Hebraization: Language and (Un-)belonging in Israel

Bradley Williams Cohen

Columbia University in the City of New York

Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies

Advisor: Timothy Mitchell

Senior Thesis, April 2015

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Abstract

The production of new Hebrew-speakers is a point of Israeli national pride. This paper locates five

central sites for the production of the Hebrew language and Hebreophone subjects, a process I label

“Hebraization:” the agrarian kibbutz, the Ulpan (state-funded adult language education for

immigrants), the military, the university, and the urban center. The paper takes a critical look into

two of these five sites, the Ulpan and the university, for their role in producing new Hebrophone

subjects. It focuses primarily on the Ulpan’s role of Hebraizing adult Jews of Arab-descent in

comparison with the Hebraization of the Palestinian citizens of Israel up until today.

Keywords: Hebrew, Palestine, Israel, Sociolinguistics, Arabic, Palestinians, Mizrahi studies

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT ....................................................................................................................................... 2

TABLE OF CONTENTS .................................................................................................................. 3

CODE OF HONOR ........................................................................................................................ 4

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................................................... 5

INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................... 6

1 LITERATURE REVIEW ............................................................................................. 9

1.1 DISCURSIVE FORMATIONS ...................................................................................................... 10

1.2 THE INVENTION OF THE MIZRAHIM .................................................................................. 12

1.3 HEBREW AND ARABIC SOCIOLINGUISTICS ........................................................................... 13

1.4 PALESTINIAN CITIZENS OF ISRAEL ....................................................................................... 15

1.5 ETHNOCRACY .......................................................................................................................... 17

2 HEBRAIZATION OF NEW JEWISH AND PALESTINIAN SUBJECTS ............................. 19

2.1 SABRA ASHKENAZI JEW .......................................................................................................... 19

2.2 THE MIZRAHI JEW: DE-ARABIFICATION THROUGH HEBRAIZATION ............................. 23

2.3 HEBRAIZATION AND URBAN REALITIES .............................................................................. 24

2.4 TOWARDS A HEBREOPHONE PALESTINIAN ........................................................................ 26

2.5 THE GALILEE ........................................................................................................................... 29

2.6 JUDAIZATION, HEBRAIZATION ............................................................................................. 29

3 STATE LANGUAGE EDUCATION & ACCEPTABLE EXPRESSIONS OF ARABNESS ......... 31

3.1 ULPAN: CULTURAL HEBRAIZATION ..................................................................................... 31

3.2 ISRAELI STATE ARABIC ........................................................................................................... 34

3.3 ILLEGIBLE HISTORY ................................................................................................................ 36

4 THE UNIVERSITY ................................................................................................... 38

4.1 HEBREW UNIVERSITY IN JERUSALEM .................................................................................. 38

4.2 HEBREW UNIVERSITY’S ULPAN AND EAST JERUSALEMITE PALESTINIANS ................... 41

4.3 THE ROTHBERG INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL ...................................................................... 44

4.4 UNIVERSITY OF HAIFA’S INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL & DE-PALESTINIFIED ARABIC ... 46

4.5 TECHNION – ISRAEL INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY ......................................................... 52

CONCLUSIONS ........................................................................................................................ 55

WORKS CITED ........................................................................................................... 58

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Code of Honor

15 April 2015

We, the undergraduate students of Columbia University, hereby pledge to value the integrity of our ideas and the ideas of others by honestly presenting our work, respecting authorship, and striving not simply for answers but for understanding in the pursuit of our common scholastic goals. In this way, we seek to build an academic community governed by our collective efforts, diligence, and Code of Honor.

I affirm that I will not plagiarize, use unauthorized materials, or give or receive illegitimate help on assignments, papers, or examinations. I will also uphold equity and honesty in the evaluation of my work and the work of others. I do so to sustain a community built around this Code of Honor.

Bradley Williams Cohen

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Acknowledgements

This six-month project would not have been possible without the support and patience of my

advisor, Timothy Mitchell. My special thanks to you for taking on this project and steering me in the

right direction, even at the last moment. Likewise, the indefatigable support and guidance of my

methods advisors Kai Kresse and Yitzhak Meir Lewis helped turn what was once a passing idea into

this final product. Additional thanks goes to Nurit Peled-Elhanan for her kind help regarding Israeli

textbooks, to Columbia professors Taoufik Ben-Amor and Joseph Massad for their advice, and to

Roni Henig for listening to my questions about Yiddish. The last days of this project would not have

functioned without support from Andrew King, Patrick McGuire, and Saphe Shamoun. My friend

Thomas Pichl deserves particular appreciation for sending me last-minute materials and to Alina

Mogilyanskaya for teaching me what it means to make a deadline.

I give my renewed love and fondness to my parents for their encouragement to follow my

passions. I send my gratitude and admiration to my partner Shimrit Lee for inspiring me at every

step along the road of writing this thesis and my hope that one day I can do the same for her.

Likewise, words do not express my appreciation for the selfless altruism of Paul Mendes-Flohr,

without whom none of this would have been possible.

Finally, to Frederic Gijsel, to whom this thesis is dedicated, I send my love and gratitude for

teaching me what it means to write a thesis and for enduring our silence until the project was over.

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“I didn’t know how to respond, in Hebrew or Arabic, so I held my silence.”

-- Sayed Kashua, Second Person Singular

Introduction

Language creates new subjects and it creates new lands. The Hebrew language, spoken

until two millennia ago in the Southeastern Mediterranean, has become the mother tongue of five

million Israeli Jews and a second tongue for Israel’s 1.5 million Palestinian citizens. As part of

the Zionist national project of forging a state in early 20th century Palestine, it stirred the

imagination of a small number of European Ashkenazi Jews who chose to leave their lives in

Europe for a foreign land. Alongside the Zionist notion of ‘Avoda ‘Ivrit, the philosophy of

“Hebrew labor” on the Land of Israel, Hebrew created a new subject: the Sabra Jew. The

community of the Sabra formed the Kibbutz, imagined as a rejection of urban ghettoized life in

Jewish Eastern Europe. Reborn Sabra Jews worked the land, carried guns, fought wars, and

occupied positions of power. Their new version of an ancient language provided the narrative for

this vision. In it, the Hebrew language and Hebrew Labor produce not just the Kibbutz but as

well the Kibbutz produces the Yishuv. Eretz Yisrael is redeemed by ingathering the exiles.

In a trope similar to that of immigrants to the US, the Israeli narrative romanticizes the

teaching of the Hebrew language (Hebraization) to newly-arrived immigrants to the state of

Israel as producing a “melting pot” of cultures that produces a homogenized, Hebrew-monoglot

Sabra Israeli citizen liberated from social class. The argument of this paper is that the teaching of

Hebrew allowed for the inculcation of Zionist nationalism through five sites in the Zionist

imagination: the agrarian Kibbutz, the Ulpan, the army, the university, and the Ashkenazi-

dominated urban center. This five-site web is responsible for a process I dub “Hebraization,” the

creation of Hebreophone citizens and subjects who hold a Zionist worldview. Zionist ideology

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holds that these five sites produce equal citizens devoid of social class, irrespective of

ethnoreligious background. Tracing the web chronologically, it is possible to see that in the

Yishuv period, it succeeded in producing a Hebraized Sabra Israeli subject that continues to

dominate cultural depictions of Israeli Jews until today. However, after the declaration of the

establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, the arrival of 350,000 Asian and African Jews put a

new test on whether this Ashkenazi-conceived, five-site web of Hebraization could produce a

Hebrew-monoglot Israeli subject out of “Oriental” Jews.1 Parallel to the fate of the Mizrahim

was that of the 100,000 Palestinian citizens who became subjects of the state of Israel since

1949. These Palestinians were shut out of these five sites for the first two decades of the state.

With time, two sites opened up to all Palestinian citizens of Israel (PCI): the Ulpan and the

university.2 As a result of this restriction, the Israeli state’s ability to produce new citizens by this

five-point web comes into question.

Many scholars have explored the connection between state institutions and the production

of new subjectivity. In the past two decades, historians have made new inquiries into the history

of the formation of the state of Israel, particularly focusing on the period of the exile of 750,000

Palestinians 1947 to 1949 and the establishment of the state of Israel. Likewise, the new field of

“Mizrahi studies” in the 1990s produced valuable inquiries into the formation of Israel’s

overlooked Arab Jewish underclass. However, in the period following the Oslo Peace Accords of

1994 until today, the state of Israel’s sociopolitical landscape has evolved to produce new

realities for its Mizrahi and Palestinian citizens and subjects. The majority of today’s discourse 1 From hereon, I will refer to the Asian and African Jews by the accepted current academic term in use: “Mizrahi” (Hebrew: Oriental) While around 10% of Mizrahim originate from present-day Iran, I will follow the common parlance use the term to refer solely to Israeli Jews of Arabophone-origin. 2 The Ulpan is the Israeli state-funded Hebrew language class required for adult immigrants to the state of Israel in order to integrate into Israeli society, serve in the military, and study in university. The class, as the following sections will detail, serves as much to teach immigrants a new language as it does to teach them new Israeli societal norms and social class divisions.

