of prison guards and interrogators (Hawker, 2013). It was Israeli lawyers representing detainees from the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) who achieved a legal ban in principle on torture, and Palestinian lawyers from the OPT in the military courts who argued time and again that the ban on torture was being violated (PCATI, 2018). There is no objective standard by which the former,

Introduction 

19

but not the latter, contributed to or inhibited ‘democratic culture’. Many regard the imposition of military occupation on millions of people with no voting rights since 1967 in itself to be the undoing of Israel’s claim to democracy, regardless of whether regular elections to a functional parliament are held, or whether the occupying military abides by international law (Lloyd, 2012). Some scholars see both legal regimes as elements of Israeli security control (Peled, 1992): two methods for successfully ‘keeping the peace’, as well as keeping the land and its resources in Israel’s hands. And yet, the scholarship on Israeli democracy – and on language in Israel – tends to separate the two groups along the lines of legal statuses ‘citizen’ and ‘civilian under occupation’, and to consider that those with citizen status are protected by a legal ‘wall’ from the most egregious forms of exclusion (what some call ‘politicide’ (Kimmerling, 2010)) while at the same time this wall limits their room for manoeuvre in the ethnorepublican system. The ‘protective wall’ is exemplified by the fact that Palestinians and other Arabs in Israel can vote for political parties that extend the demand for equality, but these parties have no prospect of contributing to a government (Ghanem, 2001). Yet by using ‘engagement with the common good’ as the defining pillar of citizenship, rather than voting in parliamentary elections, this book can find its interest in debates and their discourse analysis rather than in participation rates and their sociological analysis. Some of the experts on the politics of Israel note the consistently high public approval rating of the military echelons and the strong desire for ‘decisive political leadership’ (Kimmerling, 2001; Arian, 2005, p. 446). The conclusions drawn are that public opinion is malleable to the political will of elites and that the Israeli form of government is statist, albeit with regular multi-party elections for a legislative branch that has relative power (to impeach government officials, to oversee budgets, and to propose and pass legislation independently of the government). However, the Palestinian and other Arabs’ ‘containment’ within the ‘protective wall’ of their citizenship means that they cannot fundamentally change the ethnorepublican limits of the debate on the common good (Peled, 1992). What this book brings to the political analysis is, first, documentation of a vibrant debate amongst Palestinians and other Arabs regarding the common good: their expressions of civic engagement are not limited by Israel’s constitution. In particular, political scientists will be interested in the explicit material grounding of ‘liberal’ equality in concrete and local experiences of employment and housing (into which are subsumed other social relations such as generational and gendered redistribution of autonomous space and wealth (Kanaaneh & Nusair, 2010)). Second, many of the encounters that I present in this book had brought politicians, who inhabit a political – and to some degree, educational and social – elite, into contact with voters for whom politics is mediated by multiple layers of social experience (Yuval-Davis, 1999). I justify this book’s focus on professional parliamentary politicians on the

20 Introduction

grounds that their special position in relations of power allows them relatively more agency to iterate, accommodate, avoid, or challenge the forms of the ‘common good’, and to express these forms in discourse, including with regard to the institutional suppression and the communicative avoidance of Arabic, in ways that might have an effect on everyday linguistic practices. Because of the platforms they are on, the politicians are special foci of interest for their role in reflecting and co-creating the sociolinguistic habitus that I am describing in this book.

Building on and reframing the existing scholarship on Arabic in Israel This book submits that within the Israeli ethnorepublican system, Arabic has not been equal, but rather was allocated to a group constituted as an ethnic minority, framed by the one-nation-one-language ideology, and in this structure, Arabic has been institutionally suppressed. Part of the scholarship on Arabic on Israel attends to this, especially in the guise of critiquing the realisation of the legal status of Arabic (Deutch, 2005; Hajjar, 2005; Morris, 2008), of language-educational policies (Amara & Mar'i, 2002; Abu Saad, 2006; Amara, 2007; Al-Haj, 1995; Mendel, 2014), and of examining linguistic landscapes where Hebrew is dominant (Ben-Rafael, Shohamy, Amara, & Trumper-Hecht, 2006; Isleem, 2013; Suleiman Y., 2004; Suleiman C., 2018). This scholarship rarely records how people speak in practice, but rather privileges writing practices as the determined results of policies. The ethnorepublican structure is challenged by two political forces, which are also in opposition to each other: on the one hand, what political scientists call the ‘liberal’ vision of constitutional equality, identified in the ideologies of the Palestinian political parties at least since the 1980s (Peled, 1992). The idea that this vision has in some ways already been accomplished, as evidenced in the sustained Arabic socialisation of, and cultural production by, Palestinians and other Arabs, has been reflected in the scholarship on language policy in the portrayal of Arabic as one of the ‘minority languages’ of Israel (Ben-Rafael, 1994; Spolsky & Shohamy, 1999). This, the canonical scholarship, displays the liberal ‘multicultural’ picture that a macroanalysis in the field of sociology of language can paint. One study in this stream ventured into the field to note languages overheard during walks in the Old City of Jerusalem (Spolsky & Cooper, 1991): it was criticised for taking paths through the city that avoided Arabic-majority areas, and for portraying the different languages as a multiplicity of voices with equal claims to audibility, rather than a location of conflict (Suleiman Y., 2004, p. 167). For those in the critical camp, who see the containment of Arabic to a ‘minority’ as the suppression of the indigenous language of Palestine, the liberal ‘multicultural’ picture is a political goal yet to be achieved – by

Introduction 

21

enlarging the legal provisions in the ethnorepublican system that provide for formal equality – both as a means for, and a result of, de-colonisation. Decolonisation is a political idea of the ‘common good’ in itself, the ­linguistic corollary of which is the ousting of ‘colonising’ loanwords (Amara, 2010; Suleiman Y., 2011; and see the popular Mareʿi, 2013). Only in post-colonialism, according to this conception, can the bounties of liberal multilingualism be potentially enjoyed. The new multilinguals with whom I am concerned in this book are, therefore, skipping a historical stage by enacting postcolonialism when it is not yet structurally there. By performing it, they are hoping to bring it about, like praying for rain by dancing under the sprinkler. The ground gets watered under the sprinkler, and if enough people prayed in this way, it would be as if it had rained, which would be better than scorched earth. On the other hand, the political force of ethnonationalism pushes the political structure towards the exclusion of Palestinians and other Arabs from every avenue of citizenship, including the legal status bestowed in the form of Israeli passports, taxation duties, voting rights, and access to some forms of social welfare: the Nation-State Law which is an ethnonationalist campaign has already closed the ethnorepublican legal window for Arabic as a (suppressed) official language. Anxieties about that push towards exclusion have been reflected in the sociolinguistic scholarship on contact-induced changes in Palestinian Arabic, especially when these changes (mostly in the form of loanwords) are compared to those Palestinians who have already been excluded from the Israeli system, and are therefore relatively less exposed to contact, following the methods of social dialectology (Amara, 1999; Cotter & Horesh, 2015; Amara, 2010; Rosenhouse & Brand, 2016). In the area of interactional sociolinguistics, there is not enough evidence of practices from the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights on Palestinian and other Arab interactions with Jewish Israelis. From the traces of these interactions carried into sociolinguistic interviews in three refugee camps in the West Bank, it appears that both in Israeli workplaces and in Israeli prisons it is expected that Palestinian workers and detainees accept Hebrew as the communicative norm with the few Hebrew-speakers in the roles of employers and guards that they interact with (Hawker, 2013).48 One of these traces is the ubiquitous use of the Hebrew word maḥsōm or maḥsūm in the Arabic pronunciations, with the Arabised plural maḥasīm, for ‘checkpoint’, which many Palestinian and other Arabs do not know is originally a Hebrew word (Hawker, 2013, pp. 58–64). Another trace is the Palestinians’ and other Arabs’ humorous use of the Hebrew word for ‘manager’, menahēl, in ironic situations, whereby the semantics of power are destabilized (Hawker, 2018b). On the institutional side, Israeli military courts in the OPT conduct proceedings in Hebrew, and these are often poorly translated into Arabic, and sometimes not at all: translations that do happen, into Hebrew, are for the

22 Introduction

benefit of the institution (Hajjar, 2005, pp. 144–153).49 Inadequate court translations also affect the Israeli criminal justice system, as it does most countries’ (Morris, 2008). These are continuations of the institutional suppression of Arabic but involving Arabic-speakers in much more precarious positions than the multilingual parliamentarians I focus on in this book, who have some degree of discursive agency to set new institutional parameters. One of the propositions of this book is that it is not politically adequate to position the Palestinians and other Arabs who are in the OPT as a kind of ‘untouched’ control group of sociolinguist experimentation, who express some sort of ‘purer’ Arabic, and who represent a supposedly less confused alignment of national, cultural, and civic identities compared to those Palestinians and other Arabs who abide, linguistically contaminated and politically bifurcated, in Israel (Amara, 1999; Cotter & Horesh, 2015). Engagements with the common good as well as multilingual solutions to specific communicative problems are varied on both sides of the wall, to be analysed under the same, Israeli-controlled, sprawling and incoherent, political structure while reflecting the different degrees of exclusion and precarity. The most excluded and precarious population, at this historical juncture, are the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip, living since 2007 under Israel’s military blockade (Shane & Reynolds, 2010) and within Hamas’s sclerotic and violent jurisdiction (Baconi, 2018). And yet, enterprising former detainees have repackaged the Hebrew knowledge they acquired in Israeli prisons as a skill to sell as a language-learning commodity:50 they, too, are the new multilinguals. The triangle of politics that I rely on for analysis – ethnorepublican, ethnonationalist, and liberal – applies throughout the geographical area where Israeli control, and thus Hebrew presence, is instituted, but because politics has not always been explicitly incorporated in the sociolinguistic literature, sociolinguistic issues that are not directly causally related are conflated. The following paragraph, taken from a ‘descriptive’ chapter on the status of Standard Arabic in Israel, published in 2000 by a renowned Arabic dialectologist, exemplifies the conflation: One may recall the intensively quoted words of the Arab Knesset member Zuʿbi, who expressed his concern back in 1966 about the disappearance of Arabic from use in the state of Israel. The facts referred to above [a list of Arabic cultural productions in Israel] hardly justify this pessimistic view, although Zuʿbi’s impressionistic evaluation may be judged somewhat differently after consideration of the role of Hebrew interference in the Arabic used by the Arab citizens of Israel. (Talmon, 2000, p. 211) These issues need sorting out. First, the sorting will be aided by a return to the evidence from the field that aligns pragmatic functions with Hebrew borrowing, codeswitching, and other contact phenomena that will

Introduction 

23

presumably continue for as long as those functions are discursively useful to Arabic-speakers (Henkin, 2015; Henkin-Roitfarb, 2011; Hawker, 2013). The practices pay only tangential regard for monolingual ideologies which are formulated at an elite level as an orthodoxy (Bourdieu, 1986, p. 848). Second, the sorting will benefit from a deconstruction of the appeal, in both scholarly and popular debates, of the paradigm of ‘language shift’ or ‘endangerment’, which seems to be either upheld or rejected depending on the political views of the scholar or other analyst (Hawker, 2018a). The way this book is organised will serve to demonstrate that Arabic can be both publicly suppressed as a matter of policy and in certain practices – and the Knesset of the mid-1960s, as alluded to in the quote above, will be shown to be an important time for the institutionalisation of this suppression – and safe from the ‘dangers’ of a shift to Hebrew in other practices. In this context, the sensitivity of documenting the practices of contact phenomena (or, as typically described, Hebrew ‘interference’ or ‘penetration’ in Arabic (Amara, 2010; Mareʿi, 2013)) lies in its challenge to understandings of the Palestinian–Israeli conflict that rely on opposing monolingual national selfdeterminations. If the nation does not have its language, its basis for a claim to self-determination is supposedly compromised. On the other hand, ethically committed liberal intellectuals have found another solution to the analysis of Arabic–Hebrew language contact: since it does not meet the criterion of parity expected by from a liberal political system, the language use could not be termed ‘bilingualism’ at all; see: Yet these trends [of Hebrew proficiency alongside the maintenance of Arabic] do not indicate an emergent bilingualism in Israel. There is little bilingualism in this officially bilingual country. Arabic and Hebrew coexist as dual languages, as paired languages, as opposed languages. Although many Palestinians speak Hebrew fluently, none do so at home. Nowhere do Arab children speak to their parents in Hebrew. Nowhere do Arab children struggle to retain fluency in the ancestral language. And in very few places do Palestinians switch back and forth between Arabic and Hebrew within the same conversation. (Lefkowitz, 2004, p. 149) Though I agree with the summarising observations listed in this quote, the analysis ‘there is little bilingualism’ seems again to presuppose a causality between bilingualism in Israel and Arabic contraction. This scholarly concern with language shift influenced my initial research proposal, when I embarked on the project in 2014: I set out for my fieldwork with a bilingualism test, ready to investigate whether a contraction of Arabic was taking place and if so to what degree. I found no contraction, and consequently I reframed my investigation. A reframed analysis needs to align politics, economics, and historiography with the rich linguistic ethnographic findings

24 Introduction

that the scholarship does provide, and incorporate this into sociolinguistic work on language ideologies and negotiations of identity. What the analysis in this book introduces is the integration of each text into the contextual power dynamics explicitly related to inherited socio-political systems. In so doing, the analysis not only accepts flexible notions of bilingualism, but also moves on from that frame to a multilingual one, under conditions of late capitalism. None of the language policies, ideologies, or the linguistic practices described in this book are particularly new to the discipline of sociolinguistics; what is different is putting them together in the political logic presented here, in a context where ongoing conflict, projected onto monolingualism, has plagued the analysis, including for those scholars who seek a liberal or postcolonial political solution. The first chapter looks at the language choices between Hebrew and Arabic on the political stages that the Knesset provides. For the section on the first (formative) years of the Knesset, I studied the records of public addresses of Arabic-speaking politicians, and of the early arrangements for translation and interpretation in the Knesset. This historical section points to the swift institutional suppression of Arabic which took hold in the late 1950s and early 1960s, in circumstances of heavy-handed mobilisation of immigrant Jewish populations, the securitisation of the Palestinian and other Arab populations, and the colonisation of the lands that they had depended on (Zureik, 1979; Lustick, 1980). Continuing with the theme of Arabic-speakers on political stages, the first chapter will also look at recent years’ challenges to the institutional suppression of Arabic. These rhetorical strategies of increased audibility are sometimes defiant, and sometimes subtle, expressions of national difference. Jewish Israeli politicians’ deployment of securitised ‘Israeli Arabic’ serve as discursive strikes against Palestinian and other Arab political arguments. The second chapter looks at how the bilingual habitus manages, and struggles with, situations in which the insider-Arabic and outsider-Hebrew language choices are not clear-cut. The evidence is taken from the fieldwork situations in which both Jewish Israeli and Palestinian and other Arab speakers were present, as bearers of their relations to institutions of power and as individuals with linguistic capabilities and comprehension needs. From the patterns of language choices made in every one of these ‘mixed’ situations, I infer that a tacit principle operates, as an expression of implicit sociolinguistic knowledge that organises practices in accordance with the habitus (Bourdieu, 1972, p. 202) that had formed among Palestinians and other Arabs in the first years of Israeli rule. According to this principle, Arabic is preferably not used at all to address Jewish Israelis (constructed interactionally), not even in cases of uncertain identification of an interlocutor, and then secondarily Arabic is used with explanations and interpretations, and thirdly it is signposted and justified. I call this ‘the principle of Arabic avoidance in “mixed” company’.

