INTRODUCTION
Rumour has it that a new language has emerged: aravrit in Hebrew, al-ʿarabrīya in Arabic, rendered as Arabrew in English. The rumour has spread from news articles to popular culture to social media and to scholarly publications. This mixture of Arabic and Hebrew is supposedly spoken by Palestinian and other Arab citizens of Israel, who make up approximately one fifth of the population of the state, without counting the Occupied Palestinian Territories or the Golan Heights. Most of these native Palestinian Arabic speakers have become bilingual through formal and informal learning of modern Israeli Hebrew in the decades since 1948, when Israel was established as a state and their local social, economic, and political structures were destroyed.
Journalistic, entertainment/cultural, and expert commentators have claimed that the bilingual mixing is the manifestation of an underlying transformation in the political, moral, and psychological characteristics of Palestinians and other Arabs in Israel as opposed to those who are not citizens. Reactions to Arabrew have been various, from lauding it as heralding a new era of integration and coexistence, to condemning it as a form of subversion, conspiracy, and treason. One of the Arabic terms for this code, al-baʿarīya, appears to reference the word for ‘camel dung’, baʿar, by metathesis of al-ʿarabīya ‘Arabic’.
This article offers a double exploration: first, it provides examples of spoken Arabic from fieldwork in 2015 in Israel, showing patterns of use of Hebrew for inter- and intra-sentential codeswitching, and borrowing. These Hebrew uses serve specific communicative objectives such as displaying expertise, credibility, authority, or casual style. Second, following Kroskrity (Reference Kroskrity2000), it reports on and contextualises the metalinguistic commentary surrounding the ‘Arabrew’ question. Several ideologies are at play, both in the pragmatic functions of the Hebrew usage by Palestinians, and in the commentary on that usage, of which nationalism, colonialism, and liberalism are identifiably linked to aspects of the history of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
The method employed in this analysis combines insights of critical discourse analysis and identity-centred contact linguistics (following the advice of Blommaert & Bulcaen Reference Blommaert and Bulcaen2000). It is proposed that while patterns of Hebrew codeswitching and borrowing in Palestinian Arabic do serve pragmatic functions that are, via several articulations involving socioeconomic class and nationality/ethnicity, linked to wider questions of power in Arab-Israeli relations, it does not follow from this that these forms of linguistic innovation constitute a new language variety—as commentators have claimed, which is exposed in the second part of this article—nor that the significance of this variety can be defined by one over-riding abstraction such as peace, danger, and more, which is what the commentators want to see in the contact phenomena. The problem deconstructed here is why these abstractions—the mirage—are so alluring.
PALESTINIANS USING ISRAELI HEBREW: MOSTLY BORROWING AND CODESWITCHING
The material presented in this section was recorded from 10 February 2015 to 17 March 2015 at meetings and rallies held as part of the electoral campaigns of Palestinian candidates to the Israeli parliament. The fieldwork generated twenty-six recordings (totalling thirty-two hours) of seventeen Arabic-speaking candidates and their numerous supporters, critics, and aides in different situations including office meetings, house-to-house visits, street leafleting, public rallies, and town hall debates, ranging in geography from the Galilee to the Naqab/Negev. With the exception of three meetings, the events recorded were open to the public, and as the researcher, I participated in these after having notified the candidate or his/her aides of the reason for my presence. At the three closed meetings to which I was invited I sought consent from all participants after introducing myself and the research.
The Arabic speech data was analysed for traces of Hebrew, of which samples are presented below. While most of the occasions and situations evidenced some Hebrew presence in the Palestinian Arabic speech, some of the situations yielded no Hebrew usage at all; these differences were not patterned according to different interlocutor contexts, such as large or small groups, supportive or challenging audiences, formality of the occasion, presence of media, nor to the sex or political affiliation of the candidates (who ranged from centre-left ‘Labour’, to Palestinian and Arab nationalists, Islamists, and Communists). The types of Hebrew usage recorded varied in their forms and functions, and cannot be analysed quantitatively without losing sight of the contextual and ideological connections that are under examination.
The transcriptions follow the norms of academic Semitic orthography (as advised by the Journal of Semitic Studies among others), thus the IPA glottal stop /ʔ/ is transcribed ʾ, the Arabic voiced pharyngeal approximant /ʕ/ is ʿ, the voiceless pharyngeal fricative /ħ/ is ḥ, and the voiceless velar fricative /x/ is transcribed ḫ. Hebrew is in italics both in the transcriptions and their glosses.
The inclusion of fifteen examples of speech in the first section of the article roots the discussion of ideologies that follows in the second section in material grounds. The examples, which illustrate recognisable patterns of pragmatic functions, set empirical constraints on commentators’ claims of the rise of ‘Arabrew’, and makes the versatility of Hebrew codeswitching and borrowing evident through the explicit contextualisations that reference power dynamics in Israel/Palestine. They do debunk claims that there is one overarching reason for these uses of Hebrew by Palestinians.
TAGS AND DISCOURSE MARKERS
Besēder
The utterance in (1a) is an aside spoken on a mobile phone in the course of an interview.
(1)
a. ya ḥabīb-i aḥki maʿ-ak kamān šweyy… ana maʿ šabāb… kamān ši sitt daʾāyeʾ
sabʿa daʾāyeʾ akūn bi s-sayyāra, baḥki maʿ-ak (.) besēder
‘mate I'll talk to you in a bit… I'm with some people… in about six minutes seven minutes I'll be in the car, I'll talk to you (.) alright’
b. minṣuff hōn u minrūḥ ʿa l-matʿam (.) besēder?
‘we'll park here and go to the restaurant (.) alright?’ (Hawker Reference Hawker2013:82)
In (1a), besēder ‘alright’, voiced in a neutral tone, had the directive function of ending the telephone conversation and thus allowing the return to the interview. Besēder has been attested in similar situations in the West Bank of the Occupied Palestinian Territories as a tag with rising tone, as shown in (1b).
The pragmatic functions of the embedded Hebrew items, identified for the fifteen speech samples presented in this section of the article, are based on concrete applications of a Hallidayan analysis of interpersonal, textual, and ideational macro (or meta) functions (Halliday Reference Halliday and Lyons1970:143). Since the phenomenon to be explained is a result of language contact, the semantic options that the items are implicitly contrasted with are, at least in part, available Arabic (approximate) equivalents (Butler Reference Butler1985:60). In the case of example (1a), the Arabic equivalent ṭayyib ‘alright’ could have had the directional function of concluding the interactional turn, but would not have matched the connotations of familiarity of besēder—a familiarity, together with the term of address ḥabīb-i ‘my friend, mate’, that mitigates the impoliteness of abruptly ending the conversation. In functional terms, besēder fulfils the interpersonal function of creating a relationship of familiarity with the unseen interlocutor and thus softening the blow of cutting the phone call short, the textual function of demonstrating a type of access to Hebrew, namely to informal registers, and the ideational function of conveying a casual and positive—‘alright’—conclusion to the conversation. There is not the space in this article to perform a detailed functional analysis of each example, though it is expanded on elsewhere (Hawker Reference Hawker2019).