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regarding the future of Palestine/Israel concerns the possibility of its future as one state or as two

separate sovereign states. If it continues as one state, will it be democratic with equal rights for

all its citizens? If it becomes two states, what is the future of the Palestinian citizens of Israel

who are alienated from the political objectives of the principal Israeli Jewish and Palestinian

political stakeholders?

This paper recounts the history and challenges of producing new Hebreophone subjects in

a rapidly-evolving state of Israel from 1949 to 1967. It looks into how the state today is

producing new Hebreophone subjects, not just from Jewish immigrants and Palestinian citizens,

but also from East Jerusalemite Palestinians whose political alignment places them in a future

Palestinian state should the “two-state solution” occur. As such, this paper chooses to examine

the Ulpan and the university under a critical lens. Out of this five-site web of Hebraization, they

are the two national institutions shared between all citizens of the Israeli state. Likewise, they are

among the few sites with the possibility of inter-ethnoreligious overlap in the state of Israel. In

question is the veracity five-site web’s ideological intention to produce equal subjects. If the web

is intended to produce social difference, what does that mean for the Hebrew language?

Similarly, what are Israeli state universities’ role in producing difference?

This paper examines whether the pre-state Zionists settlers in Palestine from 1881 to

1949 expanded their power over new Jewish subjects by means of Hebraization and how that

could have contributed to the expansion of their territorial sovereignty in Palestine. Likewise, the

paper looks into the role of Hebraizing the Mizrahim as a social experiment for future territorial

expansion through its policies of “Judaification” in the Galilee region and Jerusalem. The

ultimate conclusion is that wherever the state manages to produce new Hebreophone subjects, it

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manages to legitimate its sovereignty. As a result, its newest trial is East Jerusalemite

Palestinians.

The paper reviews the main existing literature on the invention of the Mizrahim, the

social history of the Palestinian citizens of Israel, Zionist discursive formations, and the role of

language of the Israeli state security apparatus. Afterwards, it pieces together a longue durée

critical reading of the Hebraization of three ethnoreligious groups: the Ashkenazim, Mizrahim,

and Palestinians citizens of Israel, focusing on the latter two groups’ experience in Ulpanim and

Israeli universities. The other three sites of the five-site web are examined in order to apprehend

the intersectionality of Ulpanim and Israeli universities in Hebraization. A special focus is given

to East Jerusalem Palestinians, the most recent group to enter in the Ulpan system for the sake of

studying in an Israeli university. Finally, the last chapter looks at Israeli state teaching of

Palestinian spoken Arabic to Israeli Jews for use in the state security apparatus as well as visiting

foreign students in Israeli universities. The paper is interwoven with reexamination of modernity,

permission-to-narrate, democracy, and Westernness, and ethnocracy. I conclude that Zionism’s

original five-site web intentionally produced social difference and ethnoreligious separation. The

implications of this conclusion can provide insight into the possibility of future democracy and

equality in Palestine/Israel.

Chapter I: Literature Review

This paper concerns itself with “Hebraization” of new Israeli citizens and subjects,

through Zionist institutions and nationalist ideology. My thesis holds that the Modern Hebrew

language has matured since its adoption as a national tongue for the Zionist movement at the turn

of the twentieth century by creating five sites of Zionist national consciousness: the Ulpan, the

army, the university, the kibbutz, and the urban center. In turn, these five sites, which I

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denominate “the five-site web of Hebraization,” produce a new Israeli citizen through the

Hebrew language and its role within each site. Focusing on the Ulpan and the university, this

paper looks at three different groups of new Israelis: Ashkenazim, Mizrahim, and Palestinian

citizens of Israel (PCI).

The topic of Palestine/Israel generates a wealth of writing. Most existing literature about

the Hebrew language focuses on the revival of Hebrew by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, Hebrew’s

discursive formations in Zionist thought, its application to Ashkenazi settlers the Yishuv, and to

new immigrants to the state of Israel.

1.1 Discursive Formations

Julie Peteet and Shlomo Sand produced two important critical inquiries works into

Hebrew discursive formations. Peteet’s “Words as interventions: naming in the Palestinian-Israel

conflict” examines how certain terms for renaming the land, conflict with Palestinians as well as

internal struggle, and Zionist national identity come to be. She writes, “The Zionist project of

forging a link between the contemporary Jewish community and the land of Palestine was a

project of extraordinary remaking: of language, of place and relation to it, and of selves and

identities. Naming, a form of symbolic intervention, points to a cultural politics of landscape and

competing nationalisms.”3 Israelis and Palestinians have collectively inherited a distinct space

and unique historical narrative based on these discursive formations. Peteet highlights this

construction in writing that “terminology is subject to the historical process. Names are thus not

only components of a repertoire of mechanisms of rule and a prominent part of historical

transitions but are, methodologically speaking, themselves a means of tracking power in this

3 Peteet, Julie. "Words as interventions: naming in the Palestine–Israel conflict." Third World Quarterly 26.1 (2005): 153- 172.

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process.”4 As in any nationalist framing narrative, each Hebrew term in the Zionist

consciousness has its own genealogy that led to its discursive power.

Shlomo Sand approaches the same topic in examining certain keywords of the Zionist

discourse such as aliyah (immigration, literally: ascent), eretz (land), galut (exile), sabra (Jew

born in the Land of Israel) that have taken untranslatable qualities in public Israeli discourse. He

writes, “It is only in Eastern Europe, in the context of a major demographic concentration and

decisive linguistic and cultural alienation, in tandem to the weakening of religious belief, that the

Jewish people, in which a radically different secular culture from the surrounding population was

born.”5

Peteet and Sand’s writing touch upon Edward Said’s concept of “imagined geography,”

which is the spatial reconstruction of discourse formations into an atemporal geography.6 Sand’s

The words and land functions as an annotated glossary to his last two books The Invention of the

Jewish People and its sequel The invention of the land of Israel: from Holy Land to homeland,

which cast a critical retrospective into Jewish national thought.7 These three books can be read as

a trilogy. The Invention of the Jewish people contends that Ashkenazi Jews adopted European

Christian Orientalism in constructing a Jewish national consciousness.8 Sand’s theory builds off

of Benedict Andersen’s landmark Imagined Communities.9 In the same vein, Sand’s Invention of

the land of Israel builds on Said’s “Imagined Geography” that maintains that nineteenth-century

4 Ibid, 153. 5 Personal translation from original French text: “C’est seulement en Europe orientale, dans le context d’une concentration demographique importante et d’une alientation linguistique et culturelle determinante, que s’est constitue, parallelement a l’affaiblissement de la croyance religieuse, le people Yiddish, au sein duquel est nee une culture laique radicalement differente de celle des populations environnantes. Sand, Shlomo. Les mots et la terre. Les intelectuals en Israel. Fayard. 2014. 187. 6 Said, Edward W. "Invention, memory, and place." Critical inquiry (2000): 185. 7 Sand, Shlomo. The invention of the Jewish people. Verso, 2010 and Sand, Shlomo. The invention of the land of Israel: from Holy Land to homeland. Verso Books, 2012. 8 ______. The invention of the Jewish people. Verso, 2010. 21. 9 Cf.: Anderson, Benedict. Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. Verso Books, 2006.

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European Zionists adopted Christian missionary zeal for a “Holy Land” romantically depicted by

Orientalist Renaissance art.10 Following this genealogy, Zionism imagined a Jewish nation

before locating it in Palestine. Once Zionism located itself in Palestine through the creation of

the Land of Israel, Zionist discursive formations came to be. Returning to Peteet, she writes that

“the Zionist project of forging a link between the contemporary Jewish community and the land

of Palestine was a project of extraordinary remaking of language, of place and relation to it, and

of selves and identities. Naming, a form of symbolic intervention, points to a cultural politics of

landscape and competing nationalisms.”11 Peteet, Sand, and Said’s genealogies trace Zionist

discourse from Western Europe to the present-day state of Israel. My article seeks to continue

this genealogy after the Jewish arrival to Palestine from Europe in the 1880s.

1.2 The Invention of the Mizrahim

Ella Shohat’s article “The Invention of the Mizrahim” covers similar ground to the

aforementioned books of Lefkowitz and Suleiman. Shohat, herself a Mizrahi Jew whose family

originates from Baghdad, historicizes and details the formation of the Mizrahi racial identity

under Zionism, which she describes as Eurocentric.12 When speaking of the notion of otherness

that Mizrahim have come to feel, she describes it as a form of “Jewish self-hatred” that the

Mizrahim inherited from the Ashkenazim.13 Shohat uses Malcolm X’s words to label this effect

as the gravest sin of the Euro-Israeli-Sabra ruling class: to make the subaltern hate herself.

Shohat’s article, published in 1999, calls for “a de-Zionized decoding of the peculiar history of

Mizrahim, one closely articulated with Palestinian history.”14

10 Said, Edward W. "Invention, memory, and place." Critical inquiry (2000): 180. 11 Peteet, Julie. "Words as interventions: naming in the Palestine–Israel conflict." Third World Quarterly 26.1 (2005): 155. 12 Shohat, Ella. "The invention of the Mizrahim." Journal of Palestine Studies (1999): 6. 13 Ibid, 16. 14 Ibid, 18.

