My paper examines the motivations surrounding Arabic study and promotion among Zionists prior to Israeli statehood. As others have made clear, the Zionist discourse around Arabic during the post-1948 period has been most concerned with the Israeli military apparatus. I argue that in the pre-state period, Zionist interest in Arabic stemmed also from a complex of two other internal factors, not contingent in and of themselves upon military conquest but deeply linked to Zionist national ambitions. First, the intensive Zionist construction (“revival”) of Hebrew as a modern language in this period led to a renewed interest in Semitic languages in general and Arabic in particular. Materials from the Hebrew Language Committee, the Hebrew University, and Hebrew schools demonstrate that Arabic, because it was taken as a model for accent and vocabulary, was instrumental in debates about the desired nature of Modern Hebrew. Archival sources also indicate the pedagogical function that was attributed to classical Arabic in imparting to students an understanding of Hebrew grammatical structure, in the way that Latin and Greek were employed in Europe. Discourses about Arabic reflect educators’ uncertainties regarding the merits of a Humanistic education as opposed to a spoken language-based methodology, increasingly prominent in Europe, that implied in this setting a focus on spoken Arabic rather than classical texts and grammatical forms. Second, the socialist orientation of some Zionist parties theoretically required a degree of contact with Arabs and a knowledge of spoken Arabic. On one level, the labor Zionist belief that Arabs could and would come to esteem Zionist efforts led to attempts at meetings between small groups and propaganda efforts within the Arab community, including the newspaper Haqiqat al-'Amr from 1937. On another level, the very desire to establish rapprochement among workers was based on a claimed rejection of bourgeois cosmopolitanism and a return both to Semitic roots and socialist lifestyle. Sources from labor and Kibbutz movements suggest that this rejection of (European) multilingualism in general was consistent with, and in fact paradoxically required, a turn to Arabic study. In surveying a range of archival sources, my aim is to understand the perceived function of Arabic within the complex linguistic system of the Jewish community at the time. As I show, Arabic was both a richly imagined symbolic asset and a multivalent and variously deployed instrument in service of Zionist nation-building.

Arabic and Security in Israel: 1967-1973 The paper will deal with the connection between the teaching of Arabic language in Israeli-Jewish schools and the Israeli security system. This relationship, which existed rather covertly during the British Mandate in Palestine and during the first two decades of the state of Israel, strengthened dramatically following the crucial period of 1967-1973. This period, which is usually analysed in geo-political or sociological parameters, also brought some critical and meaningful transformations within the field of Arabic language in Israel generally, and particularly within the field of Arabic teaching in Jewish schools in Israel. In my paper I will demonstrate the way the 1967 War and 1973 War fundamentally bolstered the connection between Arabic language, which was and is an official language in Israel, and Israeli national security. The military occupation which followed the 1967 War increased the Israeli establishment's need for Arabic-speaking personnel. Also the Israeli military intelligence's failure (proven in the 1973 War) signalled the urgency to improve intelligence capabilities. Both wars brought about a decisive request from the security establishment to increase and improve the teaching of Arabic in Israeli schools, which they hoped would result in better recruitment for the Israeli military intelligence and the military administration. Lastly, a sociological element also needs to be taken into consideration: the above mentioned increased need for Arabic-learners coincided with a decline in the Jewish Arabic-speaking reservoir. The fact that the second generation of Arab-Jews, who immigrated to Israel in the 1950's, did not study Arabic and actually distanced itself from the language, decreased the "natural" reservoir used by the security establishment. This increased the need for an artificial, ad hoc, solution. The paper will stress the effects that these three processes had on the field of Arabic teaching in the Israeli Jewish school system, and the mechanisms and formulas that were created in order to find a solution for this lack of Arabic-speaking-Jews. I will argue that this six-year period rendered Arabic language in Israel to be anything but a normal or official language, with most of the communicative, cultural, spiritual and daily-life associations being erased from it, and with the security elements becoming by far the most dominant. By doing so I believe the paper would shed new light onto one of the unexplored yet most important issues of the Israeli-Arab conflict.

This paper presents findings from an ongoing study of Arabic instruction in Israel, its underlying cognitive processes, and the way these are embedded in the daily reality of sectarian, Zionist domination. The research focuses predominantly on the teaching of Arabic grammar at both the Arabic and Hebrew school streams and at universities. I am concerned in particular with knowledge formation and transmission, teaching and learning styles and seemingly technical curricular choices. The paper presents the results of a systematic comparison of textbooks, curricular documents, and examinations of Arabic in the Jewish and Arab school streams in Israel. The results of the comparative analysis are then interpreted in light of earlier ethnographic and other studies of Arabic instruction. I argue that Jews and Arabs tend to develop different modes of learning Arabic, and that this difference imposes itself on curricular design such that there is no neutral curriculum. Consequently, even the most seemingly technical curricular choices are politically and ideologically loaded. They are guided by implicit ideological and political notions that practitioners have, such as what language is, what the place of Arabic is in the world, who controls Arabic, and so forth. This point becomes particularly poignant at the tertiary level of education. All top-tier universities in Israel are Hebrew-language institutions and (with one partial exception that helps demonstrate the general trend) teach university grammar of Arabic in a way that suits the Arabic learning patterns of graduates of the Jewish schools system. As a result, Arab students tend to be disorientated and alienated by these practices. These implicit alienating aspects of the curriculum come in addition to more visibly sectarian aspects of Arabic instruction, and turn educational encounters in Arabic classes into sites of sectarian and political clashes.