Dafka
The Israeli Hebrew word dafka does not have a one-word translation in English—some of its meanings can be rendered in German as gerade, in French as justement, in Czech as zrovna—and neither does it in spoken Palestinian Arabic, though there are circumlocutions such as bi ḏ-ḏāt ‘especially, (in) particular’ in formal registers of Arabic.
(2)
a. dafka ʾiši bi ǧāmiʿet-kum
‘that's something specific to your university’
b. ḫsāra inno mriḍti dafka l-yōm
‘pity that you have fallen ill today of all days’ (Hawker Reference Hawker2013:84)
The purpose of dafka in (2a) is to express an attitude to the ‘something’ under discussion (racism) by portraying it as exceptional and restricted to one place (a university in Israel). Dafka has also been attested in the West Bank, as in example (2b) where it is used to emphasise the focus of the information.
Discourse markers are easy to adopt and spread across languages, as dafka does also into the English spoken by some Jewish communities in the US (Benor Reference Benor2010:164), because they require little if any integration in the new linguistic context. Separation of tags such as besēder from the clause by an audible pause, noted as (.), might be a component of their adoption for these purposes.
Hesitation disfluencies
Hesitation disfluencies are subject to sociolinguistic variation as are other aspects of speech. In spoken Israeli Hebrew, filled pauses are produced as /e/ (Silber-Varod, Weiss, & Amir Reference Silber-Varod, Weiss and Amir2015), while in the Arabic of the Eastern Mediterranean region they are generally (based on limited evidence) produced as /a/ (Maamouri, Bies, Gaddeche, Krouna, & Toub Reference Maamouri, Bies, Gaddeche, Krouna and Toub2009).
(3) ana bawaṣṣil suʾāl ilkum bi šekel ʿāmm bas bi šekel ḫāṣṣ la l-ē (.) ʾustāz [redacted]
‘I'm relaying this question to all of you in general but in particular to the erm (.) Mr [redacted]’
The speaker went on to convey a complex question in seven clauses, in a semi-formal register of Bedouin Palestinian Arabic, with no suggestion of Israeli Hebrew elements apart from the single instance of hesitation.
Pitʾōōm
In this example, the Hebrew for ‘suddenly’, pitʾom, is used with a lengthened vowel in the last syllable, combined with a rise-fall intonation, to perform a mocking voice that echoes the preceding word il-yōm ‘today’.
(4) kānu yiʿātbū-na (.) inna ʾiḥna minṣawwiṭ la- (.) la- la- lā- (.) [interjection from another speaker: msīḥī] kīf ṣār il-yōōm (.) pitʾōōm
‘they used to rebuke us (.) because we voted for a (.) for for for (.) [interjection from another speaker: a Christian]; how did it happen that todaaay (.) suuuddenly’
In this case, the purpose of using this word, pitʾōōm ‘suuuddenly’, with such an intonation, was to express the attitude of scepticism or sarcasm (towards the politicians’ u-turn in their stated position on voting for Christian candidates). The Arabic equivalent faǧʾa ‘suddenly’) would not have rhymed with il-yōm ‘today’ and does not contain a stressed vowel with which to emphasise the mocking voice, and these textual functions were available to this speaker because of Hebrew contact phenomena.
BORROWING
Borrowed nouns form the bulk of the Hebrew presence in Palestinian Arabic speech. Most of the borrowing in the examples from the fieldwork in Israel constitutes specialist jargon in general, and technical terminology in particular, just as it does in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (Hawker Reference Hawker2013:35–66). Neologisms (or perceived neologisms) are a productive area for lexical borrowing in many languages (see Smeaton Reference Smeaton1973 for Gulf Arabic; Heath Reference Heath1989 for Moroccan) and have been branded as ‘developmental aid for languages which are to a greater or lesser degree referentially inadequate’ (Coulmas Reference Coulmas1992:265). However, this does not account for innovation that occurs continuously within languages to accommodate new concepts, hence the caution in this section in referring to loanwords as instances of what is perceived as ‘new’ and ‘imported’.
It may be argued that some of the examples below constitute codeswitches rather than loanwords, the distinction between which is the matter of an ongoing debate (on which this article does not take a position; see Poplack & Meechan Reference Poplack and Meechan1998; Myers-Scotton Reference Myers-Scotton2002). The linguistic situation of Palestinians and other Arabs who are citizens of Israel, which may not be communally bilingual but where many individuals are highly proficient in both languages, makes the distinction less clear than in monolingual situations (Muysken Reference Muysken2013). For the purpose of this article, borrowing is interesting insofar as it offers a lexical trace of areas of contact that are infused with power relations between Israelis and Palestinians, be it higher education, shopping centres, or the parliament. The use of Hebrew loanwords reflects this contact, but does not self-consciously refer to the power relations. Codeswitching, and in particular metaphorical codeswitching (Blom & Gumperz Reference Blom, Gumperz, Gumperz and Hymes1972:424–25), does invoke the multifarious connotations of the contexts where Israeli Hebrew prevails.
Bursaries
The following clause contains the highest proportion of Israeli Hebrew loanwords of any clause in the corpus of thirty-two hours recorded during the fieldwork: in the single piece of quantification offered for this article, it is calculated that out of the four nouns forming the topic of this speaker's turn in the conversation, three are Hebrew loanwords.
(5) il-milgōt fi l-ǧāmiʿa, bi l-miḫlela, fī milgat mifʾal hapays.
‘the bursaries at the university, at the college, there is the bursary of the National Lottery.’
Though the number of Hebrew loanwords might look proportionally high, the matrix language is Arabic.
Vote contractors
Had the events observed in the fieldwork centred on, for instance, industrial fairs or medicine, the specialist jargon recorded would have revolved around these subjects. As it was, the terminology of the next examples reflects the matters discussed in the campaigns of the 2015 Israeli elections.
(6) bidnāš nkūn kablanei kolot
‘we don't want to be vote contractors’
Ensuring that a certain number of votes went to a particular party through patron-client networks (‘contracting votes’) was a feature of Palestinian voting patterns in Israel (Zureik Reference Zureik1979) that the new Palestinian parties challenged (Pappé Reference Pappé2011).
Electoral threshold
This speaker evidences features of Palestinian rural dialect, for instance [k] in the word bikul-lak ‘say to you’ where an urban dialect speaker would pronounce [ʔ]. He is referring to the amalgamation of four small parties that attract the votes of Palestinian citizens of Israel in response to the raising of the electoral threshold for entering the parliament from 2 to 3.25 percent.