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Linguistically, the Mizrahim resembled the Palestinian non-Jews, sharing dialects of the

same language and a shared cultural patrimony. Joseph Massad quotes Prime Minister Golda

Meir in his 1996 article, “Zionism’s Internal Others,” explaining that Yiddish was held as the

defining character of exilic Jewishness, equating Arabic with non-Jewishness.15 He astutely

points out the contradiction in the assertion of Yiddish as the defining characteristic of

Jewishness in that the Zionists in Palestine rejected the use of Yiddish until the 1960s. Here,

Shohat and Massad both illustrate well the shifting of Zionist othering from the diasporic

Yiddishophone Jew to the Mizrahi Arabophone Jew and then finally to an internal-external other,

the Palestinian.

1.3 Hebrew and Arabic Sociolinguistics

Daniel Lefkowitz looks at the difficulties of Hebraization of Jewish ‘Olim (immigrants)

to the state of Israel in his book Words and Stones: The Politics of Language and Identity in

Israel. Speaking from his own perspective as an Ole (immigrant) to the state of Israel, his work

can be read in tandem with the work of a Palestinian citizen of Israel, Yasir Suleiman, in A War

of Words: Language and Conflict in the Middle East. Both Lefkowitz and Suleiman address two

key issues: linguistic identity in Israel and the Israeli “Mizrahi,” Jews from Arab lands who

culturally and linguistically are similar to Palestinian Arab non-Jews, while they are religiously

and nationally tied to the dominant Ashkenazi Jews from Europe. For each author, he dissects

the diglossia, code-switching and code-mixing that occur in his own life as he traverses different

political and cultural spaces in Israel/Palestine. As each of them observes in different settings,

the three official languages of Israel/Palestine (Hebrew, Arabic and English) carry different

currencies, weights and implications. Lefkowitz speaks of how Palestinian citizens of Israel

15 Massad, Joseph. "Zionism's internal others: Israel and the Oriental Jews." Journal of Palestine Studies (1996): 60.

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teach their children Arabic as a matter of pride and identity, while speaking Arabic in the street

with a stranger is frowned upon.16 Simultaneously, he interviews Mizrahi Jews (Israeli Jews

originating from Arabophone countries) who can understand certain dialects of Arabic, but never

learned to speak them due to the stigma that Arabic carries in Israel.

Suleiman writes about similar experiences in his research speaking with Israelis and

Palestinians. He notes in Chapter Two of his book the different weights English carried in

comparison to Arabic. As a Palestinian living abroad he does not speak Hebrew, and thus he had

to conduct his research when speaking to Israeli soldiers in English. Even when speaking to

Druze soldiers whose mother tongue is Arabic, they would still prefer to speak in English, as it

was seen as a more neutral language than Arabic. Meanwhile, when interacting with other

Palestinians, Suleiman found no obstacles to speaking in Arabic. In Chapter Five of his book he

writes about the paradoxical situation of Mizrahi Jews in comparison with Palestinian citizens of

Israel. Mizrahi Jews, whose ancestral tongue is Arabic, have transitioned to speaking Hebrew;

meanwhile, Palestinian citizens of Israel have produced some of the greatest writers in Modern

Hebrew, such as Emile Habibi and Anton Shammas.

Both Suleiman and Lefkowitz are particularly interested in this connection between

Mizrahi Jews and Palestinian citizens of Israel given their shared socioeconomic status vis-à-vis

Ashkenazi European Jews and their similar sociolinguistic backgrounds. As a result, they share

the experience of “otherness” in a domain dominated by European Jews. However, compared to

the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, they occupy a privileged position. Unlike

Israeli Ashkenazi Jews and Palestinian West Bankers and Gazans, the linguistic landscape and

connection to their neighboring cultures of the Mizrahim and Palestinian citizens of Israel is 16 Lefkowitz, Daniel. Words and stones: the politics of language and identity in Israel. Oxford University Press, 2004. 4.

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fractured and contentious due to the diametrically opposed positions of Zionist and Arab

nationalisms that pit “Arab” and “Jew” as mutually exclusive categories.

1.4 Palestinian citizens of Israel

The previous literature cited deals with the intersection Zionism and language and the

results of what I denominate as “Hebraization” of European and Arab Jewish settlers. However,

the focus shifts now to Palestinian citizens of Israel, the descendants of those 100,000

Palestinians who managed to avoid displacement outside of the state of Israel during the ethnic

cleansing of Palestine between 1947 and 1949. As Israeli historian Ilan Pappé describes

throughout his book, Forgotten Palestinians, the Palestinian citizens of Israel live a precarious

political existence in the turmoil and upheaval of the state and non-state actors in the surrounding

region.17 Viewed as disloyal to the state, they lived under military rule from 1948 to 1966, with

all freedom of movement and assembly forbidden without permission from the state. Villages in

the Upper Galilee region were forcibly moved to Lebanon. Palestinians residing in Haifa who

evaded the 1947-9 ethnic cleansing were forced to move to surrounding villages into houses of

other removed Palestinians. All power structures of Palestinian life were destroyed and

restructured by Israeli Jewish military governors. As Pappé points out, all PCI schools under

military rule were obligated to celebrate Israel Independence Day as a pageantry holiday, a day

commemorated by Palestinians worldwide as the anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba.18 The

pageantry involved singing of Zionist songs in Hebrew and pledges of loyalty and gratitude to

the Jewish state for bringing the PCI community out of their “Arab backwardness.” The

objective of military rule was the subservience of the PCI population. The first test of the loyalty

17 The Palestinian citizens of Israel (PCI) are referred in Zionist discourse as “Israeli Arabs” and occasionally in Palestinian discourse as “1948 Arabs” (٤٨۸ عربب). Cf.: Pappé, Ilan. The forgotten Palestinians: A history of the Palestinians in Israel. Yale University Press, 2011. 18 Ibid, 3.

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of the PCI population came in 1956 with the Suez war where, during Israel’s collaboration with

the UK and France against Nasser’s Egypt, the PCI population did not rise up and join the

Egyptian enemy as many Israeli politicians had predicted. Strict curfews and additional

restrictions had been placed into effect as a result of the war. The Kafr Qassem massacre was a

result of these regulations when a troop of Israeli soldiers opened fire on forty-nine PCI peasants

returning past curfew from their fields.19

After the abolition of martial law on the PCI population in 1966, the state of Israel had

the difficult task of figuring out what to do with this population. Arab-speaking and with close

familial and cultural ties to the neighboring Arab states, they still posed a security threat to the

state of Israel.20 PCIs did not experience Hebraization at the same level as Israeli Jews during

this 1948-66 period of martial law.21 However, Palestinian males did have some familiarity with

the Hebrew language from performing manual unskilled labor in Jewish cities as well from

interactions with the Israeli state security apparatus. With the Jewish state now firmly

established, PCIs began to integrate into the Israeli economy. This integration represented a

loosening in the Zionist principle of Hebrew Labor that had been used during the Yishuv to create

a separate Jewish economy. With the social tapestry of the state of Israel completely segregated

(and continues as such until today), the PCI community could be more accepted into Israeli

politics and economy much in a similar vein to how the Mizrahim had been integrated in the

1950s. Much in the way that the early state of Israel feared that Mizrahi Jews would find

19 Pappé, Ilan. The forgotten Palestinians: A history of the Palestinians in Israel. Yale University Press, 2011. 56. 20 Ibid, 32. 21 Given that the Jewish settler-colonists had managed not to learn much Arabic through the separatist philosophy of “Hebrew labor” that kept them separate from the Arabic language despite living amongst and surrounded by Arabophones. Cf. Smooha, Sammy. "The advances and limits of the Israelization of Israel’s Palestinian citizens." Israeli and Palestinian identities in history and literature (1999): 19.

17

solidarity with their fellow Arabophone neighbors, the state needed to ensure that PCIs would

stay loyal to the state by creating social differences between the PCI community.

The Druze Muslim community of the Galilee swore allegiance to David Ben-Gurion’s

Haganah during the 1947-1949 ethnic cleansing of Palestine and escaped expulsion. Likewise,

the Bedouin communities of the Galilee also pledged allegiance to the state. With the traditional

Arab Muslim power structures and organizations dismantled by the events of 1947-1949, PCI

Christians rose to positions of power they had not previously occupied.22 The Muslim merchant

class and bourgeoisie had fled the violence of 1947-1949 and left behind in their exile an

unskilled economically disenfranchised Muslim Fellahin population. The divisions caused by the

events of 1947-1949 as well as by military rule from 1949-1966 meant that different population

segments could be used for different objectives of the Israeli state. After the June War of 1967,

their situation moved aside in the international spotlight for the plight of those living in the

occupied Palestinian West Bank and Gaza Strip. Pappé maintains that even though much of

today’s activism, literature, and cultural depictions focus on these occupied territories, it is

important to remember that the plight of Palestinians in the state of Israel is intimately connected

to that of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and diaspora.

