The Politics of Schooling

One originary trait of the field is the subversion of official policy at the local level of practice. For instance, there seems to have always been a general consensus among policymakers that Arabic should be made compulsory for Hebrew-speaking students and that Arabic is best taught at school in Arabic.Footnote ²⁶ But no less remarkable than this ongoing consensus is its failure to materialize in practice. Such policies are repeatedly subverted at various levels. Thus a 1976 decision by a Knesset committee to make Arabic compulsory throughout high school was ignored, and then a 1988 policy decision by Minister of Education Yitzhak Navon to make Arabic universally compulsory from the seventh through the twelfth grades was not acted upon by his own ministry. When policy steps are, in fact, adopted by the ministry, they are subsequently subverted, or severely diluted, at the local level of schools.Footnote ²⁷ Policymakers have so far been unwilling or unable to force the issue.

This state of affairs is remarkable given the impressive weight of the forces that push for the expansion of Arabic instruction. These have included academics, professionals involved in teaching Arabic, such as supervisors at the Ministry of Education and Arabic teachers, and some sympathetic ministers of education. In this they are allied with the very powerful security apparatus—most importantly, Military Intelligence—with its enormous resources and insatiable need for loyal, that is, Jewish, Arabic speakers.

The Intelligence Takeover of Arabic Instruction

Military Intelligence is probably the most powerful driving force in the promotion of Arabic instruction in Jewish schools. Military representatives have participated in virtually all commissions of inquiry into Arabic since the 1960s. The military is also represented on the Arabic Language Subject Committee, which steers Arabic instruction within the Ministry of Education.Footnote ²⁸

The rationale provided by Military Intelligence for the promotion of Arabic in schools is straightforward: Israel needs Jews who understand Arabic to help protect the Jewish state from the Arab threat and also to facilitate at the national level a strategic engagement with the peoples of the region. This need is particularly acute now that the generation of Jews who immigrated from Arabic-speaking countries is retiring or dying out and is not being replenished.

Military Intelligence is involved not only at the level of policymaking and implementation but also with the actual teaching of Arabic in Israeli schools. This involvement has taken various forms, including the creation in 1986 of shif ʿat, a unit within the Ministry of Education staffed by military personnel and headed by a senior intelligence officer, Nissim Atzmon, who had previously played a critical role in developing the military's in-house Arabic training apparatus. Shif ʿat was charged with improving and broadening Arabic instruction and also administered the national-testing scheme of Arabic at Jewish schools. Military Intelligence also provides special educational camps and intelligence paramilitary training to young cadets, puts suitable high school pupils in touch with intelligence units that seek to select future conscripts, and provides a whole array of speakers, teaching aids, and other material to support Arabic instruction. Promising pupils might be invited to summer camps and other activities of the Gadnaʿ Mizrahanim (literally, Youth Brigades of Orientalists). Arabic instruction in school also includes such activities as excursions to the National Memorial for the Commemoration of the Fallen Members of the Intelligence Community and motivational talks by intelligence officers.Footnote ²⁹ Military Intelligence also funds educational development and endorses instructional material such as textbooks and dictionaries that are used in schools. Furthermore, the military provides some schools, usually junior-high schools in peripheral towns, with conscripts who are trained to teach Arabic.Footnote ³⁰

The open involvement of Military Intelligence in Arabic instruction in Jewish schools helps lift the status of the subject. Much of the informal curriculum, and a substantial part of the formal curriculum, revolves around preparing Jewish students for their impending military service. Building up the military significance of Arabic is thus a critical aspect of promoting a positive attitude among students toward the subject, lifting its prestige, and attracting academically successful students to it. Teachers, for their part, actively seek military involvement in their classes as an effective means of raising the motivation of Arabic students.

The formation of shifʿat under Minister of Education Yitshak Navon marked the culmination of a takeover by Military Intelligence of Arabic instruction at the high school level.Footnote ³¹ Arabic education in Jewish schools came under the effective direction of Military Intelligence in partnership with the Ministry of Education. The school and military Arabic curricula became coordinated into an integrated whole. But with all the efforts that Military Intelligence puts into promoting Arabic, the results remain unsatisfactory from an intelligence perspective.Footnote ³²Shif ʿat was disbanded in 2001, and although Military Intelligence continues to dominate Arabic instruction at schools, there is a general sense that the intelligence community cannot rely on schools and will be obliged to continue training its recruits to make up the gap in their Arabic proficiency. The emergent symbiotic relationship is such that schools focus their teaching on passive comprehension of Modern Standard Arabic. Military Intelligence then uses this knowledge base to further train its recruits in advanced Standard Arabic and colloquial Arabic.

