Language:
English
Year of publication:
2011
Titel der Quelle:
Israel Studies in Language and Society
Angaben zur Quelle:
4,1 (2011) 116-98
Keywords:
Arabic language Social aspects
;
Language and languages Political aspects
;
Palestinian Arabs Languages
;
Bilingualism
;
Jewish-Arab relations
Abstract:
This paper examines the socio-political role assigned to Arabic in four position paperspublished by Arab-Palestinian institutions in Israel and widely known as the Future Visiondocuments. Proposing a blueprint for conceding more power-sharing, recognition, andequality to the Palestinian minority in Israel, the documents call for an end to the linguistichegemony of the Jewish majority. Moreover, the documents explicitly advocate for increasingthe presence and practice of the Arabic language in the public sphere, both instrumentally as ameans for communication and symbolically as an expression of the Palestinians’ cultural andnational identity. The documents, as this article reveals, promote bilingualism as a means tochange the hierarchical and differentiated regime of citizenship, through which the ethnicdominance of the Jewish majority is maintained. More specifically, the documents proposethat the state should adopt bilingualism as the salient characteristic of Israel as a driver to endthe Jewish ethnic hegemony and transform Israel into a binational state. While this paperrecognizes the prospects for change entailed in bilingualism, drawing on insights from theliterature on bilingual education as a tool for conflict resolution, it also argues that theseprospects might remain unrealized, without inducing tangible equality and genuinerecognition in the minority-majority relations.
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