1.5 Ethnocracy

Pappé’s history of the Palestinian citizens of Israel is complemented by Oren Yiftachel’s

theorization of “Ethnocracy.”23 Whereas Pappé’s book provides a didactic social history of the

Palestinian citizens of Israel, Yiftachel maintains that “Judaization” comes out “de-

Arabification” of Palestine. Following Edward Said’s thought, the Zionist euro-centered

22 Pappé, Ilan. The forgotten Palestinians: A history of the Palestinians in Israel. Yale University Press, 2011. 66. 23 Yiftachel, Oren. "‘Ethnocracy’: The Politics of Judaizing Israel/Palestine." Constellations 6.3 (1999): 364-390.

18

imagined self constructs itself on the native Oriental Other. 24 Yiftachel provides a definition to

this theory of “Ethnocracy”

• (a) Despite several democratic features, ethnicity (and not territorial citizenship) determines the allocation of rights and privileges; a constant democratic- ethnocratic tension characterizes politics.

• (b) State borders and political boundaries are fuzzy: there is no identifiable demos, mainly due to the role of ethnic diasporas inside the polity and the inferior position of ethnic minorities.

• (c) A dominant ‘charter’ ethnic group appropriates the state apparatus, determines most public policies, and segregates itself from other groups.

• (d) Political, residential, and economic segregation and stratification occur on two main levels: ethno-nations and ethno-classes.

• (e) The constitutive logic of ethno-national segregation is diffused, enhancing a process of political ethnicization among sub-groups within each ethno-nation.

• (f) Significant—though partial—civil and political rights are extended to members of the minority ethno-nation, distinguishing ethnocracies from Herrenvolk democracies or authoritarian regimes. 25

This definition permits a closer reading of Shohat, Massad, and Pappé and connects the plight of

Israel’s Mizrahi Other with the PCI Other.

There is a clear nexus connecting the de-Arabization of the country with the marginalization of the Mizrahim, who—culturally and geographically—have been positioned between Arab and Jew, between Israel and its hostile neighbours, between a ‘backward’ Eastern past and a ‘progressive’ Western future. But, we should remember, the depth and extent of discrimination against Palestinians and Mizrahim has been quite different, with the latter included in Jewish-Israeli nation-building project as active participants in the oppression of the former.26

The entrance of the Israeli state in to Mizrahi lives follows a similar narrative to the Israeli

entrance into Palestinians lives under occupation. Neve Gordon approaches the topic of state

micromanagement of Palestinian affairs in his book Israel’s Occupation. He describes Israel’s

intentions to increase funding to education in the Occupied Territories while at the same time

subverting the development of a sustainable local Palestinian Arab economy. Gordon’s book

24 Said, Edward. "Orientalism. 1978." New York: Vintage (1979). 7. 25 Yiftachel, Oren. "‘Ethnocracy’: The Politics of Judaizing Israel/Palestine." Constellations 6.3 (1999): 368-9. 26 Ibid, 380.

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claims that ironically following Israel’s 1967 annexation of the West Bank, university education

in the West Bank increased with many new universities appearing.27 However, the social

mobility infused into the West Bank served to erode the traditional power structures of

Palestinian villages that had provided for its communities’ common welfare.28 With traditional

power uprooted, the Israeli occupation could install a legal regime that legislated every aspect of

Palestinian life in the West Bank.29 The hyper-legality of the occupation could exert new forms

of coercive disciplinary and bio-power over its new subjects.30 The goal of the Israeli occupation

was to uproot nationalist sentiment, particularly in West Bank urban schools and universities:

“Israel’s attempt to implement an alternative regime of truth in order to prevent the revitalization

of a Palestinian national identity ultimately failed, though, because schools are not islands cut off

from daily reality, but are firmly connected to the sociopolitical environment in which they

exist.” 31

Chapter II: Hebraization of new Jewish and Palestinian subjects

2.1 The Sabra Ashkenazi Jew

Language unites people, but it also divides them. The case of language in the state of

Israel is a particularly interesting one. When Jewish settlers arrived in Palestine at the beginning

of the twentieth century, they came from a heterogeneous linguistic background with Yiddish as

their common language. Meanwhile, the indigenous Palestinian population shared with each

other the continuum of the Palestinian Levantine dialect of Arabic. This dialect shared close

lexical similarities with the dialects the Eastern Mediterranean and particularly the urban centers

27 Gordon, Neve. Israel's occupation. University of California Press, 2008. 38. 28 Ibid, 13. 29 Ibid, 42. 30 Ibid, 63. 31 Ibid, 62.

20

and capitals such as Damascus, Beirut, and Aleppo. Likewise, when the first European Jews

arrived to settle in Palestine in the 1880s, print journalism began in Palestine with two

Palestinian Arabophone newspapers, al-Karmal and Filistin.32 The introduction of print culture

into Palestine helped to foster national consciousness among Palestinians residing in different

regions. Simultaneously, print culture allowed Palestinian ideas to be legible to the surrounding

Arabophone populations from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean and for ideas from this expansive

area to make their way to Palestine. The duality of the continuum of spoken Arabic dialects and

print culture meant that Palestinians came into Palestinian national consciousness as well as Arab

national consciousness.

The linguistic landscape of the Jewish arrivals to Palestine was similar. The early Jewish

arrivals shared Yiddish as a common tongue that served as a lingua franca between Jewish

scattered in the “Pale of Settlement” in the area from modern-day Germany to Western Russia

and south to the Black Sea in Ukraine. Yiddish had been one of the main unifying factors

amongst these scattered and often ghettoized Jews inhabiting a fairly large geographic area.

Zionism had its roots in Europe in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Charged with

the duty of creating Jewish national liberation, it sought to remove Jews from Europe, a

continent that they believed had treated them as a “fifth column” for centuries.33 The key to

Jewish national liberation was the notion of revival that Zionism sought to inculcate in Europe’s

linguistically heterogeneous Jews. To resolve the issue of language, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda

developed a “modern” Hebrew in order to shift the Ashkenazi European Jews lingua franca from

32 Davis, Rochelle. "Ottoman Jerusalem." Badil.org: 13. 33 Avineri, Shlomo. Making of modern Zionism: the intellectual origins of the Jewish state. Basic Books, 1984. 39.

21

Yiddish to Hebrew.34 Hebrew has served for millennia as the liturgical language for all world

Jewry and influenced the linguistic vernacular usages of the world’s Jews, though both

Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews had not used it as their mother tongue. A new Hebrew provided a

linguistic framework for a new expression of Jewish identity—the Sabra Jew.35 Distinguished by

language and religion from the indigenous Arabophone Palestinian non-Jew, the Sabra’s

language emerged from the philosophy of “‘Avoda ‘Ivrit,” that sought to make early Jewish

colonial settlements autonomous from the surrounding Palestinian non-Jewish communities.36

Palestine at the turn of the twentieth century had a developed economy based on the economic

regime of the Ottoman Empire’s Tanzimat reforms.37 With the Jewish settler population in

Palestine being in the tens of thousands, they were inevitably economically reliant on the

Palestinian Arabs that surrounded them.38 Boycotting non-Jewish labor and products was as

crucial to this stage of ‘Avoda ‘Ivrit as was boycotting the non-Jewish language—Arabic.39

Many early European Jewish settlers did learn to speak sufficient Arabic in order to survive

economically in Arabophone Palestine.40 Hebrew absorbed certain geographic, culinary, or

agricultural Arabic terms into its quotidian vernacular.41 For the first half of the twentieth

34 Ashkenazi: Hebrew term for “German,” which came to refer to all Jews residing in Eastern Europe from Germany at the West until Russia at the West. 35 Sabra: Palestinian Arabic term that came to denominate Jews born in Palestine. Cf.: Fellman, Jack. The revival of a classical tongue: Eliezer Ben Yehuda and the modern Hebrew language. Walter de Gruyter, 1973. 9 36 ‘Avoda ‘Ivrit: For more information, cf.: Glazer, Steven A. "Language of Propaganda: The Histadrut, Hebrew Labor, and the Palestinian Worker." 36.2 (2007): 25-38. 37 Lockman, Zachary. "Railway workers and relational history: Arabs and Jews in British-ruled Palestine." Comparative studies in society and history 35.03 (1993): 601-627. 38 Bernstein, Deborah S. "Constructing Boundaries." Jewish and Arab Workers in Mandatory Palestine, Albany NY (2000). 43 39 Weinstock, Nathan. "The Impact of Zionist Colonization on Palestinian Arab Society before 1948." Journal of Palestine Studies 2.2 (1973): 56. 40 Lockman, Zachary. Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948. Univ of California Press, 1996. 98. 41 Hebrew’s absorption of Arabic terms did not necessarily reflect an acceptance of Palestinian sovereignty on the land, but rather was a pragmatic cultural appropriation that often occurs in settler-colonial environments. For more information on colonial language contact, cf.. Trudgill, Peter. "Colonial dialect contact in the history of European languages: On the irrelevance of identity to new-dialect formation." Language in Society 37.02 (2008): 241-254.