The military thus becomes the major venue for postsecondary acquisition of proficiency through training, most effectively through active service, where Jews have the opportunity to use Arabic. With very few exceptions, Jews who have achieved a measure of command of Arabic within the Israeli education system are graduates of Military Intelligence Arabic training.

Odd Coalitions

The Israeli security apparatus is not alone in promoting Arabic instruction. It is the autonomous nature of the field that allows for contradictory social forces to come together, and, in this case, military efforts are reinforced by radical Israeli Arab political leaders who are greatly concerned about improving the status of Arabic in Jewish schools. In the report of the Knesset (Parliament) Education Committee investigation into the teaching of Arabic, Arab Communist member of Knesset Tawfiq Tubi outdid his colleagues by issuing a minority recommendation to effectively make the teaching of Arabic compulsory throughout the education system.Footnote ³³ Other educational initiatives come from liberal Jewish and radical Arab-Jewish nongovernmental organizations that seek to promote coexistence, such as the Abraham Fund's attempt to reinstate colloquial Arabic instruction in primary schools (an early practice that dwindled over the years and was finally abandoned in the late 1980s), or Hand in Hand's recent initiation of private bilingual schools.Footnote ³⁴

More remarkable than the constellation of forces that militates in favor of deepening and broadening the instruction of Arabic at schools is the fact that it has so far been singularly unsuccessful. Subversion from below restricts the breadth of Arabic instruction, while other players in the field (especially universities and teachers) restrict its depth.

Subversion from Below

Initiatives from above are thwarted from below by pupils, parents, and principals. The critical areas where decisions are subverted are the prioritization of resource allocation in schools and, more significantly, the local action of teaching staff and students. For their part, principals direct teaching resources (teaching time and budgets) to subjects that are tested at the matriculation level and away from non-examined subjects even in contravention of explicit policy. This is sometimes achieved by highly irregular means. At least one principal has gone so far as to hand out fictitious term grades to students after canceling the compulsory Arabic instruction at his schools. The supervisory staff at the Ministry of Education generally turn a blind eye to such practices, which were revealed to me by one of the inspectors at the Ministry of Education. The state comptroller reports on other techniques of reducing Arabic class sizes, including exempting weak students from Arabic classes so that they can focus on more central subjects.Footnote ³⁵

The ministry's quiescence is a recognition of two main facts. One is that a full implementation of all official curricular policies is unrealistic given the resources available at the local level. Official policy is seen, at best, as a wish list or, at worst, as a cynical political statement for the record or for public consumption. The other fact is the limit of the supervisory powers to confront a coalition of principals and parents. There is a diffuse concern that in such situations, being too dogmatic may end up in a political blowout. Moreover, there is a split within the ministry between those functionaries who are in charge of ensuring the smooth operation of schools—by making realistic compromises—and the subject inspectors who act as advocates for their own particular subjects. It is actually the negotiations between these two sets of midlevel functionaries that shape many of the pragmatic compromises.

The inability to formulate coherent policy, and to enforce existing policy, is often camouflaged by intentional vagueness and ambiguity in policy statements, leaving much scope for midlevel machinations. In 2003, for example, internal correspondence from the ministry to principals stated that a policy decision had been made to reiterate Arabic's compulsory status in Hebrew schools from the seventh through the tenth grades and to include a compulsory Arabic test in the matriculation examinations at the minimal level of one unit. These policies had been decided at the ministerial level but were progressively diluted down the rungs of the bureaucratic ladder all the way to the classroom. In most nonreligious, public Hebrew schools Arabic generally continues to be offered as an optional second foreign language between the seventh grade and the ninth grade and is often not offered at all in tenth grade.Footnote ³⁶ There was never an enforcement of the compulsory inclusion of Arabic in the matriculation examinations. Indeed, it appears the policy decision has never been made public and was subsequently abandoned. In other words, effective policy—the policy of enforcement and provision of resources—failed to support the articulated policy of Arabic instruction, reflecting a deep level of indecision and ambiguity at the top echelons of the Ministry of Education.

