In 2018, Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, passed the Basic Law: Israel—The Nation State of the Jewish People. The law has since been widely derided for its discriminatory nature and codification of the ethnic tensions that have characterized Israel since its 1948 inception. It granted the right of self-determination only to Jewish citizens, declared the goal of Jewish settlement a national value, and established Hebrew as the sole national language, reducing Arabic to a “special status” language. The statuses of Hebrew and Arabic are especially pertinent in the context of larger Israeli society: Linguistic divides deepen the segregation that pervades Israeli municipalities and schools.
Language is foundational to social interaction. It dictates, perhaps more than any other facet of everyday life, one’s ability to function within a social network. Entrenched deeply within both Israeli ethnic communities and the Israeli education system is a stark lingual disparity: Hebrew is prioritized over Arabic. Instead of supporting all of its citizens, Israel actively operates against its Arabic-speaking populations by facilitating severely imbalanced cross-language comprehension between them and their Jewish counterparts. Moreover, the onus has been placed on the former group to accommodate and conform to the standards of the latter—resulting in inequitable opportunity, entrenched bias, and media echo chambers that, among the native Hebrew-speaking majority, favor an Israeli nationalist perspective. Israel must reverse the tenets of the 2018 Nation State Law, reinstate Arabic as a national language alongside Hebrew, and fund and mandate the equal education of both languages in all public schools.
One of the starkest examples of systemic discrimination against Arab Israelis is visible in the nation’s education system. About 1.6 million students are enrolled in Israeli primary and secondary schools, but, as of 2016, only 2,000 students total attended joint Jewish-Arab schools. Instead, students overwhelmingly attend homogenous schools with curricula distinctly informed by ethnicity. In schools for Jewish Israelis, classes are in Hebrew; Arab students generally receive their education in Arabic. While learning Arabic is not mandatory for Jewish Israeli students, for Arab students, learning Hebrew is now required. The resulting disparity in language proficiency is staggering: About 90 percent of Arab citizens are fluent or near-fluent in Hebrew, compared to a meager 6 percent of Israeli Jews who speak Arabic. In a nation that is roughly 74 percent Jewish and 21 percent Arab—excluding the approximately 5 million Arabic-speaking Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank—these statistics indicate an undeniably two-tiered language system.
The composition of Israeli municipalities also reflects both the state’s and the major ethnic groups’ antipathy toward facilitating cross-cultural relations and ethnolinguistic equality. Despite the substantial size of Israel’s Arab population, ethnically integrated municipalities are remarkably uncommon. A mixed city in Israel is characterized by minority Arab enclaves within a majority Jewish municipality. As it stands, there are only eight mixed cities in total—or seven excluding Jerusalem, where the Arab population primarily lives in annexed East Jerusalem and is excluded from Israeli citizenship. Moreover, only 10 percent of Israel’s Arab citizens live in these eight mixed cities. The remainder of the 134 recognized Arab municipalities in Israel are not mixed. Similarly, the majority of the nation’s Jewish population lives in predominantly Jewish cities. Unsurprisingly, in Jewish cities, people speak Hebrew, and in Arab cities, they speak Arabic. Visual markers of this linguistic difference pervade the city: In Jewish and mixed cities, the names of stores are written primarily in Hebrew, often with an Arabic inscription underneath, while the opposite is true in Arab cities. Street names and signs display a similar pattern.
The stark separation of Jews and Arabs and the attendant inequality between Hebrew and Arabic have caused ethnic fracture and deepened ethnic resentment. Changes to Israeli domestic law regarding language could reverse these trends by facilitating understanding between Jews and Arabs.
Such understanding has been sorely lacking even at the best of times, but the need for cross-cultural comprehension has been sharpened by the war in Gaza. Since the beginning of the war, Hebrew-language Israeli outlets have been near-uniformly pro-Israel. Even liberal Israeli publications such as Haaretz have focused almost exclusively on the trauma of October 7 and the return of the Israeli hostages. Mainstream Hebrew-language media often ignores the atrocities in Gaza and does not include the perspectives of Gazans; most allusions to these perspectives are oblique appendages to an Israel-centered narrative. If Israeli Jews’ Arabic language comprehension were better, the likelihood of Jewish engagement with Arabic reporting would be far higher. Such exposure could engender a greater understanding of Israel’s war crimes and potentially soften hardline stances on the war which, in domestic Hebrew media, are largely framed as an appropriate and vital response to the events of October 7.
Indeed, Arab citizens within Israel are overwhelmingly opposed to the nation’s military actions in Gaza. While their ethnic ties to Gazans no doubt contribute to this sentiment, it is bolstered and informed both by their own systemically enforced abjection within Israel and the widespread consumption of Arabic-language media. While it is too late for voting-age Israelis to receive adequate Arabic language instruction during this war, the one-sidedness of domestic Hebrew-language coverage of the war demonstrates the necessity of bolstering Arabic instruction for future generations.
Some might argue that the emergence of a dominant language under a unified government is necessary and inevitable. The United States, for instance, has a significant number of native Spanish speakers—12.5 percent of the population—but conducts federal proceedings only in English and mandates that English be taught in public primary and secondary schools. It does not mandate Spanish language education. Many more countries across the world have adopted similar systems to manage multilingual populations. So why, given these similarities, should Israel receive criticisms from which others appear exempt?
The difference stems from Israel’s unique situation—in particular, from the recency and character of the nation’s establishment. In what is described in Arabic as the Nakba, or the “catastrophe,” the 1948 formation of Israel violently displaced around 800,000 Palestinians, some internally and others into surrounding countries and occupied territories. About 60,000 people in Israel today were born in 1948; in other words, living memory recalls a time when Hebrew did not reign. To now require all citizens to learn only Hebrew while leaving Arabic by the wayside represents a slap in the face to Israel’s already second-class Arab population. While a single national language is conducive to establishing equal rights and opportunity under one government, enforcing the domination of a language not natively spoken by a significant proportion of the population generates inequity and erodes culture.
Jewish-Arab and Israeli-Palestinian relations remain fraught, but a clear path lies before Israel regarding its attitude toward language: It must end the Nation State Law’s degradation of Arabic and actively prioritize the learning of Arabic for its entire Jewish population. Segregation will self-perpetuate for as long as the status of language continues to represent ethnic hierarchy. The ability of Israeli Jews to sympathize with Arabic-speaking fellow citizens and with residents of Gaza and the West Bank only stands to benefit from improved Arabic language ability. Arab citizens would recognize an increased level of respect and equitable opportunity with the reinstatement of Arabic as an official language in what is as much their homeland as Israel is for its Jewish population.