The Jerusalem municipality is preparing to launch a new curriculum for teaching Arabic to Jewish schoolchildren with the start of the 2022/2023 school year, according to a report published by Al-Monitor on August 29, 2022.
The Jerusalem municipality is preparing to launch a new curriculum for teaching Arabic to Jewish schoolchildren with the start of the 2022/2023 school year, according to a report published by Al-Monitor on August 29, 2022.
The syllabus called Ahlan focuses on spoken Arabic rather than Standard Arabic, unlike many Arabic curricula used in educational institutions there.
This curriculum, which will be implemented in 30 schools across the city, is supervised by Madrassa, a non-profit organization that promotes the Arabic language spoken among Israeli Jews.
The Madrassa Foundation stated on its website that 95% of Israeli Jews do not have the ability to communicate in Arabic, despite the fact that 22% of the total "insider population" in Israel is Arabic-speaking.
Statistics also show that only 2.4% of Jews in Israel can read a short text in Arabic, only 1.4% can write a paragraph in Arabic, and only 0.4% of Jews in Israel can read a book in Arabic.
This issue raises the issue of the motives behind this sudden interest in the Arabic language, at a time when the Palestinians are living through various racist restrictions imposed on them by the Israeli authorities.
Jonathan Mandel, director of projects at the Jerusalem-based Van Leer Institute for Research in Humanities and Social Sciences, sees in a research published in 2020 entitled: “Arabs, Jews, and Arabic: Teaching Arabic in Israel and its Challenges”, that teaching Arabic is always linked to the security needs of the State of Israel, and between The Israeli Ministry of Education and Military Intelligence has a long history of cooperation to prepare Arabic-speaking cadres to work in the intelligence apparatus, and the Ministry of Education enjoys financial support from the Israeli army as well.
While some initiatives interested in teaching Arabic promote the matter as an integration of culture between two societies and to develop joint life between Arabs and Jews, the practical and legal reality, according to experts, is largely far from these allegations. Especially after the adoption of the Nationality Law in 2018, the deletion of Arabic from the official languages of the state and keeping only Hebrew.
For example, Palestinian Arabs have been suffering from the recent revocation of licenses for private Palestinian schools in East Jerusalem, under the pretext of incitement against Israel in school textbooks, and a school was demolished last month. According to what Anadolu Agency reported, the Israeli District Court in Jerusalem issued a decision to "immediate demolition" of the Ein Samiya school, northeast of Ramallah.
The issue is not recent
Abdullah Maarouf, a professor of Jerusalem studies and former media and public relations official at Al-Aqsa Mosque, said in his interview with TRT Arabi: “The issue of teaching Arabic in schools in Israel is not modern, and talk about it has been going on since the establishment of that state in 1948, but the dispute is great within Israeli institutions and society. The importance of learning Arabic.”
He added, "Some Israeli researchers see the necessity of educating Jews in Arab Palestine in order to enable them to see the Arab environment and deal with it comfortably, while this endeavor is opposed by some who believe that this will affect the Jewish personality."
Maarouf continues: "In a certain period of the last third of the last century, laws were issued obligating learning Arabic in the preparatory stage, then the Israeli authorities retreated after a time, and made learning it optional, and this shows their confusion about the matter."
In this regard, the former deputy mayor of Baqa al-Gharbiya and an Arabic language teacher at the Open University, Idris Mawasi, points out in an exclusive interview with TRT Arabi that “Teaching Arabic in Hebrew schools is very old, I taught 40 or 42 years ago in Jewish schools, the issue persists all the time, but It was not taken seriously, especially since the students were studying in Standard Arabic only, which would not benefit them in daily life, so the focus was placed on teaching the spoken language in addition to the Standard as well. Even some of them pass the high school exam in the Arabic language before they are accepted into universities.”
Reasons for expanding daily language teaching
In light of the closure of Arab schools last month in Jerusalem, the demolition of others, and the expansion of Arabic teaching in Jewish schools, Maarouf says: “In fact, the occupation authorities do not deal with learning Arabic from a purely cultural standpoint, but from a colonial colonial logic that aims primarily to understand the Arab community to deal with it in a way easier."
He stresses that "these measures do not mean that the occupation authorities want to coexist with the Arab community, but rather want to take advantage of this matter in facilitating the penetration of the Arab community, whether in the city of Jerusalem or in the rest of the Palestinian territories, so we see this contradiction." He added that "the occupation authorities do not see the Arabic language as the language of civilization, and many members of the hard-line Zionist movement in the occupying country treat Arabic with some contempt and underestimation."
On the other hand, Mawasi, a former candidate for the 48th Palestinians for the 19th Knesset elections on the Social Justice list, believes that "many Jews want to learn Arabic, so that they can talk with their Arab neighbors in a more meaningful way and learn their traditions, character, and even popular proverbs."
Mowasi points out that "some Jewish students in universities say that they came to learn Arabic with a desire to live in peace with the Arabs, especially the leftists." On the other hand, Mowasi does not deny the existence of "those who are learning to join the intelligence services, stressing that these have specialized institutes."
Mowasi continued, saying: "I have some students at the Open University, who are originally Jewish teachers who came to learn Arabic because they wanted to become teachers of Arabic in Israeli schools. However, we cannot say that a huge number enroll in Arabic language courses at the university, as it is almost no more than 150 people annually.
On the relationship of civil society initiatives to teach spoken Arabic with the occupation government, Professor of Jerusalem Studies Abdullah Maarouf confirms to TRT Arabi that this matter “depends on the nature of civil society organizations and the way they present their vision in teaching Arabic to the Israeli community,” stressing that “some organizations follow the Israeli left and do not It receives great governmental support, especially from the Israeli right-wing governments, but there are some institutions that understand the right’s vision in the matter of teaching Arabic in the Jewish community in Israel, and these receive some government support.”
As for how the Palestinians of 48 receive such initiatives, Maarouf believes that “the Palestinians of 48 are among the most understanding of the Israeli mentality and the subtleties and dimensions of the occupation’s proposals to teach the spoken Arabic language to the Jewish community in Israel, and therefore they fully understand that the intention is not to get close to them as much as to try to understand them more. And trying to deal with them, throwing ashes in the eyes at the same time to show that this country is a democracy, and to show that it deals with everyone equally.”
For his part, Mwasi concluded his interview with TRT Arabi, saying: "The issue here is not in the absence of the language of understanding. Almost all the Palestinians of the interior are fluent in the Hebrew language almost as well as the Jews, and about 75% of the residents of the West Bank are also fluent in it, however some support that the Jews learn Arabic, Because we have a different culture and our own history and they don't know anything about it, it's very important that they get to know that and that they know we exist." (Sumaya Al-Koumi (ElkomySomaia) Egyptian journalist)
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