For their part, parents and pupils generally support the principals’ concentration of resources on “important” subjects. In fact, many pupils resort to additional means to avoid wasting energy on subjects that are not examined at the matriculation level. In the last three decades, many students have been taking advantage of a mushrooming private market in educational psychology, where one can effectively buy certified exemptions on the grounds of learning disability from the study of a second foreign language.

To further understand the motivations of parents and pupils, we must consider the political economy of foreign-language literacy and especially the previously discussed devaluation of Arabic as against the revaluation of English. The devaluation of Arabic and revaluation of English affect the way both are articulated to the personal and national interest. Learning English is motivated by personal interest, that is, by the benefits such knowledge bestows upon its bearer as an individual. It is taught in order to help pupils in their later years. A good mastery of English is a prerequisite for entry into university and is a highly valued skill in the labor market. It is deemed essential for professional, financial, and personal success.

Learning Arabic is not of personal value as such but rather of national (i.e., sectarian) significance. Its benefits lie not in immediate palpable personal gain but rather within the national interest, that is, the Zionist project. Maintaining a reservoir of Jews who can understand Arabic is deemed to serve this interest. Although majoring in Arabic may lead one to a lucrative career with the security apparatus or diplomatic service, it makes little utilitarian sense to study Arabic for any other reason.Footnote ³⁷

This explains how social agents who share ideological dispositions may come to adopt contradictory positions in the field. Official policymakers, as guardians of the national (i.e., sectarian) interest, are motivated by the existential conflict with and permanent suspicion of Arabs to strengthen Arabic instruction. The very same fear and loathing of Arabs leads parents, children, and principals who have little to gain from knowledge of Arabic to identify Arabic with Arabs and to consequently adopt contradictory strategies and practices and resist Arabic instruction emotionally, aesthetically, and practically.Footnote ³⁸ One Jewish teacher of Arabic recounted how after a suicide attack in the center of Israel, she came into her tenth-grade classroom to find “Death to Arabs” written across the blackboard. This was not unusual. Several teachers and supervisors observed that the continuing conflict creates a mental block in some students toward Arabic in particular and Middle East studies in general.

These classroom hostilities toward Arabs and Arabic echo some broad contemporary political trends in Israel. Quite recently there have been numerous attempts, motivated by a blend of populist opportunism and sectarian chauvinism, to eliminate or reduce Arabic's special status. These include legislative attempts to scrap the status of Arabic as an official language,Footnote ³⁹ government regulation to eliminate Arabic place names from road signs,Footnote ⁴⁰ and policy attempts to remove Arabic from the compulsory core of school instruction.Footnote ⁴¹

This clash between different interests—all motivated in various ways by an underlying sectarian imperative—exemplifies that social and political practice is always mediated through a field of practice. The same sectarian outlook thus produces mutually antagonistic positions toward Arabic instruction. Similarly, opposed imperatives that are embodied on the one hand by the security establishments and on the other hand by an Arab Communist member of Knesset can produce a shared agenda of deepening and broadening Arabic instruction.

The Role of Universities

Along with Military Intelligence, the other major institutional framework that critically affects Arabic instruction is the set of university departments of Arabic language and literature. Universities play a central role in cementing the status quo and preventing schools from emphasizing creative language skills in Arabic instruction.

Academia influences school education in various ways. The Subject Committee in the Ministry of Education is charged with curricular development and determines such issues as textbook selection and the like. It is dominated by academics and is chaired by a professor, invariably of the Hebrew University. Moreover, the bulk of Arabic teachers—and especially the leading ones—are trained at universities.Footnote ⁴² Even those who have been trained at colleges will find themselves at universities once they rise through the ranks and require an advanced degree.

But it is not only that teachers are trained at universities. One of the major targets that shape curricular development at school is university-entrance exams and curricula. Ideally, graduates of the school system should be able to perform well at universities. This imposes a requirement on both schools and universities to ensure that their curricula are compatible. The domination of the ministerial Subject Committee by academics ensures that this happens.