Introduction 

25

The third chapter looks at in-group situations, in which there are only Palestinians and other Arabs amongst the interlocutors, and a range of multilingual repertoires is mobilised for rhetorical effect and discursive authority. Styles for claiming discursive authority include but are not limited to: the repertoires involving ‘double-monolingual’ code alternation, and bilingual codeswitching and borrowing. Other repertoires draw on religious discourse and Educated Spoken Arabic (Mitchell, 1978). This chapter also touches upon another facet of the scholarship on Arabic–Hebrew contact, in relation to communicative strategies for what has been called ‘inter-cultural dialogue’: a phenomenon associated with the 1990s diplomatic negotiations between the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Israeli government, whereby meetings between Jewish Israelis and Palestinians and other Arabs were orchestrated and then analysed for communicative successes and failures in the interest of ‘peace’. The fourth chapter starts by summarising what we know: that the expressed ideologies betray monolingual anxieties about bilingual language contact, but the varied practices are confidently displayed in alignment with multilingual aspirations. There is a conceptual lapse between practices which have evolved without ideological formulation, and ideologies to which practices cannot conform (Bourdieu, 1972, pp. 201–202). What I consider, in this chapter, is what socio-economic articulation works with this new political voice. The role of consumerism will be examined, as the hegemonic ideology which co-opts multilingualism and undermines civic engagement. In conclusion, the socially and historically specific experiences of citizenship, captured in the vignettes for the book, will be mapped onto the sociolinguistics/politics analytical triangle: bilingual/ethnorepublican – monolingual/ethnonational – multilingual/liberal. The sociolinguistic approaches to ‘class’ will be considered, moving away from the categorisation of socioeconomic status but accepting that constructed distributions of precarity can become part of a new analytically useful definition. The idea that in late capitalism, the service and knowledge economies predispose speakers to repackaging language skills as economic and political resources will be expressed in the proposition that language itself becomes a ‘means of production’. The institutional suppression of Arabic and reactions to that suppression, the principle of Arabic avoidance in ‘mixed’ company, and the sociolinguistic practices of recourse to multilingual repertoires when agentic discursive space is created, are analytical threads that will run through the book.

Notes 1 Because I was driving on the motorway when I saw the billboards, I did not take a photo. I thank Helal Alosh for sending me the photos reproduced here. The resolution is not high enough to decipher who sponsored their display.

26 Introduction 2 Yi srae l Beytenu, undated, ‘The vision of Yisrael Beytenu – Israel our home’, from yisraʾel bayteynu [‘Israel is our home’; political party] ‫ישראל ביתנו‬: www. b​eyten​u.org​/the-​visio​n-of-​yisra​el-be​ytenu​-isra​el-ou​r-hom​e-2/,​ accessed 12 June 2018. 3 Basic Law: Israel – The Nation-State of the Jewish People ‫ ישראל – מדינת‬:‫יסוד‬-‫חוק‬ ‫הלאום של העם היהודי‬, http:​//m.k​nesse​t.gov​.il/A​ctivi​ty/Le​gisla​tion/​Laws/​Pages​/ LawB​ill.a​spx?t​=laws​ugges​tions​searc​h&lawitemid=565913, accessed 6 August 2018. 4 Prusher, Ilene, 24 July 2018, ‘A new law shifts Israel away from democracy’, http:​//tim​e.com​/5345​963/i​srael​-nati​on-st​ate-l​aw-de​mocra​cy/, accessed 25 July 2018; Kremnitzer, Mordechai, 20 July 2018, ‘Jewish Nation-state Law makes discrimination in Israel constitutional’, www.h​aaret​z.com​/isra​el-ne​ws/.p​remiu​ m-nat​ion-s​tate-​law-m​akes-​discr​imina​tion-​in-is​rael-​const​ituti​onal-​1.629​1906,​ accessed 25 July 2018; The Economist, 26 July 2018, ‘Israel's Jewish nationalist identity is outweighing its democratic one’, www.e​conom​ist.c​om/mi​ddle-​ east-​and-a​frica​/2018​/07/2​6/isr​aels-​jewis​h-nat​ional​ist-i​denti​ty-is​-outw​eighi​ng-it​ s-dem​ocrat​ic-on​e, accessed 26 July 2018; etc. ad nauseam. 5 As broadcast on commercial (not public-funded) Channel 2 and recorded for YouTube, see video Channel 2: Electoral debate for the 20th Knesset :2 ‫ערוץ‬ 26.02.2015 ‫עימות הבחירות לכנסת העשרים‬, uploaded by user ‘Old News’ ‫החדשות‬ ‫ הישנות‬on 26 February 2015, www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0nz_RlviGI, accessed 18 March 2015. All video sources that are used as primary material are listed in Appendix 4. An opinion poll conducted in 2015 found that 48% of Jewish Israelis agreed that ‘Arabs should be expelled or transferred from Israel’ (see Pew Research Center, 8 March 2016, ‘Israel’s religiously divided society’, www.p​ewfor​um.or​g/201​6/03/​08/is​raels​-reli​gious​ly-di​vided​-soci​ety/,​ accessed 20 September 2018). Yisrael Beytenu, Liberman’s party, gained over 5% of the valid ballots cast in the 2015 elections, thus taking six out of the 120 Knesset seats: Central Elections Committee, 17 March 2015, ‘Final results of the elections for the twentieth Knesset’, www.b​echir​ot20.​gov.i​l/ele​ction​/Engl​ish/k​neset​ 20/Pa​ges/R​esult​s20_e​ng.as​px, accessed 20 August 2018. 6 With apologies to the ghost of Mark Twain, who never said anything like this. 7 Segev Šalom in Hebrew; fieldwork site, 3 March 2015. 8 ha-Negev in Hebrew, an-Nagab in Bedouin Arabic. 9 The politicians at this meeting were from the Joint List political party and from the Higher Committee for Follow-up of Arab Affairs in Israel (‫لجنة المتابعة العليا‬ ‫[ للجماهير العربية في إسرائيل‬laǧnat al-mutābaʿa al-ʿuliyā li-l-ǧamāhīr al-ʿarabīya fī ʾisrāʾīl]), and would all describe themselves as ‘Palestinian’. 10 In the body of the text, Arabic will be demarcated in bold, Hebrew will be in italics, and English translations in single quotation marks. In texts transcribed in tables, Hebrew will be in italics, Arabic in regular font. There were no words or utterances recorded where the language is bivalent (Woolard, 1998), that is, where the attribution to Hebrew or Arabic would have been ambiguous to the interlocutors, though this linguistic possibility has been played with in Palestinian authored texts (for instance in The Pessoptimist, written in Arabic by Emile Habibi, and in Arabesques, written in Hebrew by Anton Shammas); one bivalent pun devised by parliamentarian Ahmad Tibi is described in section 1.3. Transcription conventions are justified in the introduction and listed in Appendix 1. 11 3 March 2015, Šgīb as-Salām, fieldwork recording. 12 Though the citizenship scholarship mostly refers to Aristotle (Nussbaum, 1990), it has been argued that philosophers have written on different conceptions of the ‘common good’ in Asian and North African political settings too, countering claims of the Euro-centrism of citizenship and of its ‘universalism’

Introduction 

27

(Linklater, 2007, p. 40). For instance, Mozi wrote in the fifth century BCE at a time of warring states and amidst the multiplication of schools of philosophy before the entrenchment of the Chinese empire: ‘The purpose of those who are virtuous lies in procuring benefits for the world and eliminating its calamities. Now among all the current calamities, which are the most important? I say that the attack on the small states by the large ones, disturbances of the small houses by the large ones, oppression of the weak by the strong, misuse of the few by the many, deception of the simple by the cunning, disdain toward the humble by the honoured: these are the misfortunes of the world’ (Fung, 1952, p. 91). 13 Knesset records, The Fourth Meeting of the Twentieth Knesset, Tuesday 5 May 2015 ‫ ט"ז באייר התשע"ה‬,‫הישיבה הרביעית של הכנסת העשרים יום שלישי‬. 2015 ‫ במאי‬5, p. 42. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. All translations are the present author’s. ‘Like fat in the bones’ ka-šémen ba-ʾatsamot is an idiomatic simile meaning ‘something deeply pleasant’ – it is not as common as the English ‘music to one’s ears’ – and is an approximate quote from Psalm 109, verse 18 ‫ּשׁמֶן ְּב ַעצְמֹותָ יו‬ ֶ ‫ ַכ‬. I thank Noa Vichanski for looking up the biblical reference. 16 See video ‘Maiden Speech of Knesset Member Zuheir Bahloul in the Knesset Plenum, 5 May 2015 5.5.15 - ‫נאום הבכורה של ח"כ זוהיר בהלול במליאת הכנסת‬, uploaded to YouTube by user ‘‫ زهير بهلول‬- ‫‘ ’זוהיר בהלול‬Zuheir Bahloul’ on 5 May 2015, www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBp7CA-Y5Uw, accessed 12 April 2018. 17 Akko in Hebrew, Acre in English. 18 Akka, fieldwork site, 12 February 2015. 19 Ibid. 20 BBC News, 29 July 2018, ‘Israeli Arab MP resigns over controversial “nation state” law’, www.b​bc.co​.uk/n​ews/w​orld-​middl​e-eas​t-449​95501​, accessed 6 August 2018. 21 See Adalah, ‘Israel’s Jewish Nation-State Law’, 2 August 2018, www.adalah. org/en/content/view/9569, accessed 14 August 2018. 22 Smooha, Ethnic democracy, 1997; Yiftachel, Ethnocracy, 2006; Robinson, Citizen strangers, 2013; Ram, Postnationalist pasts, 1998. 23 Fieldwork site, 7 March 2015. 24 Fieldwork site, 13 March 2015; see Tables 3.3–3.4. 25 Fieldwork site, 14 March 2015. 26 Fieldwork site, 17 February 2015; see Tables 3.8–3.9. 27 The fieldwork and research on this project were funded by the Leverhulme Trust’s Early Career Fellowship ECF-2013-624. 28 Mahmoud Nujeidat represented the ‫ األمل للتغيير‬-‫ התקווה לשינוי‬-‫‘ אלאמל ללתג'ייר‬Hope for Change’ party (see Central Elections Committee candidates list, undated, ww w.b ​echir​ot20.​gov.i​l/ele​ction​/Cand​idate​s/Pag​es/de​fault​.aspx​, accessed 17 September 2018), which did not, in the event, garner enough votes to enter parliament. 29 I‘lam (Arab Centre for Media Freedom, Development and Research), www. ilam-center.org/en/default.aspx, accessed 19 August 2018. 30 The Abraham Fund, www.abrahamfund.org/en, accessed 19 August 2018. 31 The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, www.vanleer.org.il/en, accessed 19 August 2018. 32 Baqa al-Gharbiya, fieldwork site, 13 March 2015. 33 Haifa, fieldwork site, 10 February 2015. 34 Umm al-Fahem, fieldwork site, 18 February 2015. 35 Fieldwork site, 14 March 2015; see Tables 2.1–2.5. 36 Fieldwork site, 7 March 2015.

28 Introduction 37 38 39 40

41 42 43 44 45 46

47

48 49

50

Fieldwork site, 17 February 2015. Fieldwork site, 7 March 2015. Fieldwork site, 12 February 2015. In public opinion polls, many more citizens of Israel identify as ‘right-wing’ than as ‘left-wing’, and therefore it could be argued that studying right-wing citizenly discourse is of urgent importance. See Pew Research Center, 8 March 2016, ‘Israel’s religiously divided society’, www.p​ewfor​um.or​g/201​6/03/​08/is​ raels​-reli​gious​ly-di​vided​-soci​ety/,​ accessed 20 September 2018. And by focusing on the multilingual expressions of the ‘left-wing’ Palestinians and other Arabs, this book in some way contributes to such ‘speaking out’. Deborah Danan (Jerusalem Post journalist), 28 December 2012, ‘Druze MK wins prize for helping preserve Hebrew’, www.j​post.​com/N​ation​al-Ne​ws/Dr​ use-M​K-win​s-pri​ze-fo​r-hel​ping-​prese​rve-H​ebrew​, accessed 27 January 2015. Central Elections Committee – Elections for the 20th Knesset, List of candidates ‫רשימת מועמדים‬, undated, www.b​echir​ot20.​gov.i​l/ele​ction​/Cand​idate​s/Pag​es/de​ fault​.aspx​, accessed 18 June 2018. The subsequent elections have been constitutionally scheduled to happen by 5 November 2019: then a researcher with luck and different connections could obtain a picture of a different spectrum of political discourse. Knesset records, Meeting number 140 of the 20th Knesset ‫וארבעים של‬-‫הישיבה המאה‬ ‫הכנסת העשרים‬, 29 June 2016, p. 168. Arik Bender (Maariv journalist), 19 July 2018, ‘By a majority of 62 supporters against 55 opponents: the Nation-State law passes in the Knesset’ 62 ‫ברוב של‬ ‫ חוק הלאום אושר בכנסת‬:‫ מתנגדים‬55 ‫תומכים מול‬, www.m​aariv​.co.i​l/new​s/pol​itics​/Arti​ cle-6​52012​, accessed 19 August 2018; Gil Hoffman (Jerusalem Post journalist), 23 July 2018, ‘Druze minister threatened over Nation-State Law vote’, www.j​ post.​com/I​srael​-News​/Druz​e-min​ister​-thre​ate ne​d-o ve​r-N at​ion -S​tat e-​Law-v​ ote-5​63223​, accessed 19 August 2018. For a debate between advocates of voting and advocates of election boycott, see the video ‘Complete video of the debate in Arara between supporters and boycotters of elections’ ‫فيديو كامل للمناظرة في عرعرة بين مؤيد لالنتخابات ومقاطعتها‬, in an article by Panet and Panorama, on 14 February 2015, http://panet.co.il/article/938464, accessed 19 April 2015; see also Ella Heller, 16 March 2015, ‘Who doesn’t vote in the Israeli Knesset elections?’, https://en.idi.org.il/articles/5204, accessed 12 March 2016. See Taghrid Shbeta, 16 May 2014, ‘You don’t speak Hebrew?’ ?‫אתה לא מדבר עברית‬, www.kavlaoved.org.il/‫עברית‬-‫מדבר‬-‫לא‬-‫אתה‬/, accessed 22 June 2018. Failing to ensure that a defendant understands the legal proceedings is a violation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights art. 9 (1) and (2), a nd of clauses of the Fourth Geneva Convention in the case of persons under occupation (UNICEF, 2013). Abeer Ayyoub, 11 December 2015, ‘The Palestinian ex-prisoner who teaches Hebrew in Gaza’, www.h​aaret​z.com​/isra​el-ne​ws/.p​remiu​m-stu​dying​-hebr​ew-in​ -gaza​-1.54​36945​, accessed 20 August 2018.