(7) fī nās ʿindna bikul-lak twaḥḥadu liʾanno rafaʿu l-ʾaḥuz ḥasima
‘there are people around who'd say to you that they united because they had raised the electoral threshold’
The placement of the Arabic definite article (i)l- in front of the borrowed compound aḥuz ḥasima (and not between the two compounded nouns as Semitic syntax would have required, generating the hypothetical form *aḥuz il-ḥasima in accordance with the rules for compounds known in Hebrew grammar as smiḫut and in Arabic as iḍāfa), indicates that aḥuz ‘percent’ and ḥasima ‘exclusion’ have not been borrowed separately and subsequently syntactically compounded. From this it can be deduced that the term is borrowed as a one-word portmanteau, which is how it is also sometimes produced in spoken Israeli Hebrew. Phonetically, the borrowing transformed the voiceless velar fricative /x/ of the Israeli Hebrew aḫuz ḫasima to the voiceless pharyngeal fricative /ħ/ in aḥuz ḥasima. This conforms with findings elsewhere on Palestinians in Israel (Cotter & Horesh Reference Cotter and Horesh2015; Henkin Reference Henkin2015) that if phonology is borrowed at all (and in this case it is not), it follows the lexical borrowing, and syntax and system morphemes such as the definite article remain in the matrix language.
Opinion
This is another nominal compound, this time with the meaning of the genitive construct.
(8) fīyo ḥavat daʿat mustašār qānūni (.) btāḫad bi šahir tamāniye
‘It contains an opinion of a legal advisor (.) taken in August’
This example offers the opportunity to speculate on the possible patterns, if not random, of the choice of a Hebrew borrowing over an Arabic equivalent, and vice versa. The Arabic for ‘legal opinion’, istišāra qānūnīya, would have been as accessible to the bilingual speaker as ‘legal advisor’, rendered here in Arabic as mustašār qānūni. Yet, while ‘opinion’ was expressed by borrowing ḥavat daʿat from Israeli Hebrew, mustašār qānūni remained in Arabic. All of these terms are specialist jargon necessary for political speeches, but for Palestinian politicians and commentators in Israel there is additional social or political value in displaying both Israeli Hebrew and Arabic expertise when seeking to win votes and convince discussants, as in examples (5), (6), and (7) above.
Fifth column
This term, gāyis ḥamiši ‘fifth column’, was used in a TV debate on 26 February 2015 by Avigdor Liberman, head of a far-right Jewish party, to collectively describe the position of Arab citizens of Israel (Persico Reference Persico2015). The borrowed instance of gāyis ḥamiši presented here was recorded on 13 March 2015.
(9) ana muš gāyis ḥamiši (.) kāḏib u māḫid maʿ-āy ʿašrīn ṣōṭ, rāyiḥ ʿa likūd minšān aḍubb ṭaṣrīḥ
‘I'm not a fifth column (.) lying and taking twenty votes with me, going to Likud [an Israeli political party] in order to pocket a permit’
The speaker turned Liberman's insinuated meaning of ‘fifth column’ on its head by using it to describe the ‘vote contractors’ of example (6).
INTRA-SENTENTIAL CODESWITCHING
The examples in the corpus point to the pattern of using intra-sentential codeswitching for reporting Israeli Hebrew communications.
Good morning
This speaker described university education, which is not segregated by nationality, as opposed to primary and secondary education.
(10) ana kul yōm baḍḥak-ilhum, u humme biḍḥakū-li, lamma minfūt ʿa ṣ-ṣaff iṣ-ṣubuḥ (.) minqūl ṣabāḥ il- boker tōv boker tōv
‘I smile at them every day, and they smile at me, when we enter the classroom in the morning (.) we say good mor- good morning good morning’
The speaker had started to report the greeting in Arabic, but corrected herself to give the original Hebrew.
At the shopping centre
In this example the speaker is referring to the practice of offering certain benefits only to those who have completed army service, which most Palestinian and other Arab citizens do not participate in (Kanaaneh Reference Kanaaneh2008).
(11) inti lamma btumruʾi bi l-kanyōn u bikūnu mʿalʾīn ʾārma daruš ʿovēdet ʿim nisayon tsvaʾi
‘you when you pass through the shopping centre and they have put up a sign worker wanted with military experience’
‘Shopping centre’, kanyōn, constitutes a loanword here, while ‘worker wanted with military experience’ is a codeswitched phrase quoting an advertisement in Hebrew to give it the credibility of a reportage, like in example (10).
Terrorists
The speaker in this example was quoting Israeli far-right demonstrators who had disrupted a political debate at which Palestinian politicians were present.
(12) mutaṭarrifīn zeyy, zeyy illi kānu yʾūlu-lna meḥablim (.) titsu (.) haḥutsa (.) meḥablim (.) hay il-arḍ miš arḍ-kum (.) meḥablim (.) hay il-arḍ arḍ-na
‘extremists like, like those who were telling us terrorists (.) get (.) out (.) terrorists (.) this land isn't yours (.) terrorists (.) this land is ours’
These quotes were delivered in a stilted monotone, as if the contrast between the content of the expressions and their delivery betokens a dispassionate resignation to the insults the politicians are allegedly accustomed to.
INTER-SENTENTIAL CODESWITCHING
Together with borrowing, inter-sentential codeswitching is the predominant form in which Israeli Hebrew appears in Palestinian speech.
Performing respect
The following example of language alternation displayed skilled bilingualism, or perhaps more accurately, double-monolingual proficiency (Heller Reference Heller, Block and Cameron2002) in high registers of Arabic and Israeli Hebrew. It was typical for situations involving Palestinians and (usually non-Arabic-speaking) Israelis, in which the bilingual Palestinians sometimes positioned themselves as mediators. Here, Palestinian bilingualism can be accurately described as a key to social capital, following Bourdieu & Thompson (Reference Bourdieu and Thompson1991).
(13) hāda l-ižtimāʿ yōkaʿ fi l-balda al-qadīma wa hīya raməz aṣ-ṣumūd wa raməz al-baqāʾ wa raməz aṣ-ṣirāʿ min ažli taḥqīq al-wužūd lana hunā fi hāḏihi al-balda at-tārīḫīya ḏāt al-ʾirṯ al-kabīr (.) nomar štey milim kamuvan be-ʾivrīt lamrot še ha-ʾorāḫat, orāḫat ha-kavod šelanu doveret ʾaravit
‘this meeting is taking place in the Old City which is a symbol of resilience, a symbol of rootedness and a symbol of the struggle to make our existence here a reality in this historical town of great heritage (.) we shall say a couple of words of course in Hebrew even though the guest, our esteemed guest speaks Arabic’
The switch to Hebrew paid polite attention to the needs of the Israeli Hebrew speaker, the ‘guest’, in attendance, and thus invoked power relations both in the immediate situation and in wider society, where the question of who is at home and who is the incomer touches on colonial aspects of Zionism.