The intellectual and institutional orientation of academic teaching and research in Arabic is crucial. Israeli academia has always seen itself as part of the Western academic world. Arabic instruction in Israeli academia was initiated by European-trained scholars in the various fields of Orientalist scholarship and has formed an organic and integrated part of European Orientalist scholarship ever since.Footnote ⁴³ The rejection of Israeli academia and scholarship by Arab academia reinforces this position.

The Orientalist heritage includes an aloof philological approach, one that positions itself as a nonparticipatory observer of Arabic usage. It emphasizes passive decoding rather than creative mastery of the language and treats its subject matter rather like classics departments treat theirs. A common motto attributed to legendary Professor Meir Kister of the Hebrew University runs: “If you wish to learn to speak Arabic, go to Berlitz.”

Of significance, university departments of Arabic language and literature, like university departments of other major foreign languages and literature (e.g., English), are not strictly teacher-training programs, and the function of teacher training does not top their curricular priorities. Moreover, they nominally assume that students are proficient in the target language. What makes Arabic departments different, then, is not that they do not emphasize proficiency in the various language skills but rather that they tolerate its absence.

The philological approach was instrumental in fixing the language of instruction in departments of Arabic as Hebrew (in sharp contrast with departments of English) and in devaluing Arabic proficiency in instruction and appointments. As a consequence, university students complete their academic studies of Arabic without developing a balanced Arabic proficiency. By proficiency I mean the full set of linguistic skills, namely, reading, writing, listening comprehension, and speaking and ideally appropriate paralinguistic performance and cultural proficiency. Many of these university graduates subsequently become nonproficient teachers, who teach a school curriculum that does not produce proficient graduates. These nonproficient high school graduates then join the universities from which they graduate without proficiency to make up the next round of nonproficient teachers (and even academics). Thus emerges a sustained cycle of nonproficiency.

The majority of academics in Arabic language and literature departments, nonnative speaking Jews who have graduated from the Israeli education system, have an inevitable stake in the status quo whether they choose to support it or not. Changing the language of Arabic instruction in universities to Arabic will necessarily come up against the fact that a significant proportion of the lecturers are not sufficiently proficient to deliver instruction in Arabic and may not be able to compete with academically trained Arabs. One such person I encountered during my fieldwork was a tenured senior lecturer who specialized in medieval Arabic manuscripts. He freely conceded his limited proficiency and claimed that my research inspired him to begin reading Arabic translations of European novels he had already read (e.g., by Dickens) in order to improve his mastery of contemporary Arabic. When I asked why he did not read novels by Arabs, he replied that he was not interested in Arabic literature, which he considered inferior. He did not pursue his reading of Arabic translations for long. Otherwise, he communicated with his Arab students and colleagues exclusively in Hebrew and had no opportunity or reason to communicate in Arabic either verbally or in writing. This particular academic is an extreme example but demonstrates how unessential Arabic proficiency is for an academic career in Arabic.

The overlay of sectarian and personal politics, rarely explicit yet always present, accentuates the problem. This was brought home to me following a presentation I gave in Arabic at a departmental seminar. Mine was the only paper delivered in Arabic that semester. My forty-five minutes or so of presentation were followed by questions and answers in Arabic. Later that day, in a private conversation, one of the Arab adjunct instructors pointed out to me, in a gloating tone, that none of the Jews asked a question. He explained that they could not really speak Arabic and were too scared to do so. I responded that I must have made a considerable number of mistakes myself, to which he laughed and responded, “Ghalṭat al-jāhil basīṭa, wa-ghalṭat al-ʿālim faḍīḥa” (roughly meaning that the mistake of the uneducated is not serious, but the mistake of the learned is scandalous). Although the broad generalization about the Jewish academics in the department was exaggerated—at least a few are fully proficient in Arabic—Arabic proficiency is clearly embroiled in a sectarian personal politics.