22

century, European Jewish settlers lived in close proximity to indigenous Arabophone

Palestinians. New European Jewish settlements in Palestine were dependent on their neighboring

villages and cities for their economic livelihoods. It was language that helped maintain

separateness between these communities.42

Hebraization was a struggle for the early Zionists. 43 Each arriving European

Yiddishophone Jew had to learn a language that he or she never knew outside of the liturgy and

religious scholarship. However, with Hebrew as their lingua franca European Jews found unity

in Hebrew’s standardized comprehensibility with other Jews coupled with the standardized

incomprehensibility of their Palestinian neighbors. In contrast, the small number of Jews who

had migrated to the Jewish holy cities of Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed, and Tiberias since the

eighteenth century had learned to communicate in Arabic while preserving the linguistic

traditions they had brought with them to Palestine.44

Zionism posited the new agrarian, secular, Hebreophone Sabra Jew, in opposition to the

Yiddishophone, exilic, ghetto religious Jew.45 The Hebrew of the Sabra Jew separated him or her

from the ghettoized exilic Jew as well as the indigenous Palestinian Arab. The imagery of the

Sabra Jew was built out of the image of the Palestinian Arab: sun-soaked, horse riding, and gun

carrying agrarians. Like the early agrarian Zionist settlers, the majority of Palestinians were

42 Glazer, Steven A. "Language of Propaganda: The Histadrut, Hebrew Labor, and the Palestinian Worker." 36.2 (2007): 28. Olshtain, Elite, and Gabriel Horenczyk. Language, identity and immigration. Elite Olshtain & Gabriel Horenczyk. Hebrew University Magnes Press, 2000. 57. 43 Hebraization: a term that normally refers to the “Hebraizing” of European Jewish surnames upon arrival to Palestine. In this paper, I use this term to denote the “Hebraization” not just of names, but of Jew’s mother tongues and, ultimately, their identities. 44 The Jewish population of Palestine it 1897 at the time of the World Zionist Congress was fewer than 50,000 Jews in population of roughly 475,000 Palestinian non-Jews. 45 In his theory “Muscle Jews,” Max Nordau speaks of the post-exile Jew: “Let us take up our oldest traditions; let us once more become deep-chested, sturdy, sharp-eyed men.”Nordau, Max Simon. Zionistische Schriften. Jüdischer Verlag, 1909.

23

Fellahin.46 Much of the land that the early Zionists purchased was land owned by absentee

landlords residing in Beirut or further afield. Just as the Sabra Jew’s corporal birth and spiritual

rebirth occurred on the land of the Fellahin, the Sabra Jew’s representation was never far away

from that of the Fellah.47

2.2 The Mizrahi Jew: de-Arabification through Hebraization

The ideology of “Hebrew Labor” had meant that Jews were heavily involved in manual

labor on agricultural Kibbutzim. Following the 1949 incorporation of Yemeni Jewry into the

state of Israel, manual labor began to be increasingly performed by Arab Jews. Eventually the

Jews of Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Iraq, and Persia would be brought to Israel by the Israeli

government over the next decade. By 1966, over 90% of Asian and African Arabophone and

Persian Jews had been brought to the state of Israel. The period from 1949 to 1966 was the

period of de-Arabification of Arabophone Jews who came from a geographic area spanning from

the Atlantic Ocean at Morocco all the way to Indian Ocean at Iraq. The Hebraization of these

subjects, under the guise of national liberation, relabeled them collectively “Mizrahim.” Their

mother tongue of Arabic was forbidden and stigmatized. 48Agrarian Kibbutzim were reserved for

Ashkenazi Jews; Mizrahi Jews were placed by the state of Israel in periphery communities

around Tel Aviv and Haifa known as “development towns” and in rural communities known as

“Moshavim.”49 Densely populated and underserved, these suburban belt-towns provided cheap

housing for Mizrahim while keeping them removed from the Ashkenazi-dominated social fabric 46 Fellah (plural: Fellahin): Palestinian agrarian peasant who formed the majority of the Palestinian population prior to 1948. 47 In settler-colonial theory, cultural appropriation is a fundamental aspect of the rebirth of the settler colonist when breaking with the culture of their country of origin. 48 Lefkowitz, Daniel. Words and stones: the politics of language and identity in Israel. Oxford University Press, 2004. 153. 49 Kibbutz: collective socialist-inspired agrarian settlement. They remain until today Ashkenazi-exclusive communities. Moshav: agrarian settlement but unlike the Kibbutz not necessarily collective in nature. Mizrahim would increasingly move to Moshavim in the 1950s Development Town: Mizrahi populated exurbs in Israeli metropolises.

24

of the urban center.50 In the case of Haifa, in particular, the Mizrahim were placed by the state in

the “Krayot” or “villages,” a semi-circle of high-rise commuter suburbs not unlike the Banlieues

that characterize French cities. Development towns like these became more desirable for the

nascent Israeli state for relocating newly-arrived Arab Jews who had been placed in the

Ma’aborot or “transit camps” near the port of Haifa.51 As such, the Hebraization of the urban

fabric of the Palestinian port cities of Haifa, Acre, and Jaffa was a complex process. The only

non-Arabic speakers were the Ashkenazim who came to completely dominate the prime central

areas of Haifa’s Mount Carmel area, the core of Tel-Aviv as well as the annexed, ethnically

cleansed sections of the Palestinian port city of Jaffa, and West Jerusalem.

2.3 Hebraization and urban realities

The Zionist reconfiguration of Mandate Palestine into the state of Israel from 1947 to

1949 introduced new subjects to Hebraization. Prior to the events of 1947-49, most European

Jewish arrivals to the Yishuv settled in small Jewish-only communities on the periphery of the

important cities of Jaffa and Haifa or in Kibbutzim that dotted the coastline. After the 1947-49

ethnic cleansing of Palestine, Jews could move with state-assisted ease into the urban centers of

Palestinian Arab cities.52 This period of 1945-51 saw a surge in the migration of European Jews

who had survived the extermination camps of Nazi-controlled Eastern Europe to Palestine who

50 Ashkenazi Jewish populations until today occupy center of the urban metropolises of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv-Jaffa, and Haifa. 51 The most well-known event of the “Ma’aborot” period from 1948-52 was the Wadi Salib riots of 1951. Wadi Salib (Arabic for “Valley of the Cross”) was a Palestinian Christian neighborhood cleansed of its indigineous in April 1948. The Israeli state used its emptied houses as cheap housing for Jewish immigrants to the state of Israel originally from Morocco. Slum-like conditions and endemic poverty led the neighborhood to rise up against the Ashkenazi-dominated state in 1951. After the riots were put down, the population was forcibly moved to Development towns outside of Haifa. 52 I use the term the “Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine” for the events in Palestine of 1947-9 that saw seven eighths of the indigenous Palestinian population expelled from the land that became the state of Israel. Ilan Pappé’s work, Forgotten Palestinians, is cited throughout this paper: Pappé, Ilan. The forgotten Palestinians: A history of the Palestinians in Israel. Yale University Press, 2011. 3.

25

would come to populate these urban centers as well as move into new Kibbutzim and towns,

many built on the remains of Palestinian villages.53 As a result of the ethnocratic urban planning

and land-use policies of the Israeli state, there was no residential population overlap of the

Ashkenazi and Mizrahi communities.54

The new state had several battles to fight. The European Jewish immigrants to the state

between 1945-51 far outnumbered the population of Sabra Jewry that had arrived during the

Second Aliyah. As a result, Hebreophone Jews risked losing their privileged position and

importance to the Germanic and Slavic speakers who came from the extermination camps who

shared Yiddish or High German as a shared language if they had one. These Jews arriving after

1945 had not necessarily held Zionist beliefs, ideals, or practices in the period prior to the

Holocaust. The Jewish colonists of the Yishuv period had developed a Hebrew vernacular

language foreign to the Yiddish-inflected liturgical Hebrew these European Jews were familiar

with. The Hebraization of these new subjects of the Israeli state was, thus, pedagogic in addition

to ideological. At stake was the Zionist project that the settler-colonists of the Yishuv had been

building for nearly a half-century through ‘Avoda ‘Ivrit, a separate language and identity.

The second challenge that the Israeli state faced came as a result of the segregated

Ashkenazi and Mizrahi demographics of the state in the 1950s. With the influx of Arabophone

Jews from Yemen, Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, and Iraq between 1951 and 1956 placed in

development towns, the Israeli state lacked a cohesive Hebreophone fabric. The Mizrahim

provided a buffer between Ashkenazi Jews and the Palestinian non-Jews escaped Zionist

expulsion between 1947 and 1949. Likewise, many Mizrahim were placed in cities on the

Lebanese, Syrian, and Jordanian borders in order to provide a buffer between Arab armies and 53 Pappé, Ilan. The forgotten Palestinians: A history of the Palestinians in Israel. Yale University Press, 2011. 99. 54 Yiftachel, Oren. "‘Ethnocracy’: The Politics of Judaizing Israel/Palestine." Constellations 6, no. 3 (1999): 376.