Chapter 1

The contestation of Arabic on Zionist stages

Palestinians and other Arabs in the areas of Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories face authorities that communicate with them in Hebrew only. In the early years of the Israeli state, established in 1948, some interpreting was provided in the parliament and in the courts in order to manage the limited inclusion of Palestinians and other Arabs in political and legal processes as a minority, as a practice aligned with the one-nation-one-language logic. Such interpreting provisions disappeared in the 1960s. Arabic became restricted to in-group communication in contained and segregated communities, and to parallel Palestinian institutions with limited authority but with symbolic value. The institutional suppression of Arabic within Israel has been challenged since approximately 2010 with Arabic-speakers’ strategies of increased audibility on Zionist political stages. This challenge, in turn, has been countered by military-educated Jewish Israelis speaking Arabic in verbal attacks on Palestinian and other Arab propositions. This chapter explores negotiations around the devaluing of a ‘minority’ language in a political system that is formed to reflect the one-nation-one-language equation, as evidenced in institutional discourse practices. As in all state-centred nation-building projects, there exist in Israel rituals and institutions where the tenets of settler-colonial, nationalist, militaristic, and liberal Zionism are reiterated (but not cultural or spiritual Zionism), organised with order and regularity by state bureaucrats (Handelman, 2004). The discursive elements of the rituals and institutions, apart from what they materially entail, serve as explicit instances of the ethnorepublican upholding of Modern Israeli Hebrew’s linguistic hegemony: the construction of the monolingual context has been dependent upon these rituals since before the founding of Israel, as a type of education mostly directed at Jewish immigrants and locals who spoke languages other than Hebrew (Elboim-Dror, 1986; Spolsky & Shohamy, 2001). These rituals, then, are what are called here ‘Zionist stages’, as distinct from any general, abstract ‘Zionist hegemony’. This is methodologically preferred because to start from the premise that any Arabic in the geographical space controlled by Israel constitutes some form of negativity would be to lose any analytical

30  The contestation of Arabic on Zionist stages

edge to the categories, and it would do an injustice to those speakers of languages which were, in fact, banned from use, such as certain languages in Turkey until recently (Kaya, 2009), or varieties of Chinese in Thailand after 1940 (Morita, 2003). Arabic is not banned from use, but since Zionist stages reiterate the Hebrew hegemony, it is dissonant to hear Arabic spoken from a Zionist stage. Examples of Zionist stages are: state funerals, Israel Independence Day (and other state memorial days), Israel Prize award ceremonies, and the opening of newly elected Knessets (but not all plenary interventions or committee debates, though some speeches may denote Jewish Israeli nationalist tenets and thus turn the platform into a Zionist stage), and similar events where the Israeli flag is displayed and nationalist music is played. When Israel adopted the Law and Administration Ordinance in 1948 – at the same time as Israeli armed forces were effecting the dispossession of Palestinians and other Arabs, and the destruction of their communities – which transferred British Mandate law into Israeli law, the ordinance added a section that repealed the use of English as an official language, leaving Hebrew and Arabic (Deutch, 2005, p. 265). In the context of Hebrew linguistic hegemony, official Arabic appears as an ‘omission’ or an ‘anomaly’ (Mendel, 2014, p. 43); in portrayals of Israel’s linguistic situation, Arabic is one of the minority languages, the recognition of which respects social diversity (Spolsky & Shohamy, 1999, pp. 115–137; Ben-Rafael, 1994; for a discussion of ‘managed’ diversity see Gal, 2012). This ‘multicultural’ portrayal has taken as a material fact what is a liberal potential of some of the wording in Israel’s Declaration of Independence which posits Israel as a state of its citizens, regardless of ‘race, creed or sex’ (but not nationality (Kimmerling, 1999, p. 350)), echoing the discourse of the United Nations Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights issued the same year (Deutch, 2005). From the point of view of language ideologies, however, there is no anomaly to account for: having Hebrew and Arabic both as official languages is a continuation of the one-nation-one-language equation developed within the European national monolingualism project (Cameron, 2006) and replicated through fractal recursivity by nationalist movements elsewhere (Irvine & Gal, 2000). The inclusion of Hebrew as one of three official languages recognised by the British Mandate authorities was one of the diplomatic achievements of the Zionist movement, in line with that recursive replication, while Jewish communities continued to practice multilingualism (Halperin, 2015). Yet when the British instituted ‘an ability to converse in English, Arabic or Hebrew’ as a criterion for naturalised citizenship in Palestine after 1925, the legal situation became an equation of threelanguages-one-citizenship. The few Jewish immigrants from Yemen, Iraq, and elsewhere in the Middle East who naturalised in Mandate Palestine with the help of the Zionist Organisation chose to take the language test in

The contestation of Arabic on Zionist stages  31

Arabic, since that was the language in which their proficiency was testable (Banko, 2018, pp. 51, 129).1 Nevertheless, after 1948, the retention of official Arabic allowed the safe siphoning off of that language to another nation (‘the Arabs’) on which Hebrew was not drastically imposed through generational rupture, as it was on Jewish Arabic- and Yiddish-speakers (including on bi- or trilingual Jews native to Palestine/Israel), who were targets of linguistic assimilation policies (Shohat, 1988; Kosover, 1966). The current ‘multicultural’ portrayal of Israel disingenuously ignores that what is now ‘linguistic diversity’ was manufactured with the use of methods such as ethnic cleansing and forced re-education. The critics of this picture take the liberal potential of Arabic’s official status and posit it as a part of the goal of material and discursive equality (Mendel, Yitzhaki, & Pinto, 2016), the campaigns for which in the summer of 2018 became hindered by the adoption of the Nation-State Law. This law states in paragraph 4, ‘Language’ (placed between paragraph 3, ‘United Greater Jerusalem is the capital of Israel’, and paragraph 5, ‘The State is open to Jewish immigration and the ingathering of the exiles’): a) Hebrew is the language of the State. b) The Arabic language has a special status in the State; regulation of the use of the Arabic language by government institutions or in interactions with them will be set in law. c) Nothing in this paragraph is intended to harm the status as provided in practice to the Arabic language prior to the enactment of this Basic Law.2 A half-sentence had been struck out in the legislative committee from clause (b) prior to the distribution of the text to parliamentarians on 10 July 2018: ‘Speakers [of Arabic] have the right of linguistic access [sic] to state services’ [ le- d ovreih a zḫut le-negišut lašonit le-šerutei ha-medina] ‫לדובריה זכות לנגישות‬ ‫לשונית לשירותי המדינה‬. 3 This deletion has as yet untested material consequences for Palestinians and other Arabs’ access to state health services, justice, etc. The ‘reassurance clause’, (c), includes the formulation ‘the status as provided in practice’ [maʿmad še-nitan bi-foʿal] ‫מעמד שניתן בפועל‬, which essentially means that whatever has not been practiced institutionally to date will not be legally possible to claim after this point. The status of the Arabic language as it has been practiced to date is what the rest of this chapter will be dealing with, and it is not one uniform, unchanging practice. It can be divided into three historical phases: in the first phase, from 1949 to the 1960s, establishments accommodated Arabicspeakers in the very few institutions, such as the Knesset, where Palestinians and other Arabs were included within limitations, by providing interpretation and translation. The last documentations of Knesset interpreting provisions in the plenum records are from the years 1962 and 1966, and

32  The contestation of Arabic on Zionist stages

these mentions indicate the rolling back of these provisions compared to the 1950s. Then there was Arabic silence. Anwar Sadat’s visit in 1977 broke the silence momentarily, but not to the benefit of the local Arabic-speakers – these were the decades when a contained habitus for Arabic was formed: the second phase. And yet, the legal provision for official Arabic, albeit as a one-nation-one-language ideological clause, held latent liberal potential that could be put into practice to open discursive avenues of linguistic challenge to the Hebrew hegemony since about 2010: the third phase. The sections that follow will first give an account of Arabic speeches and translation in the early years of the Knesset, passing through the silent phase (which is difficult to document linguistically), and will then analyse ‘apt illustrations’ of the strategy of increased audibility of Arabic on Zionist stages in more recent years.

Knesset beginnings: translating and negotiating national  boundaries One of the speeches at the inauguration of the first Knesset on 15 February 1949 was in Arabic, delivered by Amin Jarjoura, head of the Democratic List of Nazareth.4 He alluded to aspirations for peace and justice, and to the short sections of Israel’s Declaration of Independence that mention the founding of the state for all its citizens without discrimination,5 but he failed to refer to the fact that while he spoke, Palestinians and other Arabs were still being expelled from, or being prevented from returning to, their home towns and villages (Khalidi W., 2005). According to the Knesset records transcribing the meeting, Foreign Minister Moshe Shertok (later Sharett) of the Labour government took the floor after Jarjoura finished his speech, asking to ‘complete the translation’ of Jarjoura’s words ‘on one important point: the honoured speaker conveyed his wish for the government of Israel to strive for peaceful and friendly relations with the neighbouring Arab countries and for its foreign policy to serve as an example to others’.6 To this, Elyahu Eliashar of the Sephardim and Oriental Communities party added that he requested that ‘the complete translation’ of Jarjoura’s speech be distributed amongst the representatives, and the chairperson Yosef Sprinzak clarified that ‘the complete translation of his speech will be entered in the stenographic report’.7 Indeed, in the Knesset record that is publicly accessible, a phrase in brackets under Jarjoura’s words reads: ‘translation from Arabic’. At the end of the record, a note with an asterisk states: ‘the interpretation of Mr Amin Jarjoura’s speech in the meeting was incomplete. The complete translation is included in the stenographic report in this booklet on page 28’.8 There is no record of the original speech: all the records of Knesset members’ speeches are in Hebrew, in accordance with Knesset procedures; in the case of translations, if a chairing decision is made, the speech in the original language can be added as an appendix to the official record.

The contestation of Arabic on Zionist stages  33

I have not seen such an appendix to any of the records I have studied for this research (a list of official records consulted is in this book’s Appendix 5).9 In practice, all the official records of the Arabic-speaking members of Knesset are in Hebrew only. These procedures and the meta-comments on them at the inauguration of the Knesset support my argument regarding the institutional suppression of Arabic. The evidence shows that Eliashar who was an Arabic-speaker from a longstanding Jerusalem family, requested that the Hebrew translation, but not the Arabic text, be circulated, and that this request was understood and dealt with as a bureaucratic procedural matter. Sprinzak is credited with establishing parliamentary culture in the early years of the state (Sofer, 1998, p. 115). This culture erased Arabic from the official records from the outset, and lay the ground for the soon-tocome Arabic silence: the bilingual Knesset members, even those who were Arabic-speakers but did not want to be addressed ‘as Arabs’, like Eliashar, explicitly made Hebrew the hegemonic language. The Arabic of Arab Jews subsequently went through a period of contraction due to the disruption in socialisation arrangements of communities that had been brought to Israel from elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa, to Hebrew-hegemonic education of Jews in Israel, and to the stigmatisation of Arabic-speakers (Shohat, 2017; Piamenta, 2000, p. 183). The historical, political, and social reasons for the rise and maintenance of Modern Israeli Hebrew monolingualism for Jewish Israeli institutions, regardless of the multilingualism in practice of many Jewish people, have been examined by others (Kuzar, 1999; Lefkowitz, 2004; Spolsky & Shohamy, 2001).10 Interpreting and translation in the Knesset Nevertheless, Arabic was spoken on that first Zionist stage – this fact was officially noted in brackets, and with asterisks – and interpreting was provided institutionally: this is a distant dream for the Knesset of later years, where any few utterances in Arabic have been met with shouts of ‘speak Hebrew!’ (as will be seen below). Interpreting from Arabic into Hebrew of a certain quality was offered on the spot, and was consecutive, allowing Sharett to hear both the original and the translation, and giving him the time to compare them. The first Knesset interpreter and translator, Jewish Jerusalemite Moshe Piamenta, who later went on to become an Arabic scholar at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and to head a governmental committee on the teaching of Arabic in Jewish schools (Mendel, 2014, pp. 135–139; Amara M., 2010, p. 184), described the translation processes in 1955 after the first two parliamentary elections with some pride and only moderate complaints of overworking and underfunding. Simultaneous interpretation into Arabic via earphones was provided to Arabic-speaking members in the Knesset plenum starting from the first sessions (Piamenta, 1955, p. 46). Simultaneous interpreting was then a new method, and one

34  The contestation of Arabic on Zionist stages

that required expensive technology (Gaiba, 1998). The interpreter on duty (there were two in employment from mid-1949 onward) worked from a platform that was separate both from the Knesset floor and the Speaker’s dais, and from which the Arabic-speaking deputies were visible. Translation from Arabic into Hebrew was consecutive, said out loud by the interpreter for the benefit of all deputies; and in the case of speeches submitted for translation in advance, the parliamentarians delivered their whole speech in Arabic and after they had concluded, the interpreter read the prepared translation, with attention to the style of the original text (Piamenta, 1955, p. 46). Long stretches of Arabic were thus heard aloud in the first few elected Knessets by all those present. The combination of Hebrew-only official records with audible Arabic and interpretation provisions is a textbook constituent of the ethnorepublican system: the frame was Jewish Israeli, and the content accommodated ‘minorities’. It is not known whether translation and interpretation were institutionally provided to Knesset members speaking for instance Russian or Polish (of whom there were more than Arabic-speaking members, judging from their stated ‘country of origin’11). Russian- or Polish-speaking Jews were not ‘a minority’ in this new Israel; on the contrary, they were its promoters, founders, and elites (Shindler, 2015) whose diplomatic success had depended on their multilingualism in practice (Khazzoom, 2008), and who were highly committed to Hebrew monolingual hegemony in their own educational socialisation and in policy (Spolsky, 1995, pp. 187–188). Institutional translation maps onto conceptions of ethnic difference – provided for the Arabic-speakers, but not to the European-language-speakers – as much as it addresses practical issues of comprehensibility. Arabic for ‘the other nation’ Arabic was also the language of Tawfiq Toubi’s first speech to the Knesset on 9 March 1949. He was a member of the Communist Party, and, in a speech much longer than Jarjoura’s, did describe in detail the expulsions of Palestinians and other Arabs: he named villages that had been attacked and ‘innocent people’ who were detained, listed locations of ‘concentration camps’ for Arabs, and gave numbers of missing and displaced populations, whom he termed ‘refugees’.12 The next day, prime minister David BenGurion started his speech by singling out Jarjoura’s and Toubi’s interventions for commendation, saying, ‘for the first time [in our history], members of the two nations met here, members of the Jewish nation and members of the Arab nation’,13 regardless of the fact that Toubi had presented the analysis of the Communist Party, which saw its position as an alliance of Jewish and Arab ‘progressives’ against the ‘imperialists and reactionaries’,14 rather than representing an Arab nation. Ben-Gurion’s pairing together of Jarjoura and Toubi – of opposing political persuasions, but the only two