In addition to the sectarian-cum-personal politics of intellectual authority, the fact that Jewish schools produce nonproficient graduates would put these students at a disadvantage if they had to undergo academic instruction in Arabic. There is thus a pervasive concern that a shift to instruction in Arabic would reduce the interest of Jewish students in the subject and result in Arabs dominating the ranks of both students and academic staff in Arabic departments (a process that may be under way at Haifa University, where the relative value of Arabic proficiency in the curriculum is higher than it is at other universities and where Arabs are the overwhelming majority of students of Arabic). This concern was communicated to me, explicitly off the record, by one senior academic. It was couched not in anti-Arab sentiments as such but rather in a concern for the survival and administrative well-being of a department that is stigmatized by the university and the public as composed of and catering to Arabs. In many ways, then, the fact of Arab superiority in Arabic proficiency retards the use of Arabic and the acquisition of Arabic proficiency by Jewish scholars and students.

The cycle of nonproficiency is particularly stable due to a lack of alternative sources of proficient teachers. Those Jews who have been trained by the security apparatus in Arabic are quite likely to have reached some level of proficiency; however, they are unlikely to join the teaching force because their career choices within the security and bureaucratic apparatus are much more attractive. The generation of proficient Jewish immigrants, mostly from Iraq, which once accounted for a large number of Arabic teachers in Jewish schools and for leading Jewish scholars and writers of Arabic (e.g., Samir Naqash, Shimon Ballas, Sasson Somekh, Shmuel Moreh) is now largely retired.

Segregation, Teacher Proficiency, and the Limits of Action in the Field

The scope of possible action within the field—that is, its autonomy—and the limits on it are themselves negotiated in practice. Attempts to improve Arabic instruction by dealing with the lack of proficient teachers demonstrate some limits on action within the field. One seemingly straightforward way to overcome the paucity of proficient Arabic teachers is the integration of Arab teachers of Arabic into Jewish schools. But the segregation of the teaching force persists in line with the sectarian segregation of Israeli society in general.

Officially, there is no policy of segregating the teaching force. Yet today Arabs account for a meager portion of Arabic teachers in the Jewish sector. The figure that is usually bantered around is “fewer than five percent” (roughly 50 of 1,200 teachers). However in a recent representative survey of Arabic instruction that was cosponsored by the ministry, only 1.7 percent of responding teachers at the junior-high schools were Arab, and not a single Arab teacher was found in the high school sample.Footnote ⁴⁴

When I questioned them on the subject, ministerial administrators offered two kinds of explanation for the paucity of Arab teachers. One doubted the compatibility of Arab teachers to teach Arabic in the Jewish sector. Such explanations highlight, for instance, difficulties that face native speakers who teach their own mother tongue as a second language.Footnote ⁴⁵ Such difficulties may apply to individual teachers but do not account for the broad phenomenon. Native speakers of English are the preferred teachers of English in the Jewish schools, and likewise, native French speakers are the preferred teachers of French. There is no inherent reason why the same should not apply to Arabic. Furthermore, the first few decades of Arabic instruction in the Jewish sector following the proclamation of the State of Israel were marked by the integration of Arab Jews, mostly Iraqi Jews, into the teaching force. To the extent that Modern Standard Arabic is acquired by native Arabic speakers as a mother tongue, these teachers were effectively teaching their mother tongue to nonnative speakers as a second language (without, however, reducing the curricular “Latinization” of Arabic).

Moreover, Modern Standard Arabic—the core of Arabic instruction in the Jewish sector—is not quite a mother tongue. It is the colloquial Arabic dialects that are acquired the “natural” way by Arabs. Standard Arabic is acquired in part through formal instruction, although this acquisition is backed up by passive exposure in daily life and by the commonalities with colloquial Arabic. This further detracts from the credibility of ascribing the paucity of Arab teachers in the Jewish sector to some general difficulties in teaching one's mother tongue as a second language.

Another set of explanations, though, seems to account more directly for the lack of integration of Arab teachers into Jewish schools, and that is the resistance of Jewish principals, parents, and teachers. This takes essentially two forms: one is a refusal on the part of principals to deploy Arab teachers; the other is the continued harassment of employed Arab teachers by students, parents, and staff. Such local interactions are critical in shaping, reproducing, and changing the field.