26

Ashkenazi populations in case of Arab invasion.55 However, just as the Yishuv had feared losing

its Zionist Hebreophone character to the European Holocaust survivors’ Yiddishophone non-

Zionist, so too did the Israeli state fear losing the Mizrahim to the neighboring Palestinians

shared tongue and cultural capital. As such, the Galilee region provided a particularly

challenging test to the Israeli state as it had the largest Palestinian Arabophone population as

well as a high ratio of Mizrahi Jews.56 As a result, Hebraicizing the Mizrahi Jewish population

was a matter of national survival to the Israeli state for fear of an Arabophone Galilee. The

Mizrahi Jews were called upon to abandon their Arabic mother tongue as well as their traditions

in the name of modernity.57 In order to create the narrative of liberation, the Mizrahi Jew lost his

or her Arabness and “backwardness” and became European and “modern” through the passage to

Eretz Yisrael. Hebraization served as an equalizer for the Jews of the Israeli state through a

shared national tongue.58

2.4 Towards a Hebreophone Palestinian

1947 to 1949 was a key moment in that the Yishuv transformed into the state of Israel but

also brought about the paralysis of the Palestinian population as they fell under Israeli Jewish

rule. Palestinian citizens of Israel (PCI) are the descendants of the 156,000 Palestinians who

managed to avoid displacement outside of the state of Israel during the 1947 to 1949 period of

55 Some examples of cities where this is the case are Kiryat Shomah (the Palestinian city of Al-Khalisa), Beit She’an (Bissan), and Afula. Shohat, Ella. "The narrative of the nation and the discourse of modernization: the case of the Mizrahim." Critique: Journal for Critical Studies of the Middle East 6.10 (1997): 5 56 Pappé, Ilan. The forgotten Palestinians: A history of the Palestinians in Israel. Yale University Press, 2011. 73. 57 Ibid, 6. 58 As the demographic distribution of 1950s Israel demonstrates, society was intentionally unequal. The state sought to eliminate both Yiddish speaking Jewry as well as Arabophone. However, while Arab Jews were called to abandon their Arabic language and identity from the moment they entered Eretz Yisrael, Yiddish was afforded a far more privileged status. Yiddish remained the language of the Israeli parliament for the first two decades of Israeli statehood.

27

the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.59 A religiously and ethnically heterogeneous population, PCI of

all sects and ethnic-ancestries form integral parts of their communities extending beyond the

current-day state delineations.60 They lived under military rule from 1948 to 1966, seen as

disloyal to the state and, thus, an existential threat to the “Jewish-character” of the state.61 1966

saw the end of martial law over the PCI population and their nationalization into the state of

Israel. The following year, 1967, witnessed the June “Six-Day” War in which the state of Israel

conquered neighboring Arab territory three times the size of the land conquered from 1947 to

1949.62 None of these groups exists in isolation in Israel. This diverse community of Palestinians

traverses treacherous territory as it is seen with suspicion by the Israeli state as well neighboring

Arab states. In certain media representations, the PCI population is held as a testament to the

democratic character of the state of Israel.63

Divisions were not just based on prescribed on sectarian lines, but also on geography. A

key task of the Israeli Land Ministry and the Jewish National Fund was the redistribution of

confiscated Palestinian lands for the foundation of new Jewish settlements.64 The Israeli state

faced the inconvenient reality that the majority of the population of the Upper and Lower Galilee

59 The PCI live a precarious political existence in the turmoil and upheaval of the state and non-state actors in the surrounding region. The plight of these people who are referred in Zionist discourse as “Israeli Arabs” or in Palestinian discourse as “1948 Arabs (48 عربب ) or in academia as “Palestinian citizens of Israel” has varied depending on the political landscape of the moment. For more information, cf.: Rouhana, Nadim, and As’ad Ghanem. "The crisis of minorities in ethnic states: The case of Palestinian citizens in Israel." International Journal of Middle East Studies 30.03 (1998): 326. 60 PCIs are comprised of Arab Sunni and Druze Muslims, Christians of a variety of denominations, nomadic Bedouins as well as small ethnoreligious minorities of Circassian Muslims and Armenian Christians that are tied beyond the state of Israel to the Occupied West Bank, Gaza Strip as well as into the neighboring states of Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan 61 Ganim, Asʻad. The Palestinian-Arab minority in Israel, 1948-2000: A political study. SUNY Press, 2001. 45 62 With the occupation of West Bank, Gaza Strip, Egyptian Sinai peninsula, and Syrian Golan Heights, international pressure and attention shifted towards those inhabiting these occupied territories as well as Palestinian refugees in the diaspora and away from the PCI population. 63 Mamdani, Mahmood. “Settler Colonialism: Then and Now” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 41, No. 3 (Spring 2015), pp. 614 64 Yiftachel, Oren. "‘Ethnocracy’: The Politics of Judaizing Israel/Palestine." Constellations 6, no. 3 (1999): 378.

28

regions is Palestinian.65 Likewise, the majority of Palestinian urban populations within the state

of Israel lie in the Galilee.66

The integration of PCIs would not require much Hebraization as most of the work was in

manual labor.67 However, PCIs did become integrated into to the university system of the state of

Israel.68,69 Never has the state of Israel allowed an Arabophone university to exist west of the

1949 Armistice line.70 As a result, PCIs have had to be integrated into the Hebreophone Israeli

state university apparatus. Consequently, PCIs became yet one of many different ethnic groups

to have to receive Hebraization of some sort. However, the issue arises of the tension between

incorporating an ethnic and linguistic minoritized community into the state apparatus and still

managing to keep it separate. If PCIs are to inhabit the same space as Israeli Jews, how are they

to be integrated? Or rather, how are they to be kept separate?

By all surveys and censuses of the State of Israel, it remains a practically completely

segregated state.71 PCIs make up roughly 20% of the population of the State of Israel or around

one million citizens. Of Israel’s many public schools, there were only seven integrated Jewish-

PCI schools.72 In the Galilee region where the majority of the PCI community resides, resources

are webbed to go towards Jewish colonial settlements and bypass PCI communities.73 It is in

this region that the separation between the PCI community and the dominant, yet minority in

population, Israeli Jewish community is among the most pronounced. 65 The state still faces the same problem. 66 (Jerusalem exists in a complicated legal state of exception) 67 Sa'di, Ahmad H. "Incorporation without integration: Palestinian citizens in Israel's labour market." Sociology 29.3 (1995): 448. 68 Shavit, Yossi. "Segregation, tracking, and the educational attainment of minorities: Arabs and Oriental Jews in Israel." American Sociological Review (1990): 116. 69 Marʼi, Sami Khalil. Arab education in Israel. Syracuse University Press, 1978: 34 70 Rafael, Eliezer Ben. Language, identity, and social division: The case of Israel. Oxford University Press, USA, 1994:78 71 Yiftachel, Oren. "‘Ethnocracy’: The Politics of Judaizing Israel/Palestine." Constellations 6, no. 3 (1999): 376. 72 Leoncini, Sabina. "Equality and inclusion of the Palestinian minority in mixed Israeli schools: A case study of Jaffa's Weizman School." London Review of Education 12.3 (2014): 280. 73 Peleg, Ilan, and Dov Waxman. Israel's Palestinians: the conflict within. Cambridge University Press, 2011: 23.

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2.5 The Galilee

The Galilee region in the north of the state of Israel remains a region with a majority of

PCIs. Despite the relatively equal demographic balance of this region, large imbalances exist

between them. The Israeli state has failed to Judaize this region despite sustained efforts that

continue until today. This region is a particularly interesting site, not just for its demographics,

but also for its heterogeneous mosaic. Nearly all PCI males in the Galilee and a significant

number of younger-generation PCI females speak Hebrew fluently alongside Arabic.74 The

greatest influence on Hebraization in this region is not ideology but rather economics: Hebrew is

required for work in manual labor in Jewish towns and cities as well as in commerce. Within PCI

villages, Arabic is the daily language of communication.75 However, many Palestinian villages

welcome Jewish commerce with Hebrew signs and advertisements. Likewise, in order to deal

with the State authorities of the Israeli police and the Israeli army, knowledge of Hebrew is

mandatory. However, not unlike other cases of Arab populations under colonial influences,

Hebrew has crept into PCI spoken Arabic and syntax.76 With practically every PCI citizen using

the two languages in his or her daily life, code-mixing is inevitable.77 Yet, PCIs have at best a

strained and ambivalent relationship to the Hebrew language.78 Hebrew is simultaneously the

language of the foreign colonizer while also the language of access to economic opportunities

and tertiary education.

2.6 Hebraization, Judaization

74 The lower numbers of Hebraization amongst PCI females is due to a lower percentage of PCI females that commute to Jewish towns and city for labor purposes. However, amongst the younger generations that see a great increase in the number of PCI women working outside the home, almost all have at the least a professional grasp of Hebrew. 75 By Arabic, the diglossia of Modern Standard Arabic as well as Palestinian dialects in intended. 76 Lefkowitz, Daniel. Words and stones: the politics of language and identity in Israel. Oxford University Press, 2004. 145. 77 Code-mixing: the simultaneous use of two languages in the same speech act. 78 Ibid, 165.

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PCIs have developed a pragmatic relationship with the Hebrew language out of necessity.