The contestation of Arabic on Zionist stages  35

speakers who had addressed the Knesset in Arabic – confirms the argument put forward here that the operative language ideology followed the lines of one-nation-one-language, and that this was the primary reason for keeping Arabic as an official language. Arabic-speakers who accepted to be addressed as Arabs – and the Arab Jews were not included among these – were constructed as the other, ‘minority’, nation (Lefkowitz, 2004, pp. 82–83). Of all the delegates’ propositions, it was Toubi’s that Ben-Gurion spent most of his address demolishing on 10 March 1949, while Toubi kept silent even as his Jewish fellow communists heckled Ben-Gurion. Twenty-sevenyear-old Toubi already knew enough Hebrew to understand it and to make speeches (Piamenta, 1955, p. 45):15 already on 28 March 1949, Toubi interrupted Meir Grabovski (later Argov) who was saying in Hebrew that ‘Arab residents are equal in all, all rights to citizens of Israel’, with the Hebrew words, ʿal ha-nayyar, ḫaver grabovski, rak ʿal ha-nayyar : ‘on paper, comrade Grabovski, only on paper’.16 By 1957, when Toubi denounced the intensified crackdown on Palestinian protests reacting to the Kafr Qasim massacre by the Israeli armed forces, all his speeches in the Knesset were in Hebrew,17 and nevertheless his propositions were delegitimised (Robinson, 2013, p. 169). Other Palestinian spokespeople of the time also started their engagement with Israeli policies with Arabic speeches in Hebrew-dominant institutions, but later moved to speaking Hebrew: such was the work, for instance, of lawyers Hanna Naqara and Elias Koussa18 in the Israeli courts in the 1950–1970s (Nasrallah, 2016, pp. 380–384; Ibrahim, 1985; Pappé, 2011, p. 37). Comprehensibility and the limits of translation’s remedy On 25 December 1962, an argument broke out in the plenum between Tawfiq Toubi and Jabr Muʿadi (who had been elected on an Arab-only list affiliated to the Labour party), after Toubi had objected to government appointments of members of committees that established separate religious courts for Druze communities. In the Knesset record, Muʿadi, who was a Druze religious elder, is noted in brackets to have heckled Toubi and argued with him in Arabic, who responded in kind.19 Ukrainian-born Abraham Herzfeld, who probably could not understand the exchange, asked: ‘Why is it necessary to swear?’, to which Toubi replied that he had not been swearing, he had been saying that there was a democratic demand coming from the Druze community.20 The session chair, Beba Idelson, intervened after a few seconds to announce: ‘I am sorry to say that we are not able to translate the exchange between the speaker and Knesset member Jabr Muʿadi. They will not be recorded in the minutes, and in any case the translator informs me that they were of a personal nature’. Toubi again resorted to translating himself: ‘There are no personal matters between myself and Knesset member Jabr Muʿadi, I was saying that

36  The contestation of Arabic on Zionist stages

he does not represent the Druze residents’. Idelson repeated the procedural decision: ‘The translation is not recorded, and the speech will not be entered in the minutes’.21 The overworked translator could not be expected to convey every ‘swearword’ that Arabs might want to throw at each other, such as ‘you undemocratic reactionary, you!’ or whatever it was that had been said, which cannot be retrieved, even though the Rules of Procedure state that the recorded minutes should take note of heckling.22 Another noteworthy element is that the lack of comprehension apparently caused Herzfeld to resolve his feelings of discursive exclusion by assuming that the Arabic words that had been said amounted to swearing; Idelson apologised for not being able to relieve Herzfeld’s discomfort by providing a translation. The result was then that the Arabic, which we only know was used thanks to metalinguistic comments on its (non)translation, was explicitly erased. By 1962, the institutional suppression of Arabic was settling in, and rolling back translation provisions in the Knesset would have been the first blow. Tawfiq Toubi might have been exceptional in his bilingual capabilities; more typical was the linguistic trajectory of Saif al-Din al-Zuʿbi, deputy for another Arab-only electoral list aligned with the Labour party, who could understand Hebrew but could not speak in it (Piamenta, 1955, p. 45). Saif al-Din al-Zuʿbi’s discursive preference was to submit questions to ministers in advance, and prepare his speeches, rather than intervene spontaneously.23 As far as I can tell, what Rafael Talmon was referring to as ‘the intensively quoted words of the Arab Knesset member Zuʿbi, who expressed his concern back in 1966 about the disappearance of Arabic from use in the state of Israel’ (as I referenced in the Introduction), was a question that al-Zuʿbi had put in writing to the Minister of Interior on 24 May 1966, and which can reach us now only in the Hebrew translation recorded in the Knesset minutes: A while ago the Minister of Interior dissolved the municipal council [of Nazareth, where al-Zuʿbi was from] and designated an appointed committee under the headship of the Deputy Governor of the Northern District Mr Eynstein. Mr Eynstein’s lack of knowledge of the Arabic language creates certain difficulties, since the Secretary of the municipality, the Secretary of the council, and the majority of the residents of Nazareth do not understand, and do not know how to speak, Hebrew, and it is difficult for them to come to an arrangement with their mayor by intermediary of a translator. In light of the above I would like to ask the honourable Minister to answer me: Could the honourable Minister not have found an officer who knows how to speak the language of the residents of Nazareth, which is Arabic?24 Al-Zuʿbi had been mayor of Nazareth from 1959 until 1965, and was possibly implying that he would have made a good replacement for the Hebrewspeaking Mr Eynstein in a situation where the municipal council was pitted

The contestation of Arabic on Zionist stages  37

against a population drawn to the opposition Communist Party (Dallasheh, 2012), but his question nevertheless merits attention. It highlights the communicative problems that the institutional Hebrew monolingualism, itself achieved through the assiduous cultivation of Modern Hebrew socialisation of Jewish Israelis, posed for the governance of Arabic-speaking communities. When the Deputy Minister of the Interior, Shlomo-Yisrael Ben-Meir, born in Poland, retorted that the Arab municipal officials could manage in Hebrew ‘perfectly well’,25 al-Zuʿbi changed his argument from one based on comprehensibility to one based on ‘dignity’; before he delivered his answer, the session’s chair asked the translator to ‘translate only the words that Knesset member al-Zuʿbi said [spontaneously], not the whole prepared speech’.26 This is the last mention in the records of the work of the translator in the Knesset, though interpreting might have continued without official notation. Perhaps, then, it was a self-fulfilling prophecy that ‘Zuʿbi expressed his concern back in 1966 about the disappearance of Arabic from use in the state’ (Talmon, 2000, p. 211; emphasis added). What is remarkable for the scholarship is that a study of Arabic in Israel published 34 years after these events could summarise an argument between a politician claiming to represent the interests of his robustly Arabic-speaking constituency vis-à-vis an imposed Hebrew-speaking government, without referring to that context at all. The sociolinguistic concern with wholesale ‘disappearance’ of a language, a concern that was first imputed to al-Zuʿbi and then dismissed, thus failed to note that what was at issue was ‘use by the state’: the issue was the institutional suppression of Arabic that the discussion in the Knesset plenum both reported and demonstrated in practice.

The institutional Arabic silence A politics scholar writing about Israel in 1966 could claim that ‘Arabic was perfectly acceptable in courts of law or parliamentary debate’ (Fein, 1967, p. 60). By 2006, another politics scholar could write that an element of the Jewish Israeli ‘ethnocracy’ was the ‘use of Hebrew [only] in nearly all bureaucratic and legal forums (despite Arabic also being an official language)’ (Yiftachel, 2006, p. 106). Something had happened in the interim: the institutional Arabic silence. It needs to be emphasised that the silence spread at a time when Palestinians and other Arabs in Israel were subjected to military rule (until 1966), imposed on them but not on Jewish Israelis living in proximate locations (Pappé, 2011), and eloquent protest against at least the most egregious forms of exclusion and violence at that time must have seemed urgent to spokespeople such as Tawfiq Toubi, Hanna Naqara, and others who therefore strove to get their message to the authorities, though the process involved humiliations, of which speaking Hebrew in their native land might have seemed the least problematic (Jabareen, 2014, p. 204). At the same time, the destruction of the local economic relations

38  The contestation of Arabic on Zionist stages

when the farming land was nationalised meant that the rural population was transformed into a (gendered) workforce regulated through a separate Arab labour exchange (Khalidi R., 2015, p. 37), one of the corollaries of which was the informal acquisition of Hebrew terminology necessary for obtaining and conducting manual jobs (Hawker, 2018a; Mareʿi, 2013). The combination of low-status bilingualism by the manual workers, and expedient double-monolingual proficiency in Hebrew and Arabic by Palestinian spokespeople in Israel, meant that Arabic was silent on Zionist platforms for decades after the mid-twentieth century. A counter-culture of Arabic public discourse for Palestinians and other Arabs developed in parallel to engagements in state institutions (Khalili, 2007; Sorek, 2008). Although, for a brief moment in the early years of the Knesset, there was evidence of the one-nation-one-language equation operating not only in ideology but also in some forms of practice (seen above in the translated speeches), this equation rapidly transformed into one-n​ation​-pres​sed-i​nto-h​igh-s​tatus​-mono​ lingu​alism​ (Hebrew) on the one hand, and the-o​ther-​natio​n-bou​nd-to​unap​preci​ated-​bilin​guali​sm (Arabic and Hebrew) on the other. Some of the local Palestinian and other Arab reactions to the colonisation and co-optation policies resulted in adapted and reformed patrimonial arrangements as political entities that provided some degree of autonomy to families and communes. In these somewhat contained communities, children were socialised in Arabic while the parents ‘waited to see’ how the Israeli upheaval would play out (Cohen, 1965, p. 173; Dinero, 2010; Asad, 1975). This prevented the effective reconstruction of state-wide Palestinian and other Arab political movements (which had existed in Mandate Palestine (Banko, 2018, pp. 147–195)) to counter the colonising policies (Segev, 1998, p. 65; Lustick, 1980, pp. 137–140), but as a by-product, the containment contributed to the maintenance of Arabic in these somehow buffered communities. A study conducted in 1977 found that survey respondents’ self-identification as ‘Israeli’ decreased, the harsher the experience of land confiscation by the state (Mi’ari, 1987, p. 40): in their territorial constraints, the Palestinians and other Arabs were not ‘Israeli’. These were the years in which the habitus of Palestinian bilingualism was formed, and with it, the tacit knowledge for navigating situations depending on whether it was a discursively valuable move to speak Arabic (for instance, for the functions of insider solidarity, for rhetorical effect, for spontaneity of expression) or to speak Hebrew (for appreciation in the hegemonic sociolinguistic market, or for inclusion on platforms of official institutions). Habitus refers to deeprooted knowledge, attitudes, habits, and capabilities that people, embedded in communities, possess due to their life experiences, and that can be studied in their material and physical manifestations (Rooksby & Hillier, 2005, pp. 42–50). It is the contention of this book that silencing of Arabic in state institutions in the historical conditions of the 1950s and 1960s – even in the few institutions such as the Knesset or the courts where Palestinians

The contestation of Arabic on Zionist stages  39

and other Arabs could formulate their own discourse within the limitations of the ethnorepublican system – led to the containment of Arabic within Palestinian and other Arab communities. This is not to say that the Arabicspeakers themselves were silent, or what is called in the literature ‘quiescent’ (Ghanem, 2012). Many opposition spokespeople were vocal, challenging the limitations of ethnorepublicanism, but they did so bilingually: one language for the outside, and another for the inside of the national ‘minority’ group that formed for and with them. This was their bilingual habitus. The next time Arabic of any significant length was used in the Knesset was during Anwar Sadat’s visit on 20 November 1977; in it, he addressed ‘every man, woman and child in Israel’ in the name of ‘we, the Arabs’,27 whom he assumed to be external to Israel; this did not open the door for local Arabicspeakers to take to the podium with the same technique, particularly as Sadat’s speech signalled the withdrawing of Egyptian support for the Palestinian cause (Giora, 1994). In video recordings of Sadat’s speech, including in contemporaneous Israeli TV news footage, individual sets of headphones, resembling stethoscopes attached to little white boxes, are visible in the hands and around the heads of all delegates and deputies – not only the Arabic-speaking ones, now – as they place and remove them depending on which language is being spoken.28 At Yitzhaq Rabin’s state funeral on 6 November 1995, King Hussein (of Jordan) and President Mubarak (of Egypt) spoke in English,29 voicing allegiance to a US-dominated international diplomacy for the ‘New Middle East’ (Peres & Naor, 1993) associated with the Oslo process. The Palestinian writer and communist politician from Haifa Emile Habibi prepared to make a speech at his (controversial) acceptance of the Israel Prize for literature on 7 May 1992 but was not permitted ‘for lack of time’ by the organisers who were anticipating an anti-Arab backlash;30 it is not known what language he was hoping to deliver his message in,31 but it is likely to have been Hebrew, since that is how he addressed ‘mixed’ audiences at other ceremonies around that time (Lefkowitz, 2004, p. 148). In contrast, on 22 April 2015, news presenter Lucy Hresh (Aharish in Hebrew) lit a torch at the Israel Independence Day ceremony and included a sentence in Arabic in her Hebrew address. In the intervening 20 years, a shift had occurred as Palestinian politicians started to demonstratively include a salutation, a phrase, or a sentence in Arabic in their Hebrew speeches on Zionist stages:32 on 5 December 2011, Talab al-Sana managed to slip 20 seconds of Arabic into his Knesset speech before he was shouted down.33 On 24 June 2013, Talab Abu Arar read a Quranic verse from the Speaker’s dais.34 They were breaking the Arabic silence.