An experimental program to train Arab teachers of Arabic for Hebrew schools was abandoned in the 1990s, after it became clear that virtually all of its graduates failed to integrate into Jewish schools.Footnote ⁴⁶ A senior supervisor who is closely familiar with this aborted initiative insists that Arabic is the toughest subject for an Arab teacher to teach in a Jewish school. The topic is emotionally charged and confounds attitudes toward Arabs with attitudes toward Arabic, profoundly straining the classroom interaction for Arab teachers of Arabic to Jews. The subject, in fact, invites resistance and hostility from students and colleagues. By contrast, Arab teachers of “neutral” subjects such as mathematics integrate much more smoothly into Jewish schools.

Furthermore, Jewish resistance to Arab teachers of Arabic can be further aggravated by vested interests. When I raised the question of integrating Arab teachers into the Jewish sector with one Jewish teacher, her first response was that this would deprive the Jewish Arabic teachers of work. She then added that it may also not be a good idea “for security considerations.” She could not expand on what kind of security breach such a scenario would entail other than the general sense that it would be simpler, safer, and less worrisome if Arab teachers were kept away from Jewish children.

A related problem is that Military Intelligence's domination of Arabic instruction makes it hard to integrate Arab teachers, especially into high schools. Arabs—especially educated ones—are security risks that Military Intelligence prefers to avoid, potentially depriving such teachers of much of the educational and curricular support that Military Intelligence provides. Moreover, a significant role of high school instruction for Jews in Israel is preparation for military service (see previous). By virtue of their very being, Arabs cannot be part of this. They are considered integral elements of the existential security threat and therefore excluded from service. Ultimately, the entire security rationale of Arabic instruction would fall flat if delivered by an Arab.

The ministerial professionals who ran the aborted teaching program for Arab teachers in Jewish schools came crashing against the field's limits. With few exceptions, Arab teachers of Arabic remain excluded from Jewish secondary schools. Subsequently, this program's professional staff moved to redirect their efforts toward increasing Arabic proficiency among the Jewish teachers already in the system. They and others have turned to trying to ameliorate the Arabic proficiency of Jewish Arabic teachers through in-service training—with limited success. This suboptimal option seemed more realistic than integrating fully proficient Arabs. Such pragmatic compromises are forced by the overarching segregation of Israeli society even as they reproduce and reinforce it.

Ongoing Contestation within the Field

The administrators and Arab teachers that I mentioned previously came to discover some of the limits of the field, at least as they currently stand. But there are ongoing struggles and negotiations that are actively playing themselves out in the field (albeit with little change in practice). One of the most contentious issues has to do with the choice of register and level of Arabic to be taught in Jewish schools. Currently the concentration in instruction is on Modern Standard Arabic—and especially journalistic prose—with an emphasis on passive comprehension and the inculcation of formal rules of syntax and grammar. Students who specialize in Arabic may elect to undertake an additional unit of colloquial Arabic, but this is taught at a very rudimentary level and remains marginal to the Arabic major.

Two challenges to the Latinized approach are currently circulating in the field. One calls for the greater integration of colloquial Arabic, with the rationale of promoting verbal communication skills among students and enabling them to communicate with Arabs in the normal quotidian language. The other seeks to enhance the focus on Standard Arabic but move beyond decoding journalistic prose and into the realm of aesthetics, creative writing, and personal expression in Modern Standard Arabic. The idea here is to enhance creative proficiencies along with cultural understanding and empathy among students, thereby enabling them to meaningfully engage with Arab culture.

The peculiarity of Arabic diglossia pits these two challenges against one another. Arabic poetry and the bulk of creative writing are expressed through Standard Arabic, which is removed from the colloquial varieties. Thus, the promoters of cultural empathy and literary self-expression find themselves opposed to those seeking to promote verbal communication skills through refocusing the instruction on colloquial Arabic, even though both seek to replace the pedagogically alienating Latinization of Arabic.

There is an underlying sociological and institutional rationale to the different positions. The argument for shifting toward poetry and expressive literature emanates from elite circles of Arabic linguists and Arabic educators. The call for a shift to a focus on colloquial Arabic has a higher currency with sociologists and educationalists (not necessarily proficient in Arabic) and in the general public with support from students, parents, and principals who are frustrated by students’ lack of effective Arabic communication skills in spite of years of Arabic education.Footnote ⁴⁷ Proponents of colloquial Arabic suspect that Arabic communication skills elude students because of an excessive preoccupation with Standard Arabic, which they often (wrongly) perceive to be an essentially dead and irrelevant language, an impression sustained by the prevalent classroom practices they encounter. A common image of Arabs as essentially illiterate further detracts, in the eyes of some Jewish parents and teachers, from the value of Standard Arabic.