While Arabic is an official language of the state of Israel, Hebrew is a mandatory language for

one to survive outside of his or her town of birth. One key aspect of the ongoing Jewish

settlement of the Galilee undertaken by the Israeli state in tandem with the Jewish National

Fund-KKL is the introduction of Jewish settlements breaking up contiguous or concentrated

Palestinian towns.79 With state capital concentrated in these Jewish settlements, the economy of

blocks of PCI towns in the Galilee became centered in these Jewish settlements. The unintended

consequence of these settlements such as Karmiel and Upper Nazareth is that with time they

attracted a PCI minority. Despite subsidies to draw Jews (primarily new immigrants) to these

new settlements in the Galilee, since their foundation in the 1960s, these Israeli settlements have

been losing Jewish population each year.80 As a result, PCI residents have been coming to fill

empty housing in search of greater economic opportunities as well as substantially better state-

provided services. While in Central Israel it would be nearly impossible for a PCI to rent a house

or apartment, the failure of the Israeli state and its northern settlements to hold its Jewish

population has ultimately led Jewish landlords to rent to PCIs. This migration of PCIs occurs in

the context of an Israeli state that seldom grants building permits to PCI municipalities and limits

the geographic footprint a PCI village can occupy.81 Jewish planned settlements like Upper

Nazareth, which have a smaller population than the neighboring PCI city of Nazareth, are

allocated more land than their PCI neighbor.

79 The Jewish National Fund – Keren Kayemet le-Yisrael (JNF-KKL) is a Zionist organization that since 1901 has bought Palestinian lands for Zionist settlement. After 1948, they would be given the Palestinian lands seized by the Haganah and Irgun forces to redistribute to European Jewish arrivals to the newly-created state of Israel. For more information, see Pappé, Ilan. The ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Oneworld Publications, 2007. 80 Yiftachel, Oren. "‘Ethnocracy’: The Politics of Judaizing Israel/Palestine." Constellations 6, no. 3 (1999): 379. 81 Pappé, Ilan. The forgotten Palestinians: A history of the Palestinians in Israel. Yale University Press, 2011. 99.

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Even today, the state of Israel has not managed to successfully Judaize the Galilee,

leaving instead a complicated network of Jewish settlements and surrounding Palestinian

villages. While Judaization of the Galilee has failed to achieve its goal of a Jewish majority,

Hebraization of the PCI population has succeeded. This success was due to the centralization of

capital and state resources in Jewish settlements and cities such as Karmiel, Upper Nazareth,

Tiberias, Afula, and Nahariyya. As most PCI population centers in the Galilee are denied the

denomination of “city” and, rather, are still classified as villages, the Galilee has failed to

develop a population center apart from Haifa in its southwestern corner. While Nazareth is one

of three PCI communities in the Galilee to receive the designation as city (along with Shefa

‘Amr and Sakhnin), it is unable to urbanize due to restrictions on land allocation by the Israeli

state. Restrictions on the growth of PCI towns and villages as well as limited allocation of state

funds for education and infrastructure in these communities created migration of PCIs towards

Jewish settlements. PCIs have relied on Hebraization for economic survival outside of their

communities.

Chapter III: State language education and acceptable expressions of

Arabness

3.1 Ulpan: Cultural Hebraization

Ulpan is a progression of courses aimed at Hebraizing new adult immigrants to the state

of Israel that started in the 1950s.82 Its aim was to inculcate as well as monoglot apprehension of

the world and the new land around the newly arrived Oleh.83 Beyond language, the Ulpan is the

site “in which the immigrant acquires basic key terms from the national reservoir of associations

82 Schely-Newman, Esther. "Constructing Literate Israelis: A Critical Analysis of Adult Literacy Texts." Israel Studies 15.2 (2010): 199. 83 Ibid, 199.

32

and the collective national memory.”84 The pedagogy of an Ulpan is not unlike that of a primary-

school language classroom. Many adult learners of Hebrew in the 1950s were Mizrahim who

were illiterate in Arabic as well as Hebrew. The state wanted to create “literate Israelis” out of

these illiterate Arab Jews who would be able to read not just written Hebrew, but unwritten

social codes and status.85 The Israeli state’s approach to Hebraizing new adult immigrants in the

1950s treated adult Mizrahim as if they were children, a tabula rasa on which the state could

draw a new identity.

The Ulpan Hebraized its new subjects by Israelifying and Judaizing them.86 To Israelify

is to make a diasporic Jew resemble a Sabra Jew. While an Oleh could never become a Sabra, his

or her children would be born a Sabra. Therefore, the inculcation of Zionist national culture to

adult learners of Hebrew took into account that they would never become fully integrated like

their children would eventually become.87 To Judaify an Oleh was only applied to the Mizrahim

whose Mediterranean and North African religious practices were deemed unlawful by the

dominate-Ashkenazi rabbinate.88 They were portrayed as ignorant to the their state of pre-

modernity, oblivious to their own history and that of the Jewish people.”89

Schely-Newman takes a critical reading to a major Ulpan textbook written in 1972,

Kulanu Yahad by Dr. Shlomo Kodesh.90 With illiteracy in the Moshavim around forty percent

84 Aviad, Riva and Peretz, Meyer. “The Quiet revolution in Conferring theLanguage: Evaluation Testing for Ulpan Graduation,” in Lamed Le’Ilash, Yitzhak Schleizinger and Malka Muchnik (Tel-Aviv, 2003) 24 [Hebrew]. Quoted in Ibid, 198. 85 Ibid, 197. 86 I borrow here on a quote from Daniel Lefkowitz’s Words and stones: “The ulpan curriculum included a heavy dose of lessons on Israeli and Jewish identity.” Lefkowitz, Daniel. Words and stones: the politics of language and identity in Israel. Oxford University Press, 2004. 199. 87 Ibid, 199. 88 Massad, Joseph. "Zionism's internal others: Israel and the Oriental Jews." Journal of Palestine Studies (1996): 58. 89 Schely-Newman, Esther. "Constructing Literate Israelis: A Critical Analysis of Adult Literacy Texts." Israel Studies 15.2 (2010): 208. 90 Kulanu Yahad: (In English) Everyone together. Hava Yaari, Sefer Halimud Lealfabetim, in Haskalt Am Be’Israeal, Jerusalem, 1972: 111–4 [Hebrew].

33

amongst Mizrahi adults, the state tried to urge Hebraization and Alphabetization: “Hebrew

literacy is a key for full participation in civic life, otherwise they ‘will not be civilized citizens in

Israel.’”91 This textbook commands the Olim to be “good parents to our children and happy

citizens in our country.”92 Similarly, Israelis romanticize Hebrew as “the one mother tongue that

mothers learn from their children.”93 In this case, the Oleh is the parent to the nation and not the

reverse. Given the dearth of Sabra Hebreophone Jews in the 1950s, it would take at least another

Sabra generation born in the state of Israel before Hebrew could take hold.

Ashkenazi teachers taught most Ulpanim while the majority of the students were Mizrahim. It

was one of the few places of intersection between urban or Kibbutz Ashkenazim and suburban or

Moshav-bound Mizrahim.94 The Ashkenazi-dominated Israeli state charged itself with the duty

to “reeducate” and “modernize” the Mizrahim, who were represented as hyper-religious,

superstitious, illiterate, and irrational.95 “These unschooled adults need to go through a process of

eradicating their ignorance—including their customs and traditions. When all is deleted, other

information can be introduced.” The male Sabra Zionist citizen was envisioned as the agrarian,

modern, socialist European Kibbutznik who, when not farming, served in army reserve duty.96

Female Ashkenazim were to write to their husbands away on-base and to keep up with Israeli

and global affairs via Hebrew print media.97 In this romanticized depiction, the men would return

from the army base to resume farming. It was the duty of female Ashkenazim to teach Ulpan:

“(they) were mostly young women, they were nevertheless emissaries of the state—soldiers in

91 “Civilized” in this sentence can be read as “modern” or, interchangeably, “nationalized.” Ibid, 200. 92 Ibid, 202. 93 Lefkowitz, Daniel. Words and stones: the politics of language and identity in Israel. Oxford University Press, 2004. 135. 94 Ibid, 138. 95 Ibid, 138. 96 Schely-Newman, Esther. "Constructing Literate Israelis: A Critical Analysis of Adult Literacy Texts." Israel Studies 15.2 (2010): 202.

97 Ibid, 203.

34

uniform—who offered a key, opened a gate (shaar), to the new society in texts written in the

sacred language, Hebrew.”98

Ulpanim operate until today in order to teach new Jewish immigrants to the state of Israel

as well as visiting foreigners. Most importantly, Palestinians eventually became students in the

Ulpan, the implications of which are discussed in Chapter IV of this paper.

3.2 Israeli state Arabic

As the past two chapters have touched upon, Israeli Ashkenazi Jews have been in close

contact with the Arabic language since their arrival in Palestine. Likewise, Arabic was the

mother tongue for the Jewish arrivals to Palestine known as the “Mizrahim.” However, as

mentioned previously, in order to make an Israeli subject out of their Asian and African Jews, it

was necessary to de-Arabize them to become a Mizrahi subject of the Israeli state. Today, it is

nearly sixty-seven years since the declaration of the establishment of the state of Israel, a time at

which most Jews residing in historic Palestine arrived. With language attrition occurring

throughout the communities of these Jewish arrivals, there is no major second mother tongue for

Israeli Jews.99 The project of Hebraizing Jews in Palestine succeeded. The main two languages

taught in schools, aside from Hebrew, are English and Arabic.100 Israel, like many states in the

world, teaches English as a requisite second language. Along with strong political and cultural

98 Ibid, 208. 99 The exception to complete Hebraization are three groups of people. One is that some Chassidic Jewish communities in Jerusalem that predate the current non-Chassidic state refuse to adopt Hebrew out of opposition to the non- Chassidic nature to Zionism and choose to instead speak Yiddish. Another exception is North American Jews who have maintained their English language since English is the language of globalization and taught in Israeli schools as a requisite second language. Likewise many North American Jewish arrivals never fully Hebraized and as such have taught their children English while the children learn Hebrew in school. The third group is Soviet Jews who arrived to the state of Israel after the fall of the USSR, the first generation arriving two decades ago. 100 Lefkowitz, Daniel. Words and stones: the politics of language and identity in Israel. Oxford University Press, 2004. 135.