Performing disrespect
In this example, the speaker, who was the moderator of a town hall meeting at which all present were Arabs, was trying to re-establish order after an argument had broken out, and was struggling to make himself heard above the shouting.
(14) riǧāʾan (.) ya ǧamāʿa (.) ya iḫwān (.) ya iḫwān (.) ya ǧamāʿa (.) ya ʾustāz (.) laʾ hēk mā rāḥ nkammil (.) riǧāʾan (.) riǧāʾan (.) iḥna mniḥki (.) ʾismaḥli (.) ʾaḫ [redacted] (.) ani kore leḫa sēder paʾam šlišít
‘please (.) gentlemen (.) brothers (.) brothers (.) gentlemen (.) sir (.) no we cannot go on like this (.) please (.) please (.) we are talking (.) allow me (.) brother [redacted] (.) I am calling you to order for the third time’
The moderator parodied, by means of metaphorical codeswitching, the manner of parliamentary speakers at raucous debates. His strategy did achieve compliance with his request for orderly conversational turn-taking by using humour from a shared irreverent repertoire, and thus fulfilled a directive function without offending the arguing interlocutors. Expressing the humour in Hebrew meant that the joke was turned on Israeli parliamentarians rather than anyone present. This example, and examples (3) and (13) above, demonstrate that Hebrew codeswitching is compatible, in certain situations, with high registers and proficient command of educated Arabic. Additionally, the sarcastic or subversive use of Hebrew, also evident in examples (4), (9), and (12), gives the lie to the claim, one of several that are examined below, that using Hebrew is an indication of subservience to Israeli state authority and acceptance of Zionist ideology. The humorous function can be a form of protest (see Caubet Reference Caubet and Rouchdy2002; Hawker Reference Hawker, Manfredi and Tosco2018).
LOAN TRANSLATION
So far, the analysis of the fieldwork recordings has revealed one loan translation that is obscured by the linguistic proximity of Hebrew and Arabic (though there might be more).
Ǧīl
In Arabic, ǧīl means ‘generation’, while in Israeli Hebrew gil means ‘age’ (in the Arabic of the Eastern Mediterranean, ‘age’ is commonly expressed as ʿumər or sinn).
(15) hāda t-tahmīš illi fi l-kādir iš-šebābī illi hūwa min ǧīl tamantaʿš u fōq… illi ʿindi yifqid fīna ṯiqa
‘this marginalisation that's in the youth leadership that's from the age of eighteen and over… the ones who are with me are losing confidence in us’
However, the corpus has not instantiated ‘how old are you?’ as (hypothetically) *qaddēš ǧīl-ak?, which is regarded as unacceptable by native Palestinian Arabic speakers from different regions of Israel and Palestine to whom I have proposed it in place of the regular qaddēš ʿumr-ak?. Consequently, the Palestinian usage of the Hebrew ǧīl introduces a more nuanced vocabulary for age classification into local Arabic, encompassing ʿumər or sinn for specific numerical age, and old age or young age; ǧīl for generation, as in ǧīl al-ḥarb ‘the war generation’; and ǧīl for an age range, as in example (15) where it refers to party members in the age range eighteen and above.
Borrowing and codeswitching: Not ‘hybridisation’
The examples provided above constitute a typical, if not comprehensive, sample of the findings of the fieldwork. They are classified in this article according to the forms of the various language contact phenomena, and analysed for their pragmatic purposes in the contexts in which they are used. What is evident from the data is that the forms are common to many language contact situations (see Thomason & Kaufman Reference Thomason and Kaufman1988) and the pragmatic functions are articulated with ideas of power relations in the contexts where the two languages come into contact. It is to these ideas that we now turn, and to how the ‘Arabrew’ debate provides an outlet for them.
‘ARABREW’ AND ITS IDEOLOGICAL COORDINATES
Because of the armed conflict between Palestinian armed groups and the Israeli military, and related systems of oppression of Palestinian civilians (in their current and historical forms), the mixture implied in the label ‘Arabrew’ presents a challenge to the clear-cut division between the nations (as they are ethnically constructed). Despite this common ground to all of the explanations for ‘Arabrew’ expressed in the past decade or so, the ideologies that inform the explanations are diverse, sometimes incompatible, and self-contradictory (giving the impression of a ‘moral panic’, as is evident in the texts below), but in any case linked to specific understandings of the experience of Palestinian and Israeli history, society, and political economy. The following subsections look at both media and academic descriptions of Arabic-Hebrew contact, some of which refer to each other by citing previous publications and some that seem to have developed in parallel, and communicating various ideologies, labelled for analytical convenience: colonialism (and anticolonialism), liberalism, securitism, conspiracy theories, liberal Zionism, radical democratic politics, purism, and ethnic nationalism. Critical discourse analysis is applied to the descriptions, collected here in an inductive sweep to include all available texts on the topic of ‘Arabrew’, in order to identify their ideological coordinates in the political debate on Palestinian-Israeli relations, which is, in turn, related to the broader material context.
Colonialism
The Arabic Language Academy–Haifa was established in March 2007. Among its aims is to raise the status and standards of Arabic in Israel, including by issuing a bulletin publishing Arabic terminology as a correction to the ‘interference’ of Hebrew in educational settings (Arabic Language Academy 2009, 2013). This academy joined a number of academies for Arabic that explicitly reference the objectives of the Académie Française. The first was founded in Damascus in 1919, followed by similar establishments in Cairo, Amman, Baghdad, Rabat, and more. This proliferation is paradoxical, since each institution's aim is the promotion of a standardised Arabic shared by all Arabs, accompanying the political project of pan-Arabism. However, every newly emancipated Arab government sought to prove its nationalist credentials as it emerged from colonial control that had bequeathed multiple state structures (Versteegh Reference Versteegh2014:226–31).
The Arabic Language Academy in Haifa sponsored the work of Abdelrahman Mare‘i, an excerpt of whose work is presented in the text in (16).
(16) Walla Bseder: Diyukan lašoni šel ha-‘Aravim b-Yisrael [‘Walla bseder: A linguistic portrait of the Arabs in Israel’] (Mare‘i Reference Mare‘i2013:112; my translation)
There are those who speak of ‘linguistic security’, by which is meant, just as the population needs personal security, so does the Arabic language need a secure identity, that will strengthen the social and national cohesion in the Arab community in Israel. This idea is based on the link between identity and nationhood, and the Arabic language is the identity marker of the Arabs. Fishman (1977) determined that language represents the identity of the individual and the collective. Through language the individual identifies with society and participates in its culture. The significance of the language strengthens when the minority feels that its language is threatened or endangered. From here the question is posed: Does the massive lexical penetration of Hebrew in spoken and written Arabic constitute a danger to the essence of the existence of Arabic in Israel?