By contrast, academics in university departments of Arabic who are involved in classroom teaching of Arabic remain committed to an instructional concentration on Standard Arabic. Their position is sustained by reasons well beyond Eurocentric philological prejudice. Contrary to a common perception, the devaluation of colloquial Arabic is not a product of Western approaches but rather an integral part of language ideology among educated Arabs. In fact, Western dialectology accords colloquial Arabic more academic respect than do most traditional and contemporary mainstream Arab scholars.

It is not only the ideological framing of Arabic diglossia that supports the contemporary concentration on Standard Arabic in instruction but also the structure of the language. The morphology and syntax of Standard Arabic is more stable and regular than the colloquial, making the former easier to teach and learn (at least to Hebrew speakers). In fact, a good grounding in Standard Arabic facilitates the acquisition of a dialect but not necessarily vice versa.Footnote ⁴⁸ Once a student has command of Standard Arabic, s/he requires relatively few rules of transformation to work through the bulk of the complications added by Palestinian dialects to the morphology and syntax of Standard Arabic.

Furthermore, the surrounding context does not provide for exposure to colloquial Arabic and thus does not support its acquisition. The segregation of Israeli society is such that when Jews communicate with Arabs it is virtually invariably in Hebrew, making it unlikely for ordinary Jews to find much opportunity to interact in Arabic. By contrast, print and electronic media are easily available to support the instruction of Modern Standard Arabic on a continuous, long-term basis.

Finally, Jewish Arabic teachers, the vast majority of whom have not been taught colloquial Arabic, are even less proficient in colloquial than in Modern Standard Arabic, such that when they do try to teach colloquial Arabic, they all too often create an unidiomatic variant that does not conform to any given dialect.Footnote ⁴⁹ It is therefore a combination of the position of prominent academics in Arabic, the structure of the language (the relative regularity of Modern Standard Arabic), the segregation of Israeli society, and the distribution of knowledge of Arabic among Jewish teachers that make it highly unlikely that the curricular focus on Standard Arabic will be displaced or substantially weakened.

Some of the same issues would impede the greater emphasis on creative literature and none more so than the limits of the linguistic and cultural proficiency of teachers. The semiofficial Journal of the Teachers of Arabic in Hebrew-Speaking Schools published a series of poems and short stories that were translated and analyzed, but the limits on teachers’ mastery of the language hinders such developments and, ipso facto, the effective instruction of the culturally appropriate integration of colloquial and Standard registers.Footnote ⁵⁰ Moreover, the militarist ethos of Arabic instruction is ideologically and emotionally discordant with attempts to turn Arabic instruction into an exercise of empathy with Arabs.

The general irrelevance of another curricular contestation—namely, the emphasis on Arabic as a Jewish-heritage language by highlighting medieval Jewish-Arabic literature (texts written by Jews in Arabic typically with Hebrew characters) and modern Jewish dialects—serves to further delineate the limits of the possible and probable within the field. Jewish dialects are not integrated into instruction, even in areas dominated by Jewish immigrants from particular Arab countries. When colloquial Arabic is taught, it is invariably a Palestinian dialect. Medieval Jewish Arabic is appended as a few brief snippets in selections from classical Arabic literature without a systematic discussion of the linguistic reality in which they emerged. The practice of Arabic instruction constitutes Arabic as a non-Jewish language that is largely irrelevant to the historic Jewish experience.

This is clearly not an imposition from above. Medieval Jewish Arabic texts and Jewish dialects continue to be a major interest of Israeli academia. But efforts to raise teachers’ awareness of the possible significance of these studiesFootnote ⁵¹ have failed to breach the wall of academic irrelevance and do not seem to have had a palpable effect in the classroom. The non-Arabness of Jews has become axiomatic in Israeli society. Thus, in a recent survey teachers thought the new curriculum must focus on improving student motivation to learn Arabic, yet they were disinclined to emphasize the link between Arabic on the one hand and Hebrew and Jewish heritage on the other hand.Footnote ⁵²