Apartheid

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Learning Hebrew, on the other hand, has become a necessity for Palestinians, not only
for those with Israeli citizenship, who make up a de facto minority amongst their ‘fellow’
Israelis, but also for Palestinians in the Occupied Territories – who are still a corresponding
majority – for reasons of business as well as for short-term survival under the Israeli armed
forces’ orders and guns. Israeli occupation soldiers still arrogantly shout their demands at
Palestinians in Hebrew – routinely. Palestinians, on the other hand, routinely, and defiantly,
reply in Arabic or English. Nonetheless, Palestinian Arabic has started incorporating Hebrew
words, mostly related to the conflict, especially to the elaborate checkpoint rituals. 567
If Arab lawmakers choose to address the Knesset, the Israeli Parliament, in Arabic,
translation for Hebrew-speakers is not provided. Road signs are supposed to be trilingual, in
Hebrew, English and Arabic, but Jewish vandalism has eliminated many signs in Arabic, with
little or nothing being done by authorities to replace them.
Since 2001, the Israeli Transportation Ministry is even in the process of transliterating
Hebrew place names into the other two languages, (with the exception of towns with ‘New
Testament resonance’, such as Nazareth or Acre). This appears especially perverse with
regard to the many towns, villages and other geographic entities, whose Arabic names were
hebraized after 1948. It is a conscious and offensive strategy to make those Palestinians who
were not yet expelled or did not yet flee feel even less at home in their own homes. An
additional, also much-desired effect is that foreign visitors, tourists, geographers, etc., will
forget about or remain unaware of the Arabic origins of the place names and about indigenous
Arab and other kinds of non-Jewish physical, spiritual, cultural, social and economic presence
in the country during the last couple of thousand years. The Palestinians’ own and original
names for their own towns and villages will now be exchanged for slightly different-sounding
and differently written names, only in order to sound less Arabic and more Hebrew. And
through its taxpayers, including many who are themselves underprivileged and exploited
Palestinians, the apartheid state is now financing this scheme.
Palestinians with Israeli citizenship also often complain about time allotted for
programming in Arabic on state broadcasters being insufficient and about the songs in Arabic
that Israeli Arabs want to hear but do not get to hear on Israeli radio, whether public or
private. If music is unable to play an important role in Palestinian compared to South African
resistance, it is perhaps mainly because of a more successful Israeli fragmentation of the
Palestinian community. A law proposal in 2001 would even strip Arabic of its status of still
being an official language of Israel. Its author, ultra-nationalist Michael Kleiner, argues that,
due to massive immigration of Jews from the former Soviet Union, there are now more
Russian-speakers than Arabic-speakers in Israel, and the state cannot afford to have three
official languages. He thereby implies that recent immigrants, who are being given privileges
and rights superior to those of the indigenous inhabitants, also have a more compelling right
to their language becoming official than do the original inhabitants, upon whom the Jewish
state, the Jewish language and Jewish culture was thrust by force. 568
This kind of discrimination also takes on more concrete forms. Palestinians with
Israeli citizenship and others with Arabic as mother language who are employed in
McDonald’s restaurants in Israel are, according to company policy, not to speak to customers
or each other in Arabic. Abeer Zinaty, an ‘Israeli Arab’ employee who had received the
McDonald’s employee award, ‘Excellent Worker 2003’, was fired in early 2004 for speaking
Arabic, (still) an official language in Israel, and the indigenous language during the last
several centuries, on the job. After being bombarded by protest letters from around the world,
and even by criticism from an Israeli parliamentary committee, McDonald’s Israel announced
it would reverse its discriminatory language policy, but it would not rehire or compensate
567
Gershberg: In Peace or War, Few Israelis Learn Arabic, 2001; Johnston: Checkpoint Hebrew Finds Way Into
Palestinian Lexicon, 2004
568
Williams: Israeli Arabs Decry Signs of the Times, 2001; Ben-Zeev: The Deluge and the Ring, 1998: 121-123