The words ‘danger’, ‘threat’, and ‘strength’, and the link between language and essentialised identity, are evocative of discourses of endangerment (Heller & Duchêne Reference Heller and Duchêne2007). The Hebrew codeswitching and borrowing in Palestinian Arabic that the author documents in the chapters of the book preceding this quote are described as a ‘massive penetration’ (Mare‘i Reference Mare‘i2013:112), akin to settler-colonial imposition. In the chapters following this quote is an outline of sources of resistance to the ‘penetration’, including the Quran, and inspiration from historical eras when Arabic ‘penetrated’ Hebrew, such as medieval Andalusia. This book's positive reviews in the mainstream news indicates that the linguistic situation of Arabic speakers in Israel commands general interest, seven years after the establishment of the Academy sounded the ‘Arabrew’ alarm (see Ashkenasi Reference Ashkenasi2014).
Liberalism
Later in 2007, a mainstream Israeli TV channel started broadcasting a sitcom series written by Palestinian Sayed Kashua, Avoda Aravit ‘shoddy [lit. Arab] work’. The Arabic dialogues among the Palestinian characters included borrowing from Hebrew and some codeswitching, all with humorous effect. For instance, in season 1, episode 3 when discussing schooling options for their Palestinian daughter, one character suggests (in Hebrew) ḥinuḥ germani ‘German education’. When the other looks blank, he repeats ḥinuḥ germani, adding (in Arabic), miš fāhem ʿarabi? ‘don't you understand Arabic?’. The series won prizes in Israel (Friedman Reference Friedman2013), has been debated in organisations promoting liberal civic values (Israel Democracy Institute 2013), and is presented as material for school civics lessons on identity and belonging (see the Center for Educational Technology (n.d.)).
The main comic strategy is hyperbole, so the series cannot be considered a documentary on real Arabic language practices. Nevertheless, the success of Kashua's writing relies on his proficient bilingualism and highlighting of contact practices as an expression of the complexities of being a Palestinian in Israel. Avoda Aravit brought these linguistic practices to the attention of a wide audience, though the Keshet broadcasting company's executives for the Israeli commercial Channel 2 had been concerned about putting off viewers because of the prevalent Arabic (Efrat Reference Efrat2012). The director Shai Kapon's objection to these qualms was based on the liberal idea that citizens have the right to express themselves in their native language, which is one of the reasons why Arabic is still formally (though seldom practically) an official language of Israel (Deutch Reference Deutch2005).
Securitism
A trickle of articles in mainstream media explaining Palestinian and other Arab citizens’ ‘mixing’ of Hebrew in Arabic to the news-reading public started in 2008. An article titled ‘The B'seder Arabs’, lit. ‘the OK Arabs’ (Stern Reference Stern2008), based on interviews and on journalistic impressions, drew a sharp distinction between those Arabs (citizens of Israel) who speak ‘Arabrew’, one of the markers of which is the borrowing besēder meaning ‘OK; alright’ (see example (1) above), and the other Arabs, those beyond Israel's borders, who by implication are not quite ‘OK’.
The ‘OK’ also echoes the trope of the subservient ‘good Arab’, and in particular one who cooperates with Israel's security apparatus including the intelligence services, as researched in historian Hillel Cohen's (Reference Cohen and Watzman2006; published in English in 2011) study of Arab agents of the state security forces, Aravim tovim ‘Good Arabs’. The Palestinian nationalists’ perspective, expressed in the goal of linguistic purism espoused by the Arabic Language Academy, sees that contact with Israel has somehow created both the ‘good Arabs’ and ‘Arabrew’. It is against the causal linking of those two elements that Palestinian and other Arab citizens of Israel defend themselves. One way of mounting this defence is by turning the tables on the Israeli state, as formulated by Roni Henkin in the text in (17).
(17) Hebrew and Arabic in asymmetric contact in Israel (Henkin-Roitfarb Reference Henkin-Roitfarb2011:91)
In an outgroup context, vis-à-vis the [Hebrew]-speaking majority, codeswitching serves to determine social borders and express the minority's feelings of ethnic pride and superiority reflecting the subjective idea that, ‘We can infiltrate your borders because we speak your language, whereas you cannot infiltrate ours.’ The availability of choice to codeswitch or not is in itself associated with a feeling of national identity and ethnic pride.
The security-related words are: infiltrate and borders. The ‘borders’ are ethnonational, and conducting a raid across them, even linguistically, is a proud act of national resistance. The state-security dimension of learning Arabic and Hebrew is an inescapable factor in the region, whether manifested in the motivation of a few Jewish Israeli army conscripts learning Arabic (Mendel Reference Mendel2014), teaching Hebrew in the Gaza Strip, Palestinian prisoners learning Hebrew (Ḥamdūna Reference Ḥamdūna2010; Shafei Reference Shafei2015), or simply a reflection of the power relations, of which security control is a component (Hever Reference Hever2010). One of the suggested tactics of control is ‘divide and rule’ (see Zureik Reference Zureik1979), which the pan-Arab nationalists warned against, favouring the ‘unifying’ Modern Standard Arabic rather than granting national status to ‘divisive’ spoken dialects (Miller Reference Miller, Usuki and Kato2003:3). ‘Arabrew’ divides the Arabs further by supposedly sub-dividing the Palestinians. This is also the context within which we must consider (16) above, and bear in mind the political consequences of labelling Palestinian and other Arab citizens of Israel a ‘fifth column’ (see example (9) above), indexed by ‘Arabrew’.
The salience of security concerns in Israel marks an ideology, which is now global, that places military/security concerns at the forefront of any political decision (Kimmerling Reference Kimmerling2001; Fairclough Reference Fairclough2006:147). Securitism of this type is not impossible to shoehorn onto a version of liberalism with traction in Israel. This ideology considers the parliamentary electoral system that is the basis for Israel's self-definition as a democracy to be a tool for security in the sense of ‘keeping the peace’ among citizens who would otherwise be driven apart by divisive forces. It is consistent with this ideology to praise the successful containment of the Palestinian and Arab minority in the ‘pluralist’ system (Peled Reference Peled1992).