Breaking the Arabic silence on Zionist stages To mark Human Rights Day, on 9 December 2014 master orator Ahmad Tibi, Knesset member since 1999, inserted ten seconds of Arabic into a

40  The contestation of Arabic on Zionist stages

Knesset speech in order to create a pun that only worked in Arabic. In the course of calmly delivering his play on words, he was interrupted by the Knesset session chair, Yoni Shatbon, who asked him to switch to Hebrew, with the justification that that was the official language. Provoked, Tibi corrected him by pointing out that Arabic ‘which he is proud of’ was also an official language. After establishing that Arabic was permitted, Tibi pronounced a few sentences, now defiantly defending his language in Educated Spoken Arabic (Mitchell, 1978), and repeated the bivalent pun that had required the switch to Arabic in the first place: ‘I shall not leave my homeland because of Milky [an Israeli brand of rice pudding], because the land is my property [in Arabic: mulki]’.35 Tibi then turned to Shatbon to pose him a sarcastic question in Palestinian dialect, which Shatbon could not understand: ʿaǧabak willa mā ʿaǧabkāš ‘did you like that or not?’. Nissim Zeev, a rabbi from an Arabic-speaking background, shouted in response from the plenum: ʿaǧabo ʿaǧabo ‘he liked it, he liked it’. (Zeev was in line to speak next and wanted to take the floor.) Shatbon noted (in Hebrew, of course) that ‘the remaining time was used for provocations’ and that ‘you (plur.) will not continue to hold the Knesset in contempt’. The Knesset record of that exchange mentions that Arabic was spoken but provides only the Hebrew translation of Tibi and Zeev’s words, therefore the account provided here is based on a comparison of the video footage with the official record.36 In December 2015, some Knesset members attended a voluntary Arabic lesson for the first time because, as the co-organiser Nurit Koren (Likud) wrote in explanation, ‘often Knesset members from the Joint List speak Arabic in the plenum, and I, as the plenum chair, cannot understand the language’ [emphasis added]. Second co-organiser Bassel Ghattas commented that he hoped that his Hebrew-speaking fellow parliamentarians would at least learn to pronounce their colleagues’ Arabic names.37 It took until 11 July 2017 for an initiative by parliamentarian Yusif Jabarin to succeed in organising a day where speeches in Arabic would be simultaneously interpreted into Hebrew, after a first ‘Arabic Language Day’ in 2016. This was a performance of the yet-to-come liberal vision of respect for all languages and their speakers, the equivalent of International Women’s Day under conditions of rampant sexism.38 (Possibly the headsets that had been available for Sadat’s visit in 1977 had stopped working after 40 years in the cupboard.) The Knesset minutes for the day were all recorded in Hebrew, in the translation provided by the simultaneous interpreters when these were available (some interventions in Arabic were rendered in the records as blanks).39 Raising the issue of Arabic as a possible language of political debate in the Knesset brought to light other institutional limitations on the use of Arabic, also constitutive of the ethnorepublican system: while the Ministry of Education had been newly advised to provide, on demand, official Arabic translations of secondary school leaving certificates, so that Palestinian and

The contestation of Arabic on Zionist stages  41

other Arab students could apply for qualifications in Arabic-speaking institutions outside Israel, the Ministry could ‘unfortunately’ only translate the titles of the subjects, the names of the schools and the grades attained, but not the personal names of the students, because these were recorded by the Population Registry only in Hebrew.40 The names that would have been in need of ‘translating’ into Arabic would presumably mostly have been Arab names. Challenging the institutional Arabic suppression is difficult, and meets with opposition, even for those who are relatively structurally endowed with discursive authority (for instance, to hold the floor for three minutes) and for those with resources (for instance, to hire interpreters). In the rest of this chapter, we will look more closely at two of the speeches where the Arabic silence on Zionist stages was deliberately broken: Lucy Hresh’s proclamation at the 2015 Israel Independence Day ceremony, and Hanin Zoabi’s declaration to the Central Elections Committee on the occasion of the vote for banning her candidacy, earlier the same year. The choice of these two texts illustrates the point that the inhabitations of citizenship can be quite different, even when they use the same political-discursive strategy: the strategy of increased audibility. Lucy Hresh on Independence Day News presenter for the commercial Israeli Channel 2, Lucy Hresh (in Hebrew Aharish), accepted the invitation by Benjamin Netanyahu to light a torch on Israel’s Independence Day ceremony on Mount Herzl on 2 April 2015, and made a speech on the occasion, which is transcribed in Table 1.1, from a video recording.41 Hebrew is in italics in all the transcripts; Arabic in regular font. (.) marks short pauses. Translations are by the author of this book, and are idiomatic. There is no reason to doubt that Lucy Hresh’s pathos is based on sincere sentiments: at line 11, it appears in the video that she may be holding back tears, and the political opinions explicit and implicit in her performance are consistent with her views expressed elsewhere.42 As expected, she was criticised for participating in the ceremony, which is marked by militaristic music and Zionist symbolism. Benzi Gopstein, who represented the ‘antiassimilationist’ organisation Lehava, said: ‘It is regrettable that [Hresh] was chosen to light a torch on Independence Day […] Once a woman whose flag is not the Star of David, the IDF is not her army, and her soul does not yearn for the two-thousand-year-old hope [a quote from the Israeli national anthem, in which Jewish religious ideas are combined with Zionist imagery], is selected, then there is a huge missing of the point of lighting a torch and communicating a message, precisely on Independence Day’.43 Lucy Hresh could not, logically, be Zionist from the point of view of a Jewish supremacist, because Zionism is precisely aimed against Arabs,

42  The contestation of Arabic on Zionist stages Table 1.1 Lucy Hresh, Independence Day, 2 April 2015 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

Ani Lucy Aḫariš, bitam šel salwa u maʾaruf, aḫot šel seyida ve suzan (.) mitkabedet lehasi masua zo (.) šel yom ha atzmaʾut ha šišim ve šivʾa li medinat yisraʾel (.) liḫvod kol bnei ʾenoš be ašerhem še lo ʾavda tikvatam le šalom (.) liḫvod yeladim bnei tom ha ḫayyim al ha-ʾadama ha zot še hivtaḫnu lahem haškem ve ʾarev atid tov yoter (.) liḫvod mi še einam itanu od (.) ve naflu korban bešel sinʾat ḫinam bi yadei mi še šaḫeḫu še kulanu noladnu betselmo šel ʾel ʾeḫad (.) li-ḫvod ha mizraḫim ve aškenazim (.) ha ḫilonim ve ha datiyim (.) ha ʾaravim ve ha yehudim (.) li abnāʾ hāḏihi l-balad (.) allatī tuḏakkirunā bi ʾanna lāʾ arḍa lanā ġayrahā (.) lanā naḥnu al-ʾisrāʾīliyyūn (.) wa li kuli (.) ʾabnāʾ (.) al-bašar. liḫvod bnei ha moledet ha zot (.) še mazkira lanu ki ein lanu eretz aḫeret (.) liḫvodeinu ha israʾelim (.) liḫvod bnei ha adam (.) u li tiferet (.) medinat (.) yisrael

I am Lucy Aharish, the daughter of Salwa and Maarouf, sister of Sayyida and Susan (.) I am honoured to light this torch (.) of the sixty-seventh Independence Day of the State of Israel. In honour of all human beings in their rich diversity who have not lost their hope for peace (.) In honour of the innocent children living on this earth to whom we have promised day and night a better future (.) In honour of those who are no longer with us (.) and fell victim to gratuitous hatred at the hands of those who have forgotten that we are all born in the image of one god (.) In honour of Mizrakhi and Ashkenazi Jews (.) secular and religious people (.) the Arabs and the Jews (.) For those born of this country (.) that reminds us that there is no other land for us (.) for us Israelis (.) and for all humanity (.) In honour of those born of this homeland (.) that reminds us that there is no other country for us (.) in honour of us Israelis (.) for all humanity (.) and for the glory (.) of the State (.) of Israel

an identity which Gopstein could not utter, and defined it instead by its exclusion from the symbols that, for him, merge Jewishness and Zionism (Kimmerling, 1999; Handelman, 2004, p. 204). For left-wing journalist Gideon Levy, Lucy Hresh renounced her Arab identity by agreeing to stand on the Zionist stage; he wrote sarcastically three weeks before the event: ‘In the eyes of the Zionist establishment, Aharish is a good Arab. It turns out that in our enlightened state, a good Arab is an invisible Arab, when it comes to his [sic] identity’.44 He did not wait to hear what she would say at the ceremony to make that judgement: for him, the context of that stage was determining. In the event, Lucy Hresh used a few linguistic tools to make her Arab identity visible. Even though she used the Hebraicised version of her surname – aḫariš as contrasted with the Arabic ḥrēš – she lists the unmistakably Arabic given names of her parents and one of her sisters. Her name is one that can ‘pass for’ Jewish Israeli, but she deliberately claimed Arabness. At line 18 of the transcript, second 55 of her 80-second declaration, she smoothly shifted to Arabic for three sentences, which she subsequently translated into Hebrew. Had she omitted her relatives’ names, and not switched to Arabic, her Arab identity might well have been invisible. Her participation is akin

The contestation of Arabic on Zionist stages  43

to those ‘undocumented’ immigrants in the United States who sang the national anthem, demonstratively, in Spanish, which Judith Butler called a ‘performative contradiction’ at the political phase of creating a fissure to claim rights in a yet undefined way (Butler & Spivak, 2007, p. 63). There are, of course, legal and socioeconomic differences in the status of irregularly documented immigrants in the United States and Lucy Hresh, who resembles (but does not represent) only some of the Palestinian and other Arab middle class in Israel: the commonality that is brought to the linguistic fore is her pointedly saying in Arabic, ‘we, the Israelis’, under an Israeli flag and to the chimes of a military orchestra. The question of whether this inhabitation of citizenship can exist without hypocrisy or delusion in the absence of structural change to the hegemony is what is contested by Palestinian politicians (Bishara, 2017). Hresh’s performance showed that it can; the fact that such a performance did happen is analysed, here, as an act that both iterated the hegemony and claimed its yet undefined liberal transformation. The first structural change, to a structure that was never solid in any case, was the challenge to upholding the one-nation-one-language ideology. Whatever else she was doing, Hresh was displaying the value of her multilingualism. It is the context that gives the increased audibility tool its effect: Lucy Hresh was expanding the crack of negativity, testing the limits of the liberal potential, not yet fulfilled, of Arabic as an official language and of the very limited human rights wording in the Declaration of Independence. The Palestinian and other Arab middle-class liberals are calling the bluff on Israel’s claim to be a democracy, precisely on the Zionist stages where it is most obvious that it is not a state for all its citizens (as Gopstein had observed). They may be up to their necks in the Zionist flow, but they are trying to change the colour of the waters around them. Gideon Levy relies for his profession on these potentially radical cracks too: he may receive death threats, because he has not gone with the hegemonic narrative,45 but he can rely on permitted (at least to him) freedom of expression and relative independence of the press to publish his critical articles. (If they don’t get along, we can always place Levy and Hresh in separate cracks.) Hanin Zoabi’s disqualification from parliamentary elections On 12 February 2015, at the Central Elections Committee in Jerusalem, Hanin Zoabi spoke in her own defence at a hearing on two motions to ban her from running in the parliamentary elections. The transcript in Tables 1.2–1.6 is based on a video recording, cross-checked against the official record,46 and starts at minute 18:50 of the 29-minute video, page 25 of the 52-page record, amidst loud and overlapping speech. Overlaps are marked with the symbol [ .

44  The contestation of Arabic on Zionist stages Table 1.2 Hanin Zoabi at the Central Elections Committee, 12 February 2015, transcript part 1 of 5 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

Sharon Gal: hi ḫamās Salim Jubran (SJ; chair): šev bevakaša Sharon Gal: [meḫabēlet omedet po SJ: [gvēret zoʿbi (.) gvēret zoʿbi Hanin Zoabi (HZ): ana mā ḥakēteš nuṣṣ il waʾit SJ: [lo lo lo HZ: nuṣṣ il waʾit mā ḥakēteš Yehuda Avidan: [dabri be ʾivrit Shouts from the plenum: po tedabri be ivrit SJ: [hi amra: dibarti paḫot mema še ratsiti ledaber. hi lo higiyya le ḫetsi mi dvareiha. rabotayy, ani mevakeš ktsat šeket

Sharon Gal: She’s Hamas Salim Jubran (SJ; chair): Please sit down Sharon Gal: [There’s a terrorist standing here SJ: [Ma’am Zoabi (.) Ma’am Zoabi Hanin Zoabi (HZ): I didn’t speak half the time SJ: [No no no. HZ: Half the time I didn’t speak Yehuda Avidan: [Speak in Hebrew Shouts from the plenum: here you’ll speak Hebrew SJ: [she said: I spoke less than I wanted to speak. She has not gotten to half of her speech. Gentlemen, I request a bit of silence

Lines 5–7 in the official record read, in brackets: omeret milim ba safa ha ʿaravit ‘she says words in the Arabic language’, without specifying what these words may be. At line 8, the video goes blank for a few seconds: consequently, Tables 1.2–1.6 are a new record that is patched together from both sources. Zoabi was trying to establish common grounds with Salim Jubran, chair of the Committee, on the basis of their both being Arabs: she addressed him ‘as an Arab’. She needed his favourable inclination in order to keep the floor, as she had run out of time due to multiple interruptions; as a nationalist, following the logic of one-nation-one-language, she had assumed that he would respond to Arabic favourably. She used the familiar register of Palestinian urban dialect, as opposed to the option of more formal registers such as Educated Spoken Arabic or Standard Arabic: this is another indication that she was addressing him as an equal, fellow Arab-to-Arab, rather than speaker to a chair. The first to rebuke her for this linguistic move was another Arabic-speaker, Yehuda Avidan, from a Moroccan family related to important North African rabbis.47 Neither Avidan nor Jubran wanted to be addressed, in this context, ‘as Arabs’: Jubran in particular needed to preserve all the discursive authority he had derived from his professional standing, as Chief Justice on the Supreme Court, which is, as all Israeli state institutions, one where Arabic has been suppressed for decades. He could not be seen to depreciate himself, in the sociolinguistic market (Bourdieu, 1982), by answering her in Palestinian urban code, and thus hypothetically letting some of the overhearing audience cope with the discomfort of not understanding exactly what was being said for a few sentences. Yet he did accept that he would show that he understood Arabic – and so, partly, accepted to be interactionally formed ‘as an Arab’. He was under pressure at this moment to keep the procedures moving along and in the absence of

The contestation of Arabic on Zionist stages  45

a professional interpreter, he translated the gist of what Zoabi had said to him, and worked it into a chairing instruction (lines 11–14). Her strategy had achieved its aim, while Jubran continued to abide by the suppression of Arabic. Her words were translated for Hebrew-speakers and for speakers of Arabic who did not wish to be addressed as Arabs, even though what she had said was not immediately relevant to the argument that the plenum members were intent on having. A few seconds later she regained the floor (see Table 1.3). Zoabi accused her indicters of using disingenuous misinterpretations of Arabic for political goals, which she titled ‘the war against the Arabic language’ (lines 18–19); in essence she was alleging that she was the victim of intercultural miscommunication (Gumperz, 1982, pp. 172–203). Yet she was also using her language politically, except that she laid claim to more precise and nuanced, and essentialist, ‘native speaker’ knowledge of semantics, like ‘every Arab reader’ (line 25). When she announced that she was going to give them a one-sentence Arabic lesson, the shouts from the plenum intensified. She was, in effect, announcing that she was going to challenge the institutional suppression of Arabic (see Table 1.4). Table 1.3 Hanin Zoabi at the Central Elections Committee, 12 February 2015, transcript part 2 of 5 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

HZ: kaʾašer lo meviʾim šum tsitut še (.) še meʾašer et ha ašemot še hem meašemim oti (.) hem ovrim la maʾavak ba safa ha ʿaravit (.) ha paʾam (.) zo ha mila ḥiṣār (.) ma laʾasot (.) hem rak mevinim terminolōgiya tsvaʾit (.) laḫen hem mefaršim et ha mila muḥāṣara (.) še ba maʾamar šeli (.) le matsor tsvaʾi (.) limrot še kol kore ʿaravi mevin še ḥiṣār gam ze matsor medini (.) ve ba hekšer šelanu (.) ze bidud politi (.) o mdini Yariv Levin: [ve muḫāsarat azza HZ: [ve im kaḫ hu ha matsav Yariv Levin: [muhāsarat ġazza ze gam matsor ? HZ: [boʾu naʾavor (.) naʾase targil katan (.) naʾavor ktsat le ʿaravit (.) ani omar laḫem mišpat aḫad be ʿaravit (.) Yaron Ben-Ezra: at šoʾēlet o meḫayēvet otanu ? lo rotse laʾavor le ʾaravit