Conspiracy theories
Soon other Arabs discovered ‘Arabrew’ (see also Al-Khatib Reference Al-Khatib2012). Al-Arabiya online news (based in Dubai) ran an article on 9 June 2009 with the self-explanatory title Al-baʿarīya: Luġa haǧīna min al-ʿarabīya wa l-ʿibrīya yarfuḍuhā falisṭinīyū 48; ʾaqalīya tataḥaddaṯuhā wasṭa istimrāri l-ʾasrala wa l-ʿabrana ‘Arabrew: A hybrid language of Arabic and Hebrew rejected by the Palestinians of 1948; a minority speaks it amidst continuing Israelisation and Hebraisation’ (Zidani Reference Zidani2009). On the same day, this was picked up by a blogger called Elder of Ziyon, who commented sarcastically: ‘The latest Zionist assault on Arabs: B'Seder’ (Elder of Ziyon 2009). In July 2009, while the Gaza Strip was still reeling from the Israeli forces’ Operation Cast Lead, which had destroyed neighbourhoods and killed hundreds of civilians, the Gaza-based Donia al-Watan published al-iḥtilāl yuḥāwilu našr luġata l-baʿarīya fī siyāqi t-tahwīd, ‘The occupation attempts to spread the ‘Arabrew’ language in the context of Judaisation’ (Ibrahim Reference Ibrahim2009). In these al-baʿarīya ‘camel-dung-ese’ conspiracy theories (and the mocking of them) we find another version of the defence against accusations of national treason. Conspiracy removes the blame from the Palestinian and other Arab speakers of ‘Arabrew’ and places it on the Israeli machinators, who hold power over Palestinians in so many (not least military) ways that the perception of their power can be extended to processes (some of them linguistic) that bear no relation to actual practices of control. In any case, whether deliberately treasonous or the result of a conspiracy against them, speakers of ‘Arabrew’ are spewing a colonial aberration (as the nationalists would see it).
Liberal Zionism
The idea in its less securitised form is that bilingualism and mixing is a marker of integration in, and identification with, Israeli society. This posits Israel as a pluralist, multilingual society, in which Arabic is one of several minority languages (for research in this vein, see the work of Eliezer Ben-Rafael (e.g. Reference Ben-Rafael1994) and Bernard Spolsky (e.g. Reference Spolsky1991)). This position confines the national identity and its indexical language to a private, personal sphere without implications for public, political organisation, as evidenced in the demarcation of ‘double identity’ drawn in the text in (18).
(18) The construction of identity in a divided Palestinian village: Sociolinguistic evidence (Amara & Spolsky Reference Amara, Spolsky and Suleiman1996:81–82)
For Israeli Arabs, the principal source of modernisation and urbanisation is Israeli society. At the same time, Palestinisation represents their desire for preserving their identity. While rapprochement with Israeli society has given them the chance to achieve their ambitions as citizens with equal rights, acculturation to their fellow Palestinians satisfies their aspirations for national identity and cultural uniqueness. The sociolinguistic study of a divided Palestinian village has given us the chance to look at empirical evidence of this growing double identity.
The demarcation opposes ‘national identity’ and ‘culture’ (Palestinian) to ‘society’, ‘citizens’, and ‘rights’ (Israeli). The sociolinguistic study that follows this introduction shows that this opposition is fused in the practices of codeswitching and borrowing among Palestinians in Bart‘a on the Israeli side of the border with the West Bank (see also Amara Reference Amara1999). However, the association of the liberal project (‘society’, ‘citizens’, ‘rights’) with ‘modernisation’, ‘urbanisation’, ‘ambitions’, and ‘equal[ity]’ indicates a propensity of the liberal argument for changing into something different, premised on the idea that Israel brought modernity to the Palestinians. This is expressed in blogger Philologos’ commentary on the ‘The B'seder Arabs’ article mentioned above. Philologos’ column published on the opinion site Forward, ‘Israeli Arabs and Hebrew’ (Philologos 2008), claims that Palestinian and other Arab citizens in Israel are losing their ability to speak Arabic due to mixing with Hebrew. In a later column, it becomes clear that this is a desirable outcome from Philologos’ point of view, because linguistic unity would ‘forge a common Israeli identity’ which would work for everybody (Philologos 2014). This political view considers Zionist domination over Palestine to be advantageous to the Arabs because it brought them the benefits of modernity (Efron Reference Efron2011). The nation-state, the vehicle of this modernity (see Chatterjee Reference Chatterjee1986:5), found national minorities to constitute a problem (Butler & Spivak Reference Butler and Spivak2007) that could be resolved by their adaptation to a standardised majority language. The Orientalist idea of the ‘OK Arabs’ who comply with, and even appreciate, the ‘gift’ of modernity imposed upon them, is another component of the ‘Arabrew’ debate. A text that expresses the Zionist position in the debate is Dan Ben-Amotz's collection of anecdotes Sipurei Abu-Nimer, an excerpt of which is presented in the text in (19).
(19) Sipurei Abu-Nimer: La-anašim še-lo mefinim ʿArabit u-lo makirim tof al-ʿArabim [‘The Stories of Abu-Nimer: For beoble [sic] who don't underistand [sic] Arabic u [sic] don't know al-Arabs [sic] well’] (Ben-Amotz Reference Ben-Amotz1982:153; my translation)
Call this Arabic Hebrew, call this Abu-Nimerish, call this whatever you want. This is how he speaks, this is how in my opinion most of ‘our Arabs’ speak, construction workers, service workers, craftsmen, everyone who learnt Hebrew informally… Abu Nimer's language is no less important than his stories. My contribution consists of—if you will pardon the terrible word—recording the existence of Hebrew-Arabic.
The phonetic distortions and Arabic morphemic insertions in the Hebrew of the title are Dan Ben-Amotz's caricature, not a linguistic record of how anyone actually spoke. However, he makes a claim to authenticity in this introduction (see Lacoste, Leimgruber, & Breyer Reference Lacoste, Leimgruber and Breyer2014), which is part of a broader Zionist objective that regards the indigenous Arabs, who have an automatic, ‘pre-modern’, connection to the land of Palestine, to be a source of indigeneity that the Zionist settlers wanted to appropriate to some degree, without becoming Arab (Levy Reference Levy2013). ‘Recording’ a fictitious Arab, Abu Nimer, is a way of putting him in modernity's framework, but at a lower order (‘Oriental’; see Khazzoom Reference Khazzoom2003) at which one speaks the ‘terrible’ Hebrew-Arabic. But this scheme only works on ‘our Arabs’. This expression captures both the relation of power (Israeli possession) and the distinction from other Arabs (going back to the ‘OK/not OK’ characteristics); and ‘our Arabs’ are also described as—implicitly, more ‘authentic’—manual labourers.
Radical democratic politics
The attribution of ‘Arabrew’ to manual labourers introduces economic processes into the maze of ideologies surrounding this language contact setting. Class prejudice, it can be argued, is a clue to answering the question of why the ‘Arabrew’ debate has come to the forefront in the last decade, at the same time as some Palestinian and other Arab citizens of Israel have become successful participants in the neoliberal political economy, developed in Israel since the 1980s. A rising (limited) middle class and the ideological hegemony, throughout all strata of society, of consumerism, have been correlates of the embourgeoisement of Palestinian society (Saar Reference Saar, Carmeli and Applbaum2004), without carrying the baggage of the subservient ‘good Arab’ implicated in securitism, or accepting the degrading ‘authenticity’ of being ‘Israel's labourer’. ‘Arabrew’ did not trigger ‘moral panic’ when it was perceived to be the jargon of construction workers, whose technical terms form the bulk of Mare‘i's lexicon at the back of Walla Bseder (Reference Mare‘i2013:177–254). However, when ‘Arabrew’ is depicted as being used by middle-class professionals (not necessarily as any recorded spontaneous linguistic practices, but as referenced in an authored text such as Avoda Aravit), then reactions are strong.
Another successful Palestinian screen creation, a crime thriller set in a deprived neighbourhood of Jaffa, was the film Ajami released in May 2009, also containing Hebrew borrowing and codeswitching in Arabic. Political liberalism allowed the space—the relative independence of the media industry, Arabic as an official language—that gave the creators of Avoda Aravit and Ajami the opportunity to (entertainingly) depict the discrimination, deprivation, and alienation that Palestinian citizens in Israel experience, as well as their failures to redress these. When Ajami was nominated for the Oscars, one of the creators, Scandar Copti, stated that he was not representing Israel. He thus revealed his personal resolution of the problem of Palestinian expression in Israel—belonging in Israel, but not representing it or being represented by it—and caused ‘outrage’ to Jewish Israeli liberals (see Saranga Reference Saranga2010). Inside the liberal space, the middle-class project of educational and self-critical rights-based activism for political change, aimed at an entertainment-savvy audience that applauds it in Israel and abroad, even as it speaks—in Arabic with Hebrew borrowing and codeswitching—for the most discriminated against, deprived, and alienated, is linked to radical democratic politics (see Nicholson & Seidman Reference Nicholson and Seidman1995:326; Svirsky Reference Svirsky2012:148). The proposition of this section is that this relatively new voice is articulated with the concern with ‘Arabrew’ (not with the speaking of any new variety of Arabic), and it is also articulated with the self-confidence of the Palestinian middle class in Israel. In academic circles, these developments are manifest in the prominence of the colonial framework of analysis of Israeli history to which Palestinian academics—who are necessarily proficient in high registers of both languages—are contributing (see the work of Asad Ghanayem, Mansour Nsasra, Nadim Rouhana; see also Salamanca, Qato, Rabie, & Samour Reference Salamanca, Qato, Rabie and Samour2012). The success of a few Palestinian academics from Israel is a product of the growth of the professional middle class (which is a cultural concept rather than a materialist description, since the economic position of many academics is in the precariat; Standing Reference Standing2011). The rise of the Palestinian middle class is also seen in the employment concerns of Palestinian and other Arab graduates in Israel (Svetlova Reference Svetlova2008), and in the publicity around the case of a Palestinian couple willing to go up to the Supreme Court in their campaign to live in a gated community in the Galilee (Adalah 2011). The ideological importance of human rights organisations in Israel can be estimated by the vociferousness of the attacks against them (B'Tselem 2011).
These developments are far from a tidal wave, they are a ripple; and they are perhaps facing a counter-storm in the shape of an antidemocratic, ethnonationalist, and religious resurgence. On the political stage, they can be identified in the attention paid to the formation in early 2015 of a coalition of parties that attract Palestinian votes in parliamentary elections, the Joint List, whose candidates were among those recorded in the fieldwork presented in the first section of this article, and which sometimes gives explicit voice to radical democratic politics. Ilan Pappé expressed this voice by ascribing radical democratic activism to ‘Arabrew’ (the existence of which he accepts wholesale) itself, as evidenced in the text in (20).
(20) The forgotten Palestinians: A history of the Palestinians in Israel (Pappé Reference Pappé2011:275)
There are two forces at work in 2010. One is Arabrabiya [sic], … a distinct Palestinian Israeli dialect of Arabic intertwined with Hebrew words; it is a functional language spoken between members of the community. It broadcasts a clear message to the Jewish majority and the state: we are, so far, the only Palestinian group that knows you well, accepts your presence in our homeland as an ethnic group and wishes to share life with you despite everything that your state and movement has done to us.
The other force is the language of demographic danger…
The agency attributed to ‘Arabrew’ is recognised in the words: force, broadcast, clear message. Here we have a different take on the ‘we infiltrate your borders’ metaphor, as in (17): no longer a ‘fifth column’, the basis for the proposition is assertive, educated, self-aware, activism ‘wish[ing]’ for ‘shared’ citizenship (which has not yet been obtained, as opposed to the text in (18)). This is the project, which I label middle-class, that Pappé shares with the creators of Avoda Aravit and Ajami, and with other radical democrats in Israel. As we have seen, it is but one ideological reading of ‘Arabrew’, but it is the one that comes closest to explaining why ‘Arabrew’ has become a debate recently. However, it is also suggested in (20) that radical democratic politics does not have the upper hand in Israel's ideological space, and that we must pick up on Pappé’s warning of another force, ‘demographic danger’.
Purism and ethnic nationalism
The journalistic sources listed in this article rely on interviews with sociolinguist Muhammad Amara, a Palestinian scholar who has written on Arabic-Hebrew borrowing and codeswitching (Amara & Spolsky Reference Amara, Spolsky and Suleiman1996; Amara Reference Amara1999; see (18) above). He intervened in the debate by publishing an article on Arabic-language news site Bokra entitled Al-ʿarabrīya fī afwāh al-falisṭinīyīn fī isrāʾīl wa isqāṭātuhā ʿala l-huwīya, ‘“Arabrew” in the mouths of the Palestinians in Israel and its implications for identity’ (Amara Reference Amara2012). Amara places the effects of Hebrew on Arabic in the context of international relations of power, drawing parallels with French in North Africa and English in the globalised world. In an article written in Modern Standard Arabic without any French, English, or Hebrew word inserted, on a local website with more than 23,000 visitors per day,Footnote 1 he apparently attempted to reassure the news-reading public: ‘the Palestinian Arabs will probably not lose their Arabic language, but “Arabrew”, which is a hybrid language, will be a prominent feature of our linguistic inventory’. Calm was not restored: in December 2015, at a conference on Arabic in Doha (Qatar), one of the contributors stated that ‘there is a noted deterioration in Arabic standards and Hebraisation which is considered to be “a catastrophe for the language”, one of the tools of “a catastrophe for the people”’, using a poignant word for ‘catastrophe’, an-nakba, which references the expulsions and dispossession of Palestinians in 1947–1952 (Al-Arabi al-jadid Reference Al-Arabi al-jadid2015; all translations mine).