HZ: When they do not bring any quote that (.) that shows the accusations that they accuse me of (.) they turn to the war against the Arabic language (.) This time (.) it’s the word “ḥiṣār” [siege] (.) What can be done (.) They only understand military terminology (.) Therefore they interpret the word “siege” (.) which is in my article (.) as military siege (.) Even though every Arab reader understands that “ḥiṣār” is also political siege (.) and in our context (.) political isolation (.) or diplomatic Yariv Levin: [And “muḫāsarat” [siege] of Gaza HZ: [And if such is the situation Yariv Levin: [Siege of Gaza is also a siege? HZ: [Let’s move over (.) let’s do a little exercise (.) Let’s move to Arabic for a bit (.) I will tell you one sentence in Arabic (.) Yaron Ben-Ezra: Are you asking or forcing us? don’t want to move to Arabic

46  The contestation of Arabic on Zionist stages Table 1.4 Hanin Zoabi at the Central Elections Committee, 12 February 2015, transcript part 3 of 5 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71

HZ: ve evakeš še yiršemu (.) dvaray (.) ba safa (.) šeli (.) ba safa ha ʿaravit (.) naḥnu fi l-qāʾima l-muštaraka sa naʿmal ʿala muḥāṣarat siyāsātikum SJ: [rabotayy rabotayy rabotayy Yehuda Avidan: [eyn lanu baʾaya kvod ha-šofet (.) ve bilvad še yihiyye tirgum miyyadi (.) SJ: bevaday (.) ani meniyaḫ še ze ma še yihiyye (.) Alaa Mahajna: avidan ani muḫan letargem im ʾata rotse (.) ha safa ha aravit hi safa rišmit (.) zḫuta ledaber ba safa ha aravit Yehuda Avidan: [yeš šofet še baruḫ ha šem mevin et ha safa (.) yeš sgan yošev roš še mevin et ha safa (.) ve yuḫal letargem (.) ten lo bevakaša (.) gam ha šofet ve gam ha sgan šelo yaḫol letargem lo ata SJ: [aval yihiyye tirgum rabotayy (.) rabotayy (.) yihiyye tirgum rabotayy (.) takšivu rega (.) yihiyye tirgum ana lo lehafriʾa (.) (after a few seconds in which SJ seeks silence) Yaakov Matsa: ani mefaḫed še ze yigamer ba milim alāwu akbar ve yihiye pitsuts (.) (laughter) From the plenum: tov še ata yodeʾa aravit Alaa Mahajna: [adoni (.) ʾim ze lo hasata le gizʾanut ani lo mevin ma ze hasata le gizʾanut HZ (to Yaakov Matsa): [kol ha kavod Yehuda Avidan (to Alaa Mahajna): [al tavin (.)  ata lo ḫayyav (.) 

HZ: And I will request that my words (.) are recorded (.) in (.) my (.) language(.) in the Arabic language (.) We in the Joint List will act to place your policies under siege SJ: [Gentlemen gentlemen gentlemen Yehuda Avidan: [We don’t have a problem your honour (.) just if only there would be an immediate translation (.) SJ: Of course (.) I assume that that’s what will happen (.) Alaa Mahajna: Avidan I am willing to translate if you want (.) Arabic is an official language (.) it’s her right to speak in Arabic Yehuda Avidan: [There’s a judge who God be blessed understands the language (.) There’s a deputy chair who understands the language (.) and can translate (.) let him, please (.) both the judge and his deputy can translate, not you SJ: [But there will be a translation gentlemen (.) gentlemen (.) There will be a translation gentlemen (.) Listen for a minute (.) There will be a translation please do not disturb (.) (after a few seconds in which SJ seeks silence) Yaakov Matsa: I am afraid that it will end with the words Allahu Akbar and there will be an explosion (.) (laughter) From the plenum: Good that you know Arabic Alaa Mahajna: [Sir (.) If that’s not incitement to racism I don’t understand what is incitement to racism HZ (to Yaakov Matsa): [Well done Yehuda Avidan (to Alaa Mahajna): [Don’t understand (.) You don’t have to (.)

As we have seen from the Knesset records consulted for the section above, on Knesset beginnings, and from earlier in this text (lines 5–7), Zoabi was justified in explicitly requesting an official record in Arabic (line 40): the established modus operandi was not to record Arabic officially. There was also a procedural problem with interpreting, which was the subject of on-the-spot negotiations (lines 45–61). The lawyer Alaa Mahajna offered his services, but he was representing the National Democratic Assembly, Zoabi’s party, on the Central Elections Committee, and this might have been the reason why Avidan

The contestation of Arabic on Zionist stages  47

made a point of rejecting his offer: there was a need to view translation as impartial, not a mediation (Baker, 2010). Meanwhile, there was uproar in the plenum, which was a small crowded space: Yaakov Matsa was sitting only a couple of metres from Zoabi when he made the joke at her expense based on his association between Arabic and suicide bombers (lines 62–63). Zoabi’s reaction to the joke was sarcasm (line 69), another type of humour which allowed her to be above and at a distance from the offence (Meyer, 2000); Mahajna’s reaction was legalistic (lines 66–68), a framing manoeuvre to engage with the offensiveness without taking offence. Avidan dismissed Mahajna’s objection that the joke was racist by taking Mahajna’s turn of phrase ‘I don’t understand’ (line 67) literally, and riposting that Mahajna ‘did not have to understand’ (line 71), because it was an in-joke, for the in-group from which Mahajna was excluded (Meyer, 2000). This is similar to when feminists object to sexist jokes, or Muslims to cartoons about their religious precepts, because some types of humour rely on relations of power to create the ‘butt’ of a joke, with more or less fluidity (Kuipers, 2011; Weaver, 2009). Finally, Zoabi managed to complete her Arabic sentence (see Table 1.5). The official transcript includes the Arabic which Zoabi requested for her sentence in lines 73–77, both in Arabic script and in Hebrew script transcribing the Arabic, and is accompanied by a note from the stenographer saying: ‘The sentence spelled out above was conveyed to us by the representatives of Knesset member Zoabi and was not recorded by me’.48 Nobody had expected that there could be a need for a violation of Arabic

Table 1.5 Hanin Zoabi at the Central Elections Committee, 12 February 2015, transcript part 4 of 5 72 HZ: naḥnu fi l-qāʾima l-muštaraka sa naʿamal 73 ʿala muḥāṣarat siyāsātikum (.) 74 qawānīnikum al-ʿunṣūrīya (.) 75 wa muḥāṣarat al-ʿaqlīya l fāšīya 76 wa š-šūfunīya (.) 77 Danny Danon: hi amra še hi tomēḫet ba 78 ḫamas (.) ze ha kol (.) at tomēḫet ba ḫamas 79 o lo (.) ken o lo (.) tagidi lanu be ivrit im at 80 tomēḫet ba ḫamas ken o lo 81 Yehuda Avidan: [dani ten lanu šniyya (.) 82 al tidʾag (.) yariv po (.) 83 lo nitan limkor otanu (.) anaḫnu rotsim 84 lišmoʾa ʾeḫ hi metargemet kedei še yariv 85 yagid lanu eyfo ha nefilot 86 Yariv Levin: [hi tetargem (.) naḫon aval 87 ani kvar omer leḫa ze lo omer klum (.)  

HZ: We in the Joint List will act to place your policies under siege (.) Your racist laws (.) And to besiege your fascist and chauvinistic reasoning (.) Danny Danon: she said that she supports Hamas (.) That’s all (.) Do you support Hamas or not (.) Yes or no (.) Tell us in Hebrew if you support Hamas yes or no Yehuda Avidan: [Danny give us a second (.) don’t worry (.) Yariv is here (.) We won’t be sold out (.) We want to hear how she translates so that Yariv can tell us where the transgressions are Yariv Levin: [She’ll translate (.) that’s fine, but I’ll tell you already it doesn’t mean anything (.)

48  The contestation of Arabic on Zionist stages

suppression to be officially recorded: there was no institutional method for it, and Moshe Piamenta turned in his grave.49 Meanwhile, the language gap was used again to equate Arabic with terrorism (using Hamas as a shortcut to mean terrorism), expressed in the deliberate misrepresentation of Zoabi’s sentence as ‘she said that she supports Hamas’ (lines 78–79), and to dismiss her political stance with ‘I’ll tell you already it doesn’t mean anything’ (line 87). Showing one’s ignorance of Arabic did not entail a loss of value on the sociolinguistic market, for Danny Danon and Yariv Levin, because they were already in possession of the most prized commodity, monolingual Israeli Hebrew. These attitudes pushed Jubran just a bit over the edge, as seen in Table 1.6. Table 1.6 Hanin Zoabi at the Central Elections Committee, 12 February 2015, transcript part 4 of 5 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122

SJ: ani rotse lomar laḫem še ha ʾaravit hi safa kol kaḫ yafa še keday lehakšiv ve lišmoʾa ota lefaḫot Shabtai Kats: [aval lo ʾota SJ: yeš kaʾele še lo ʾohavim ota az ze sipur aḫer (.) tišma ze safa meʾod tsiʾurit (.) ve yafa (.) ve ḫelkeynu ha gadol (.) še bānu mi artsot ha mizraḫ gam dovrey ʾaravit (.) horeynu dibru ʾaravit (.) Yehuda Avidan: bevadayy Yaakov Matsa: [eyn maḫlóket al ha safa (.) ha safa yefeyfiyya SJ: [ze meʾod yafe lišmoʿa (.) harbe ʾanašim lemašal (.) lama lo ? rabotayy (.) rabotayy yeš harbe yehudim še šomʾim et umm kalṯūm (.) yeš hatsaga be tel aviv ʾal ʾumm kalthūm aḫšav tišʾim ve šmona aḫuz psik teyša yehudim metsapim ota (.) gvēret zoʿabi tetargem ve na nesayem et ha perek ha ze (.) bevakaša (.) HZ: ata tetargem lahem (.) Yariv Levin: ma hu oved bešvileḫ (.) lo kvod ha yošev roš al tetargem SJ: [gvēret zoʿbi tetargemi bevakaša (.) HZ: anaḫnu ba rešima ha mešutēfet nasim be matsor et ha ḥuqim ha gizʿaniyim šelaḫem et ha mediniyut ha gizʿanit šelaḫem ve anaḫnu nasim be matsor et ha mentāliyut ha fašistit ve ha šofunistit (.) SJ: yalla (.) toda raba (.) anaḫnu nistapek be ze (.) toda raba HZ: [aḫšav (.) lo lo lo inte hēka btuẓlumni (.) ani rotsa šte dakot (.) bli še af eḫad yidaber

SJ: I want to tell you that Arabic is such a beautiful language that it’s worth listening to and hearing it at least Shabtai Kats: [But not to her SJ: There are those who do not like her then that’s a different story (.) Listen it’s a very lyrical language (.) and beautiful (.) And many of us (.) Who come from eastern countries are also Arabic-speakers (.) Our parents spoke Arabic (.) Yehuda Avidan: of course Yaakov Matsa: [There is no argument about the language (.) the language is lovely SJ: [It’s very nice to listen to (.) Many people for instance (.) Why not? Gentlemen (.) Gentlemen there are many Jews who listen to Umm Kulthum (.) There’s a show in Tel Aviv about Umm Kulthum now ninety-eight per cent point nine of visitors are Jews (.) Ma’am Zoabi will translate and let’s please conclude this chapter (.) Please proceed (.) HZ: You translate for them (.) Yariv Levin: what he works for you (.) no your honour don’t translate SJ: [Ma’am Zoabi please translate (.) HZ: We in the Joint List will act to place your racist laws under siege your racist policy and we will put under siege your fascist and chauvinistic reasoning (.) SJ: Alright (.) Thank you very much (.) We will make do with that (.) Thank you very much HZ: [Now (.) No no no This way you are not being fair to me (.) I want two minutes (.) without anyone speaking

The contestation of Arabic on Zionist stages  49

Jubran used his position and authority to deliver a lecture aimed at raising the sociolinguistic value of Arabic, both by highlighting its cultural icons, and by associating it with Jews, and others that he includes himself in, ‘from eastern countries’ with Arabic-speaking parents, who are worthy of respect (lines 88–106). His interlocutors were seemingly somewhat chastised, with one saying that it was Zoabi’s discourse in particular that they did not deem worth listening to (by implication, not Arabic in general, line 92). Yaakov Matsa, speaking with his head down, looking at his desk, mumbled that the language was yefeyfiyya (line 100) – that word again applied to how a Palestinian spoke (see the Introduction), the augmentative of yafá ‘beautiful’, Jubran’s chosen descriptor – which I have translated as ‘lovely’, which only prompted Jubran to continue in his lecture. The video shows Zoabi watching Jubran’s defence of Arabic with a smile, possibly interpreting it as his showing his ‘true’ national colours, and yet what he was claiming was a much more fluid identity than what a nationalist one-nation-one-language ideology could capture: he was including the Arabic-speaking Jews – Yehudan Avidan accepted this by nodding ‘of course’ (line 98) – and listeners of Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum50 in general, in the circle of those who appreciated Arabic. It was the offensive linking of Arabic with terrorism, in fact, that pushed all these loose categories into the circle of those who could inhabit forms of citizenship that aspire to polite debate, and abide, generally, by the norms that silence Arabic institutionally, or provide immediate translation when necessary (lines 46–49). Jubran’s having translated her Arabic aside into Hebrew previously, at line 11, and his demonstrating his positive attitude to Arabic in lines 88–106, led to her asking him to translate her scripted sentence in Educated Spoken Arabic, using the pronoun ‘them’ (line 109) to mean ‘those who do not understand Arabic’, implicitly opposed to the ‘us’ who do. No less impudently, also using the imperative mood, but under the guise of defending Jubran’s role of chair and judge, Yariv Levin told Jubran not to translate, in lines 110–111, and thus not be included in the ‘us’ of Arabicspeakers. At line 121 Zoabi tried again to address Jubran as a fellow Arab, in Palestinian urban code, pleading for more time, and this time the stenographer made no mention of ‘words in Arabic’ in the official record. Jubran had by now demonstrated that he was sensitive to appeals to his language, but possibly not in the national-solidarising way that Zoabi seemed to hope for. These types of platforms give rise to political theatre that, in its use of face-threatening acts with material consequences for political exclusion,51 is not representative of the less antagonistic interactions on local Palestinian and other Arab platforms that form the bulk of the evidence for this book. The 2015 disqualification of Hanin Zoabi’s candidacy was

50  The contestation of Arabic on Zionist stages

overturned on appeal to the Supreme Court on 18 February, one week after the event analysed here. Nevertheless, analysing this segment of discourse is useful in its compressed presentation of two types of pragmatic functions of Arabic in an institutional and ‘mixed’ setting: one is an addressee-constrained codeswitch in an informal register, in order to express common ground, and test interactionally another Arab’s identity ‘as an Arab’, and the second is an anti-hegemonic strategy of increased Educated Spoken Arabic audibility (in the declarative sentence) and Standard Arabic visibility (in the official minutes) in a context of institutional suppression of Arabic. At least three different forms of inhabiting Palestinian and other Arab citizenship in Israel were in evidence: Salim Jubran was the hero of the ethnorepublican order, using chairing instructions to fend off ethnonationalist attacks from those who wanted to exclude Zoabi from politics because she was, unapologetically, a Palestinian nationalist. Yehuda Avidan was Jubran’s valiant footsoldier, acknowledging some degree of managed ‘diversity’ within the order. Alaa Mahajna precisely used the liberal potential of Arabic as an official language, as it still was then, to expand the cracks of anti-hegemonic discourse and so allow Hanin Zoabi to rhetorically demonstrate what a multilingual liberal vision would look like: people would speak their language and translate it too – radical for the Knesset of 2015.