These anxieties about language need to be contextualised in a situation where Palestinian and other Arab educators in Israel have little input in the curriculum taught at state schools attended by Arabic-speaking children (Abu Saad Reference Abu Saad2006; Amara Reference Amara2007), where there are no Arabic-medium university courses (Nohad Reference Nohad2013), and where Hebrew disproportionately dominates (however measured and compared) the linguistic landscape (Suleiman Reference Suleiman2004; Ben-Rafael, Shohamy, Amara, & Trumper-Hecht Reference Ben-Rafael2006; Isleem Reference Isleem2013). Mare‘i and Amara (and others) express a longing for language standardisation and purism, which is a component of ethnic nationalism (Milroy & Milroy Reference Milroy and Milroy1985) while documenting deviations perpetrated by younger generations, as they would see it, from that ideal. The recognition of this ideal was never achieved in Israel and so, from a nationalist perspective, it is inconceivable to move beyond it to post-identity politics, linked to post-colonialism (McClintock Reference McClintock1992), represented by the supposed hybridity of ‘Arabrew’.
Purism has traction in Israel also in other forms: the portrayal of Palestinian and other Arab citizens as a demographic threat (for expression of this, see Abraham Reference Abraham2015; for analysis, see Rouhana & Fiske Reference Rouhana and Fiske1995), and the absence of Jewish Israeli-Palestinian Arab ‘intermarriage’ (which, if it were to be a widespread occurrence, would be a potential source of actual language mixing of a sort that might hypothetically be accurately termed ‘Arabrew’). A 2014 film, Arabani, pejoratively referencing ‘Arabrew’ in its title, features the breakdown of a Jewish-Arab marriage. In 2015, the Minister of Education banned a novel tackling ‘mixed’ romance from the school curriculum, a decision challenged by human rights lawyers (ACRI 2015).
Linguistic purism, associated with European projects of state formation, and recursively projected onto other levels (Gal & Irvine Reference Gal and Irvine2000) by nationalist movements in many places, has consequences, here, for the ‘Arabrew’ debate. It allows us to see that ‘one nation – one language’ purism is the normative aspiration underlying all of the ideological approaches to ‘Arabrew’. It also shows that the mirror image of the Palestinian (or Arab) nationalist concern with ‘Arabrew’ is not any concern Israeli ethnic nationalists could currently have with borrowings from Arabic into Hebrew, but do not, because Arabic words in Hebrew are generally identified with vulgarisms and slang (Masson Reference Masson1986) of no consequence for the national, moral, security, or political self-image of Hebrew-speakers. The mirror image is the Israeli purists’ concern with the ‘demographic threat’. The rising, professional, bilingual Palestinian middle class—who do not resemble ‘our Arabs’ speaking broken Hebrew (see (19))—are a challenge to the existing paradigms because they can use liberalism, until now contained, to demand, for instance, the right to move into Jewish Israeli neighbourhoods (Sadeh Reference Sadeh2015), and radically stretch the campaign for equality. While the Arab nationalists are concerned with the ‘impurity’ of the language side of the ‘one nation – one language’ equation, the Jewish Israeli purists (and others) are concerned with the ‘contamination’ of the nation side.
The liberalism of human rights, pitted against the purism of ethnic nationalism, is again linguistically manifested in the 2015 initiative to create a combination of Arabic and Hebrew in the form of Arabrew: Can new typeface create Arab-Jewish equality in Israel? (Zandberg Reference Zandberg2015). From conspiracy theories warning of camel-dung-language to civic equality bringing peaceful integration, these are heavy burdens for a bit of borrowing and codeswitching to carry.
Besēder
Combining the insights of language ideologies and ethnographic linguistics may reveal how besēder ‘alright’ functions as the iconic loanword of the ‘Arabrew’ debate. The connotations of besēder are ‘cooperative’ and ‘positive’, and so it articulates with liberal Zionism and the happy picture of pluralist (though contained, securitised) coexistence. In unequal power settings, such as that of the worker answering to the boss, or of a service provider to a demanding client, besēder signifies compliance with authority, articulated with Orientalism and modernisation of the colonial type. Another aspect relates to consumerism's never-satisfied aspiration to a lifestyle marked by the consumption of status-laden products, some of them corresponding to Israeli Hebrew as social capital (Bourdieu & Thompson Reference Bourdieu and Thompson1991; Baudrillard Reference Baudrillard1998). Borrowing besēder as a casual discourse marker is a substitute for spending limited disposable income on actual consumer products, and still indexes consumerist social capital. Finally, when social goods are privatised and individualised, it allows for placing the responsibility for security, including so-called ‘linguistic security’ (see (16)), in the hands (or mouths) of individuals, even if all they do is sigh: ē… besēder.
CONCLUSION: PALESTINIANS AND OTHER ARABS INSIDE ISRAEL CANNOT ‘SIMPLY’ SPEAK
The empirical data does not support the claim that a new linguistic variety has come into being; rather, the evidence suggests that Palestinian Arabic borrowing from and codeswitching with Hebrew is limited by specific forms and pragmatic functions. Regardless of the empirical evidence, the mirage of ‘Arabrew’ shifts shape depending on the beholder's ideology concerning difficult nonlinguistic questions faced by Palestinians and other Arabs in Israel.
Radical democrats are calling the bluff on the contradictory combination of liberalism, securitism, and Zionism, are taking Israel's claim to be a citizens’ democracy as a goal rather than an achievement, and are using their bilingualism and command of the rules of language contact practices that come with it to index a nuanced and complex middle-class and aspirational Palestinian identity, to express humour and demand equal rights without being ‘contained, good’ Arabs. This is what instigated the ‘Arabrew’ debate, and I am arguing that it is in articulation with a particular combination of socioeconomic class and nationality/ethnicity (Hall Reference Hall, Baker, Diawara and Lindeborg1996). What all of these ideologies—colonialism and anticolonialism, liberalism, securitism, conspiracy theories, liberal Zionism, radical democratic politics, purism and ethnic nationalism, and combinations of some of these—share, is the premise that the two languages index national identities, and that the mixing of the two languages indexes a subversive mixture of the two identities. Whether the subversion is desirable or not, and for what reasons, is a point of contention, but in any case the mixture can be measured (and here is where sociolinguistics enters the fray) by the proportion of Hebrew, against the nationalist normative standard of ‘one nation – one language’.
It would be ironic if the effect of this article were to add another prescription to the plethora of advice given to Palestinians for resolving their problems. The prescription would be: “Don't worry about ‘Arabrew’, you can't change language practices unless the change is in articulation with changes in other social practices in your contexts and how you think in ideologies about these contexts, and that gives you already enough to worry about”; however, the irony would be compounded by having to acknowledge that the much-maligned prescriptivism itself might be better articulated with the ideological needs of Palestinians and other Arabs in Israel than any critical deconstruction can be.