Who do you think you are talking to? Addressing Arab audiences from Zionist platforms Ayman Odeh concluded his speech in a major televised electoral debate on 26 February 2015 with two phrases in contrasting registers of Arabic: ʿala qadr ahǝl al-ʿazǝm taʾtī l-ʿazāʾim: ‘by the will of great people, great things will come’ (which is quote from a famous medieval poem),52 fa šiddu l-himme: ‘so put your backs into it’.53 It can be assumed that he was addressing Palestinian and other Arab voters in Israel – he was looking straight into the camera as he delivered the words – in order to emphasise their common identity. But on the sociolinguistic market, doing so on a widely watched TV programme could have the intention and effect of raising the value of Arabic, not least, in the eyes of Arabic-speakers themselves: first, quoting a medieval poem made reference to an Arabic culture independent of the Israel/Palestine geography and time frames (similarly to what Umm Kulthum could do for Jubran in Table 1.6, lines 103–106), and then, using an everyday saying in spoken Arabic evoked a common-sense, ordinary team spirit amongst the in-group which excluded non-Arabic-speakers. Odeh has made a point of addressing his constituency in Arabic from the Knesset platforms: he included a few sentences in Arabic in his maiden

The contestation of Arabic on Zionist stages  51

speech to the Knesset, which he immediately translated into Hebrew ­himself. And the day before Christmas 2015, which coincided with a Muslim festival, he wished religious compatriots kul ʿām u l-ǧamīʿ bi ḫēr ‘happy holidays to everyone’; the discussion that followed was partly noted in the Knesset records as unspecified ‘shouts’.54 There, he explained in Hebrew that the Arabs’ multilingualism earned them added value as opposed to the Jewish Israelis’ ignorance of Arabic, because knowing a language enables cultural openness, mutual understanding, and deep historical knowledge.55 There was one moment in the 26 February 2015 TV debate when Ayman Odeh came close to addressing an Arabic-speaker as an Arab when the latter did not want to be construed as such: after 78 minutes of debate, Odeh turned to Aryeh Deri, former Minister of the Interior for the Shas Party, with an appeal to join forces in representing the most deprived segments of the population in Israel. Deri was born in Morocco and moved to Israel when he was nine years old, and had based his electoral campaign on protesting against Arab Jews’ poverty and disadvantage. Hebrew-speaking Israelis pronounce his name arye déri, but Odeh addressed him as ariye maḫlūf derʿiy, which is the Arabic form, which Deri used in written media.56 Choosing to enunciate Aryeh Deri’s middle name Makhlouf, which is unambiguously Arab, however pronounced, raised similar difficulties to those of including ‘Hussein’ in Barack Obama’s name (Layman, Kalkan, & Green, 2014). Figure 1.1, a screenshot of the TV broadcast as uploaded on YouTube, shows the facial expression of someone who did not want to be addressed ‘as an Arab’. Ayman Odeh participated in the debate as the head of the new Joint List, a party formed of four parties which mostly attracted Palestinian and other Arab voters: the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality,57 formed mainly of the Communist Party (which has always included

Figure 1.1 Ayman Odeh (L) and Aryeh Deri on TV, 26 February 2015 ©Author.

52  The contestation of Arabic on Zionist stages

Jewish members), the Arab Movement for Renewal (led by Ahmad Tibi),58 the United Arab List (the parliamentary representation of the Islamists),59 and the National Democratic Assembly60 (to which Zoabi belonged). Being a communist meant that Odeh could claim the heritage of the politics of Toubi, Habibi, and Naqara mentioned above. At the opening night of the Joint List’s Arabic campaign in Nazareth on 14 February 2015, Odeh said: What I am going to say might sound unconventional but I ask you to open your hearts, in the name of our humanist principles, to the poor Jewish woman in an emergency room in Rambam Hospital [in Haifa] and to the desperate Ethiopian, and the Jewish immigrant from the east, who don’t trust the Joint List, and tell them not to be afraid of voting for us. […] To change the institutions in this country we will represent the alternative for Jewish citizens too. We need 31 per cent of citizens who are Jewish to join the 20 per cent of citizens who are Palestinian to form a majority for change in this country. On the basis of universal values, following the thinking of Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King, and the thinking of our land, our fifteen seats will stand for justice for the poor and oppressed everywhere in this country. We are the alternative to the racism and wars of Liberman, Netanyahu and [Naftali] Bennett; we stand for equality, peace and democracy.61 He was met with applause. Following the thinking of the discipline of sociolinguistics, and the thinking of the people who contributed to the fieldwork for this book, I take a commitment to social justice as a baseline in all analyses (Heller & McElhinny, 2017, p. 234; Pavlenko & Blackledge, 2004, p. 4). Whether this vision of citizenship was shared by anyone in local meetings, debates, and rallies will be explored in Chapters 2 and 3. The electoral campaigns led by Odeh and his colleagues increased Palestinian and other Arab voter turnout from 56% in 2013 to 63.5% in 2015.62 In 2013, the parties that later formed the Joint List had collected a total of 348,919 votes which amounted to 7.64% of valid ballots cast and earned them 11 out of the 120 seats in the Knesset. On 17 March 2015, the Joint List gained 446,583 valid ballots, or 10.61% of the vote, and hauled in 13 seats, thus becoming the third largest party in the Knesset that opened on 31 March 2015. Before looking at the anthropological experiences enlivening these figures, there is a short digression away from Palestinians’ and other Arabs’ practices, to another phenomenon of speaking Arabic on Zionist stages: Jewish Israelis speaking ‘Israeli Arabic’.

The contestation of Arabic on Zionist stages  53

Speaking ‘Israeli Arabic’: a military language for Jewish Israelis The history of the institutions, methods, political aims, and language attitudes that created the teaching curriculum of Arabic for Jewish Israelis has been analysed elsewhere (Mendel, 2014; Amara, 2010, pp. 179–194). What is evident from the analysis is that the purpose of the language instruction has been related to military aims rather than to communication with Palestinians and other Arabs in a comprehensive and flexible range of domains (Mendel, 2014, p. 79). Stretches of ‘Israeli Arabic’ are used in the Knesset by army-educated speakers as a provocative strategy to counter the Palestinian representatives’ positions in their own idiom. On 25 February 2014, Miri Regev pronounced one sentence in Arabic to underline her dismissal of Palestinian and Muslim claims to holy sites in the Old City of Jerusalem.63 Regev had served for decades in the army, reaching the rank of brigadier general. On 23 November 2015, Yinon Magal launched a three-minute tirade of denouncements and vituperations against Palestinian Knesset members, in Arabic.64 Magal had served in the special operations unit of Military Intelligence, and gained a bachelor’s degree in Middle Eastern Studies from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. On 28 March 2016, Avi Dichter, the former head of the Israel Security Agency (known as Shin Bet or Shabak), used phrases in Arabic to denounce Odeh’s criticism of Israel’s ‘targeted’ assassination operations.65 This was not, evidently, how Odeh had envisaged the added value of multilingualism. On Arabic Language Day at the Knesset on 11 July 2017, several Jewish Israeli politicians ventured to speak in Arabic. Yossi Yona (an academic whose parents immigrated from Iraq)66 talked in Arabic of the Labour party primaries, and was criticised by other Jewish Israeli Knesset members for ‘thanking Allah’ that his preferred candidate had won the leadership. In response, Yona stated that his own parents (who were, by implication, Jewish and Arabic-speaking) used the word Allah for ‘God’.67 And Avi Dichter offered this little lecture based on his observations as a soldier at a checkpoint in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) – Arabic in bold (as Avi Dichter took the floor, Ahmad Tibi said: ‘God help us’):68 When we arrived in the territories of Judea, Samaria and Gaza [the OPT, in 1967], it was very interesting to see the effect this had on the vernacular Arabic language. Who remembers the Peugeot 404, it was the most popular car in the Strip – beige-o four hundired and four [mimicking Arabic pronunciation] – chiefly because it was possible to take two passengers next to the driver due to the manual gearshift. Then a very interesting language evolved: Where are you going? – To Tel Aviv.

54  The contestation of Arabic on Zionist stages

– How do you go there? – We peugeot’ed to Tel Aviv. We peugeot’ed to Tel Aviv. What’s ‘peugeot’ed to Tel Aviv’? He said, We drove in a Peugeot to Tel Aviv; it turned into a verb. We drove to Tel Aviv – We peugeot’ed to Tel Aviv. Once I asked someone: How did you peugeot to Tel Aviv? How did you drive to Tel Aviv? He said: We peugeot’ed in the volks – We drove in the Volkswagen. That means that it became a verb in ordinary use. And the academic community will be forever grateful to the Israeli army’s sociolinguistic fieldwork division. Displaying ‘Israeli Arabic’, as opposed to knowing Arabic, is a sign of expertise in military matters that is highly valued across the Israeli political spectrum (Feige, 1998) with the exception of the spectrum covered by non-Zionist parties which mostly attract the votes of Palestinians and other Arabs: another example of the position of negativity that they occupy vis-à-vis the hegemony (Kimmerling, 2010, p. 137). Akram Hasson, an Arab politician in the Kulanu party (in the centre of the Zionist spectrum) also spoke in Arabic in the Knesset on the occasion of Arabic Language Day; to my knowledge, that was the first time he did so. It is interesting what came out of the woodwork when the space was provided that permitted the suspension of institutional Arabic suppression: Akram Hasson announced in Hebrew that he would switch to Arabic for a few sentences, even though on this one occasion, he could have taken the floor with greetings in Arabic, as the other speakers had, spoken his native Arabic, and relied on the simultaneous interpretation. According to the Knesset records, he appealed for Arabic to be changed from ‘a language of murder’ and ‘a language of blood’ to ‘a language of peace and love’, so that his ‘grandchildren could be proud to speak it’. Then their grandfather went back to speaking in Hebrew.69 Nationalism might be ‘banal’ in many places (Billig, 1995); for speakers of ‘Israeli Arabic’, securitised nationalism is woven into anecdotes about cars. In relation to this, there are grounds for questioning what the purposes are of expanding the instruction of Arabic in Jewish Israeli schools: at present, Arabic lessons are optional in secondary schools but a law has been recently proposed to make Arabic compulsory in primary education.70 The fact that it has been proposed in the legislative context that passed the Nation-State Law, and has forbidden the teaching of aspects of Palestinian history as part of the school curriculum, should give pause.71 If the language lessons replicate the pedagogical methods, purposes, and institutional backing of ‘Israeli Arabic’, then Arabic instruction might not aid the re-valuation of multilingualism that, if sufficiently widespread, could have the potential in the future to modify the institutional suppression and communicative avoidance of Arabic in ‘mixed’ company. However, if this law were to pass, it might also be another case

The contestation of Arabic on Zionist stages  55

of language education policy leading to unintended social consequences (Norton & Toohey, 2011). There is only one example, to my knowledge, of a Jewish Israeli using the Knesset as a platform to make an Arabic statement that discursively supported the political positions of Palestinian Knesset members. On 31 July 2013, Israel Eichler of the United Torah Judaism party opposed a bill raising the electoral threshold for the proportion of the vote required for a political party to enter the Knesset, saying in Arabic, naḥnu maʿākum bi-niḍālkum min ʿaǧil ad-dimokratīya: ‘we are with you in your struggle for democracy’. Ahmad Tibi responded a few minutes later in Yiddish, mir di araber badanken aykh af der tmikhe eygn demokratye : ‘We, the Arabs, thank you for the support [for your/our] own democracy’.72 The two speakers played with the personal pronouns to emphasise allegiances: the grammatical second person plural of Eichler was the first person plural of Tibi, and vice versa.73 Despite these protests, the electoral threshold was raised from 2 to 3.25%, which gave the impetus for the creation of the Joint List from the four smaller parties as outlined above; United Torah Judaism made it over the threshold in the 2015 elections too. The fact that Eichler is a religious scholar who opposed military service for ultraorthodox Jews does not contradict my argument that face-threatening uses of Arabic by Jewish Israeli speakers on institutional platforms bear the pragmatic function of displaying military authority.

Speaking languages to power: contesting linguistic and other hegemonies As seen in this chapter, the norms of suppressing Arabic in state institutions developed in a situation where Hebrew hegemony was instituted in heavyhanded ways around the middle of the twentieth century. It has brought about a sociolinguistic market in which one nation was pressed into high status monolingualism (Hebrew) on the one hand, and the other nation was bound to unappreciated bilingualism (Arabic and Hebrew) on the other. The historical formation of the habitus under conditions of institutional Arabic suppression is also manifest in tacit principles of linguistic choices whereby Arabic is used only to address other Arabic-speakers who are prepared to be interactionally constituted ‘as Arabs’, which was problematic for Arab Jews in the Knesset, but also to others in positions of authority, such as the Supreme Court justice Salim Jubran. Practices of institutional translation, initially provided in the Knesset, served to strengthen the demarcation of the boundary between the two languages, taken to index ethnic national groups, hence the attribution of Arabic only to the Palestinians and other non-Jewish Arabs, but not to Arab Jews. The records of Knesset session minutes have only been noted in Hebrew, which is a constituent element of the ethnorepublican state. Challenging this situation by revaluing

56  The contestation of Arabic on Zionist stages

Arabic and increasing the public audibility of multilingual Palestinians and other Arabs speaking Arabic, as have done public figures including news presenter Lucy Hresh, nationalist politician Hanin Zoabi, and Communist Ayman Odeh, has been met with vociferous opposition. One of the forms of this opposition has been the tit-for-tat Arabic pronouncements by militaryeducated Jewish Israelis.

Notes 1 The Citizenship Order-in-Council of 1925 did not stipulate a specific level of proficiency in any of the languages, and the tests were varied in their implementation: for English, they sometimes included written segments (for instance taking dictation), and for Arabic, they were sometimes only cursorily administered; with thanks to Lauren Banko for these details in a personal communication, 27 January 2017. 2 Records no. 2743, Ministry of Justice, The Book of Laws, 26 July 2018, Basic Law: Israel – The Nation-State of the Jewish People ‫ ישראל מדינת הלאום של‬:‫חוק יסוד‬ ‫העם היהודי‬, p.1, translation by the author. 3 The version with visible tracked amendments made prior to plenum debate was downloaded from Basic Law: Israel – The Nation-State of the Jewish People -‫חוק‬ ‫ ישראל – מדינת הלאום של העם היהודי‬:‫יסוד‬, at http:​//m.k​nesse​t.gov​.il/A​ctivi​ty/Le​gisla​ tion/​Laws/​Pages​/LawB​ill.a​spx?t​=laws​ugges​tions​searc​h&lawitemid=565913, under tab ‘Bill proposal for early debate’ ‫הצעת חוק לדיון מוקדם‬, accessed on 6 August 2018. 4 The Democratic List of Nazareth was a party constituted by and affiliated with the ruling Labour party under Ben-Gurion’s leadership. It was seen as a patronage system to channel Palestinian and other Arab votes to support Labour; Jarjoura did not become a significant political figure (Pappé, 2011; Jabareen, 2014). 5 Knesset records, The second meeting of the Constituent Assembly ‫הישיבה השניה‬ ‫של האסיפה המכוננת‬, 15 February 1949 [in Hebrew], p.23; all translations by the present author. 6 Knesset records, The second meeting of the Constituent Assembly, p.24. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9 Rules of Procedure of the Knesset ‫תקנון הכנסת‬, updated on 14 June 2018, pp. 18, 28, 148. 10 I feel affinity with the proponents of the idea that the academic concern with ‘endangerment’ (see, for instance, Fishman, 1991) is related to Jewish experiences of contraction of multilingualism in the specific political and historical context of the success of Modern Israeli Hebrew nativisation. The possibility that this concern is then re-projected onto the case of Arabic in Israel, despite contextual and material dissimilarities, is not explored here. 11 There were 22 Knesset deputies born in the Ukraine, 26 in Poland, and 27 in Russia (out of a total of 120 deputies) serving in the First Knesset, as found on ‘Knesset members of the First Knesset’ under the ‘Country of Origin’ tab, at https​://kn​esset​.gov.​il/mk​/eng/​MKInd​exByK​nesse​t_eng​.asp?​kness​et=1&view=3, last accessed on 12 June 2018. 12 Knesset records, The ninth meeting of the first Knesset ‫הישיבה התשיעית של הכנסת‬ ‫הראשונה‬, 9 March 1949 [in Hebrew], pp. 84–86.

The contestation of Arabic on Zionist stages  57 13 Knesset records, The 12th meeting of the first Knesset ‫הישיבה השתים עשרה של הכנסת‬ ‫הראשונה‬, 10 March 1949 [in Hebrew], p. 134. 14 Knesset records, The ninth meeting of the first Knesset ‫הישיבה התשיעית של הכנסת‬ ‫הראשונה‬, 9 March 1949 [in Hebrew], p. 84. 15 Toubi’s and others’ early bilingualism probably had something to do with the attitudes to intercommunality promoted in the Communist Party: Hassan Jabareen, personal communication, 19 March 2016. 16 Knesset records, The 17th meeting of the first Knesset ‫הישיבה השבע עשרה של הכנסת‬ ‫הראשונה‬, 28 March 1949 [in Hebrew], p. 227. 17 The brackets saying ‘translation from Arabic’ no longer appear on the records, see ‘The meeting number 221 of the third Knesset’ ‫הישיבה המאתים ועשרים ואחת של‬ ‫הכנסת השלישית‬, 9 January 1957 [in Hebrew], p. 715. 18 I thank Hassan Jabareen and Leena Dallasheh for these pointers. 19 Knesset record, ‘The meeting number 197 of the fifth Knesset’ ‫הישיבה המאה ותשעים‬ ‫ושבע של הכנסת החמישית‬, 25 December 1962, p. 603. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. p. 604. 22 ‘In meetings of the Knesset minutes will be taken as a record that will include the entire length of debates, what is said orally, whether from the dais or other locations intended for the purpose in the Knesset plenum, or as heckling, and results of voting’ ‫ את הנאמר בעל‬,‫בישיבות הכנסת יירשם פרוטוקול שיכלול את כל מהלך הדיונים‬ ‫ ואת תוצאות‬,‫ בין מעל הדוכן או מהמקומות המיועדים לכך באולם המליאה ובין כקריאת ביניים‬,‫פה‬ ‫ההצבעה‬, Rules of Procedure of the Knesset ‫תקנון הכנסת‬, updated on 14 June 2018, paragraph 38, clause (a), p. 28. 23 I have reviewed all transcripts of Saif al-Din al-Zuʿbi’s speeches in the Knesset records for the sixth Knesset, from November 1965 to November 1969, during which time he made 14 prepared interventions; although the brackets saying ‘translation from Arabic’ no longer appear on the records, there are metalinguistic comments pointing to the fact that these were being translated, discussed in Chapter 1. 24 Knesset records, ‘The 76th meeting of the sixth Knesset’ ‫הישיבה השבעים‬ ‫ ושש של הכנסת השישית‬28 June 1966, p.1929, translation by the present author. 25 Ibid. p. 1929. 26 Ibid. p. 1945. 27 Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Statement to the Knesset by President Sadat – 20 November 1977 (official English translation), Document no. 73 of the Historical documents, undated, found at www.m​fa.go​v.il/​mfa/f​oreig​npoli​cy/ mf​adocu​ments​/year​book3​/page​s/73%​20sta​temen​t%20t​o%20t​he%20​kness​ et%20​by%20​presi​dent%​20sad​at-%2​020.a​spx , accessed 18 April 2018. 28 See The visit of the president of Egypt Anwar Sadat to the Knesset ‫ביקור נשיא‬ ‫מצרים אנוואר סאדאת בכנסת‬, uploaded to YouTube by user ‘knesset’ on 7 May 2013, www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNcKTnJElfE, accessed 12 January 2018. 29 See videos found on YouTube, uploaded by user ‘mauzer1’ on 13 November 2011, with the caption that it is a recording captured from the Israeli TV Channel 1, for King Hussein: Yitzhak Rabin’s funeral 6.11.1995 part 6/13 ‫יצחק‬ 6/13 ‫ ההלוויה חלק‬- ‫רבין‬, www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxLWpIP_C94, and for Mubarak: Yitzhak Rabin’s funeral 6.11.1995 part 9/13 ‫ ההלוויה חלק‬- ‫יצחק רבין‬ 9/13, www.youtube.com/watch?v=8b0ZaTa8I8s, both accessed on 27 February 2016. 30 Journalists reported that Emile Habibi had wanted to say that he accepted the prize ‘on behalf of all people of good will in the country, Arabs and Jews, on behalf of those who recognize the established fact that all solutions of genocide

58  The contestation of Arabic on Zionist stages

31 32

33

34

35

have failed’. Jewish Telegraphic Agency, ‘Israeli Arab Accepts Israel Prize; Tehiya Leader Ne’eman Stalks out’, 12 March 1992, www.j​ta.or​g/199​2/05/​ 12/ar​chive​/isra​eli-a​rab-a​ccept​s-isr​ael-p​rize-​tehiy​a-lea​der-n​eeman​-stal​ks-ou​t, accessed 3 February 2016. Mahmoud Kayyal, personal communication, 22 March 2016. It seems that it was not Arab nationalist Azmi Bishara, leader of the National Democratic Assembly (in Arabic, at-taǧammuʿ), who broke the Arabic silence for the Israeli public. Bishara served in the Knesset from 1996 until his resignation in 2007, and in 1999 he ran a campaign to be elected Prime Minister of Israel. He announced his candidacy in a press conference at Sokolov House in Tel Aviv on 25 March 1999, at which he answered questions in English, Hebrew, and Arabic; see video uploaded on 11 November 2017 by YouTube us er ‘ Aljazeera Arabic Archive’, ‘Azmi Bishara the first Arab candidate for Prime Minister of Israel’ 1999/3/25 ‫عزمي بشارة أول مرشح عربي لرئاسة الوزراء بإسرائيل‬, at ww w .youtube.com/watch?v=aTkMeKoJVEE, accessed 19 March 2018; an d S h arrock, David, ‘Man from Nazareth aims high’, The Guardian, 26 March 1999, at www.t​hegua​rdian​.com/​world​/1999​/mar/​26/da​vidsh​arroc​k, accessed 19 March 2018. When Azmi Bishara withdrew his candidacy on 15 May 1999, he used the same languages at a press conference at the Marriott Hotel in Nazareth; see video uploaded by user ‘AP archive’ on 21 July 2015, ‘I sra e l politics: Bis hara d rops o ut of electi on rac e’, at www.y outube .com/ watch?v=bW6sEyhZ3g8, accessed 19 March 2018. These press conferences are not termed here ‘Zionist stages’. From watching documentaries about Bishara’s work, which include archival footage of his Knesset speeches – and it is assumed that his speaking in Arabic in the Knesset (or on another Zionist platform) would have been a significant event that would have qualified for inclusion in such films, based on how such performances are received in other cases – it appears that Bishara’s use of different languages was consistently addressee-constrained (the topics and domains were always the same). Therefore, he cannot be said to have used Arabic demonstratively in ways that challenged Arabic suppression. See films: Citizen Bishara, 2001, by Simone Bitton, France: Cineteve, 52 minutes; I also dwell among your people, 2005, by Ariella Azoulay, Israel: Alma Films, 50 minutes; and interviews with Bishara in: Left, 1996, by Udi Aloni, Israel: Re-UMan Productions; Nakba – The Palestinian catastrophe 1948, 1997, by Benny Brunner and Alexandra Jannse, France/Germany: ARTE, 58 minutes; and In search of Palestine – Edward Said’s return home, 1998, United Kingdom: BBC, 50 minutes. See video uploaded by YouTube user ‘Talab Alsana’ on 27 November 2012, titled ‘Speech of Knesset representative Talab Al-Sana on 5 December 2011’ 5_12_2011 ‫ ;خطــاب النائب طلب الصانع في الكنيست‬www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuBsKgqlWIo, accessed on 3 July 2018. See video uploaded by YouTube user ‘nael qwedr’ on 25 June 2013, titled ‘representative Talab Abu Arar reads from the Qur’an in the Israeli Knesset ‫طلب‬ ‫ابو عرار يقراء القرآن في الكنيست االسرائيلي‬, www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0V6krqkzas, accessed on 3 July 2018. Tibi was referring to contemporaneous news in Israeli press that the price of an Israeli brand of rice pudding, ‘Milky’, was lower in Berlin than in Israel, and that the high cost of living was causing people to emigrate, see Boaz Arad, ‘Israelis’ Mass Exodus Can’t Be Blamed on the Price of Pudding’, published 8 October 2014, at www.h​aaret​z.com​/opin​ion/.​premi​um-wh​y-we-​left-​for-b​erlin​1.53​13108​, accessed 16 March 2016.

The contestation of Arabic on Zionist stages  59 36 Knesset records, Meeting no. 188 of the 19th Knesset ‫ושמונה‬-‫ושמונים‬-‫הישיבה המאה‬ ‫עשרה‬-‫של הכנסת התשע‬, pp. 26–29. See video: Watch Tibi: ‘I shall not leave my homeland because of Milky, because the land is my property’ ‫ انا ال‬:‫ الطيبي‬- ‫شاهد‬ ‫ اترك الوطن بسبب الميلكي الن االرض هي ُملكي‬, 27 December 2014, at https://yaffa48. com/?mod=articles&ID=17240, accessed 16 March 2016. 37 Times of Israel, ‘Knesset holds first spoken Arabic course for lawmakers’, 30 December 2015, at www.t​imeso​fisra​el.co​m/kne​sset-​holds​-firs​t-spo​ken-a​rabic​cour​se-fo​r-law​maker​s/, accessed 13 March 2016. 38 Dunia al-Watan, The launch of Arabic Language Day in the Knesset ‫انطالق اعمال‬ ‫يوم اللغة العربية في الكنيست بمشاركة واسعة‬, 11 July 2017, at www.a​lwata​nvoic​e.com​ /arab​ic/ne​ws/20​17/07​/11/1​06619​6.htm​l#ixz​z5Ip1​kPEme​, accessed 23 October 2017; and I thank Yonatan Mendel for sending me his commentary on the event: ‘Arabic Language in Israel: Official but Inferior’, 10 July 2017, at www. h​aaret​z.com​/opin​ion/.​premi​um-ar​abic-​langu​age-i​n-isr​ael-o​ffici​al-bu​t-inf​erior​1.54​92610​, accessed on 11 July 2017. 39 Knesset records, Meeting no. 252 of the 20th Knesset, -‫וחמישים‬-‫הישיבה המאתיים‬ 2017 ‫ ביולי‬11 ‫ י"ז בתמוז התשע"ז‬,‫ושתיים של הכנסת העשרים יום שלישי‬, 11 July 2017, pp. 37–52. 40 K ne sset records, Meeting no. 252 of the 20th Knesset,-‫וחמישים‬-‫הישיבה המאתיים‬ 2017 ‫ ביולי‬11 ‫ י"ז בתמוז התשע"ז‬,‫יום שלישי‬, ‫ ושתיים של הכנסת העשרים‬11 July 2017, p. 51. 41 Video uploaded to YouTube by user ‘Israellycool’ on 23 April 2015, Arab-Israeli Journalist Lucy Aharish Lighting Torch at Independence Day Ceremony, www. youtube.com/watch?v=-JBXLiXTMac&nohtml5=False, accessed 12 March 2016. 42 See, for instance, Alona Ferber, 22 April 2015, ‘No Apologies: Lucy Aharish Is Honored to Be Both Arab and Israeli on Independence Day’ at www.h​aaret​ z.com​/no-e​xcuse​s-no-​apolo​gies-​1.535​3762,​ accessed on 16 April 2016. 43 The Times of Israel, 22 April 2015, ‘Extremist group cancels protest against Arab-Israeli journalist’ www.t​imeso​fisra​el.co​m/ext​remis​t-gro​up-ca​ncels​-prot​ est-a​gains​t-ara​b-isr​aeli-​journ​alist​/, accessed on 16 April 2016. 44 Gideon Levy, 12 March 2015, ‘In Israel, a Good Arab Is an Invisible Arab’ www.h​aaret​z.com​/opin​ion/.​premi​um-th​e-goo​d-ara​b-1.5​33557​4, accessed on 16 April 2016. 45 Giles Fraser, 7 August 2014, ‘Against the war: the movement that dare not speak its name in Israel’, accessed on 16 April 2016 at www.t​hegua​rdian​.com/​ world​/2014​/aug/​06/ga​za-is​rael-​movem​ent-t​hat-d​are-n​ot-sp​eak-i​ts-na​me. 46 ‘Speech of representative Hanin Zoabi to the Central Elections Committee of the Israeli Knesset’ ‫كلمة النائبة حنـــين زعبى أمام لجنة اإلنتخابات المركزية فى الكنيست اإلسرائيلى‬ uploaded to YouTube by user ‘‫( ’نور المهدى رضوان‬Nour al-Mehdi Radwan) on 14 Fe b ruary 2015 at www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0Q61cWYg1M, accessed 3 March 2015; and ‘Partial record (ref. 00804115) of the plenary session of the Central Elections Committee – Discussion of the disqualification no.3/20 an d d i squalification no.4/20, Part A, Thursday 12 February 2015 at 10:00’. ‫ חלק א‬4/20 ‫ ופ”מ‬3/20 ‫ דיון בפ”מ‬- ‫פרוטוקול חלקי מישיבת מליאת ועדת הבחירות המרכזית‬ 47 Yehuda Avidan’s mother was the niece of mystical rabbi The Baba Salé (see Av ira m a Golan, 25 November 2002, ‘A Ticking Bomb for Shas’, at www. haaretz.com/1.5037410, accessed 3 March 2015). Yisrāʾīl Abū Ḥaṣīra, known as Th e Baba Salé, d. 1984, is revered by tens of thousands of followers in Fr anc e and Israel, and is said to have performed miracles, which can be invoked through prayer even after his death; see Maghress – Moroccan news, ‘Baba Salé son of Tafilalt who became a spiritual leader for Jews’ ‫بابا سالي ابن‬