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ties to the Anglophone world, teaching English meets little ideological resistance.101 Palestinian

Arabic is also taught in the upper grades of Israeli schools. Exceptional students can apply in

middle school to advanced programs in Arabic.102 However, the obvious difference between

teaching the English language and teaching Arabic is that while English is intended for

communication with those outside Israel and the global market, teaching the Arabic language is

intended for monitoring the Palestinian citizens of Israel and the Palestinians under Israeli

occupation in the West Bank and Gaza.103 While teaching English would involve teaching

reading, writing, speaking and listening, teaching Palestinian Arabic is mostly focused on

teaching listening.104 Listening is taught in order to analyze surveillance information: tapped

phone lines, interrogation tapes, intercepted documents. Many Israeli Jewish citizens spend their

obligatory military service in one of Israel’s intelligence branches.105 Intelligence is particularly

a destination for female conscripts who are generally not put into combat positions.106 Thus, with

the significant gap in power dynamics between Israeli Jews and Palestinians, the Arabic skills

being taught are meant to reinforce those power dynamics.107 The number of Israelis who can

speak Arabic is surprisingly small for a state with such a sizeable nationalized Arabophone

population as well as nearly four million Arabophone Palestinians living under their military

101 That aside, there are laws requiring that Israeli diplomats give speeches in Hebrew when traveling outside of Israel a nd laws that certain government documents must be published in Hebrew. However this type of language policy is not uncommon in governments with language preservation policies at work such as Quebec, Catalonia, France, the Swedish-speaking regions of Finland etc. Cf.: Suleiman, Yasir. "A War of Words: Language and Conflict in the Middle East." Central European Review of International Affairs 25 (2005): 89. 102 Lefkowitz, Daniel. Words and stones: the politics of language and identity in Israel. Oxford University Press, 2004, 137. 103 Ibid, 137. 104 Ibid, 153. 105 Sasson-Levy, Orna. "Feminism and military gender practices: Israeli women soldiers in “masculine” roles." Sociological Inquiry 73.3 (2003): 447. 106 Ibid, 461. 107 PCIs are not allowed into the Israeli military and state security for “security reasons.” Exceptions to this are those Druze sect and certain Bedouins residing in the Galilee who are allowed to enter certain roles in the military. For more information on this issue, cf.: Frisch, Hillel. "The Druze minority in the Israeli military: traditionalizing an ethnic policing role." Armed Forces & Society 20.1 (1993): 51-67 and Falah, Ghazi. "How Israel Controls the Bedouin in Israel." Journal of Palestine Studies (1985): 35-51.

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rule. Of the 1.7 million Palestinian citizens of Israel, the majority speaks Hebrew at a

professional level, but few Israeli Jews speak Arabic.

The teaching of the Arabic language serves a utilitarian purpose for the Israeli state:

creating Jewish subjects that are capable of understanding occupied Palestinian subjects only

insofar as the power dynamics of the state of the occupied population remain intact. The only

speech act that an Israeli Jew is able to produce after Israeli state Arabic education are orders and

interrogations rather than any type of inquiry and communication with the Other. This

deployment of language for intelligence gives Israeli Jews a powerful role over Palestinians in

their ability to listen to Palestinians’ most intimate conversations through the hoard of data of

wiretaps and computer surveillance. The Israeli Jew who works for the intelligence apparatus can

remain fully outside of Palestinian society, yet observe it from the inside.

Not teaching Israelis how to speak except for military commands and interrogation

procedures deprives the Israeli Jew of the ability to speak to a Palestinian and cannot come to

empathize with him or her. The power structure of surveillance means that Palestinians are only

allowed to speak in Arabic to each other, and must always communicate in Hebrew with the state

or its Jewish citizens. There may be an Israeli Jewish conscript listening to wiretaps or reading

emails, however the chances are that this conscript will never see the face of the person he or she

surveils and the Palestinian being surveilled may never know whether he or she was being

surveilled, when, or by whom. The impossibility of communication despite the possibility of

comprehension of the Other leaves the two subjects intimately close, but always separate.

3.3 Illegible History

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At the core of the Hebraization project was the aim of creating a linguistically

homogenous Israeli Sabra Jew. Similar to other European national projects, the Zionist

movement rewrote the history of world Jewry in another language. The Holocaust of European

Jewry between 1938 and 1945 and subsequent mass migration of its survivors to Palestine from

1945 to 1949 ruptured the European Jewish identity. Similarly, the mass migration of Arab Jews

from 1951 to 1956 produced the same effect for the Mizrahim. Pre-1945 Sabra settlers made up

about a tenth of the population of the state of Israel in addition to the sum total of post-1945

arrivals of Holocaust survivors and Arab Jews as well as the 156,000 not-expelled Palestinians.

The language of the minority, however, became the language of the majority. A new language

meant a new identity and with that new identity, a new history. Nearly every Jew born in

Palestine would experience language attrition, a failure to pass the language of the parents to the

children.108 As a result, Hebrew would not just become the language of the future but also the

language of memory of the past. The nascent Israeli state could thus monopolize the Israeli

Jewish collective memory of galut Jewry and revise it.109 Additionally, many older Jewish

migrants to Palestine in the 1940s and 1950s would fail to learn Hebrew at an advanced level.

The product of such a situation is that younger generations could not necessarily understand their

grandparents and oral histories would be either translated as passed down through generations or

lost altogether.110

Hebrew provided the platform for a revised history, a new future, and separateness from

the indigenous Palestinian non-Jews. The Israeli state thus became a fundamental arbiter in the

creation and maintenance of a national narrative, not just through the creation of state archives

108 Lefkowitz, Daniel. Words and stones: the politics of language and identity in Israel. Oxford University Press, 2004. 132. 109 Galut: Hebrew biblical term for “Exile.” 110 Ibid, 157.

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and museums, but also as a whole set of heterogeneous experiences of Jews throughout dozens

of states in the world become translated and transposed to these archives. The history of world

Jewry prior to 1945 becomes inaccessible to the majority of Israeli Jewish lay readers unfamiliar

with Yiddish or Arabic. Even in academia where language proficiency is fundamental, Yiddish

and Judeo-Arabic scholarship is limited at best. Scholarship is almost always focused on

Yiddish, seen as a fundamental tool to understanding European Ashkenazi Jewish history as only

2% of all Yiddish writings have to been translated to any language.111 The state, thus, came to

possess the key to all historiography and epistemology through its project of Hebraization.

Chapter IV: The University

4.1 Hebrew University in Jerusalem

The Hebrew University in Jerusalem (HUJ) was founded in 1918 to educate the Jewish

settlers in Jerusalem. Modeled on the Free University of Berlin, it sought to produce

Hebreophone Jewish subjects in the Yishuv. What Technion served for the hard sciences, HUJ

was to everything else. As such, HUJ served as the religious Zionist center since its

foundation.112 Along with the Technion and the Weizmann Institute for Science, it predates the

state of Israel and was integrated into the Israeli national university system after 1948. Located

on Mount Scopus in Northeastern Jerusalem, it was the only territory east of the 1949 Armistice

line between Israel and Jordan to remain under Israeli sovereignty. The campus was abandoned

from 1949 to 1967 due to its inaccessibility located in Jordanian-occupied East Jerusalem. The

university returned to its Mount Scopus location, straddling both Jewish West Jerusalem and

111 Goldsmith, Emanuel S. Modern Yiddish Culture: The Story of the Yiddish Language Movement. Fordham Univ Press, 1997. 73. 112 Avineri, Shlomo. The making of modern Zionism: intellectual origins of the Jewish State. New York: Basic, 1981. 24.

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Occupied Palestinian East Jerusalem.113 In the period after 1967 with the Israeli conquest of East

Jerusalem, HUJ allowed for the expansion of Jewish settlers into its surrounding East Jerusalem

neighborhoods.114 As Israel’s top-ranked university, HUJ attracts a wide array of people: Jewish

students from all corners of the state, Jewish settlers from the West bank, international students

and fellows both Jewish and not, as well as Palestinian students from East Jerusalem and the

West Bank. The last group of students deserves special consideration. The Palestinian student

population at HUJ has been greatly affected by the 1994 Oslo Peace Accords and the

consolidation of the PLO into the Palestinian Authority due to the increase in checkpoints

between Jerusalem and the West Bank and the construction of the separation wall.115 In a

strategically important location, HUJ represents the future of the nature of the state between the

Mediterranean Sea and Jordan River. HUJ’s student body size has increased over the years to

reflect its increasing role, not just as a university, but also as part of the Israeli state’s presence in

Jerusalem.

The Oslo Accords of 1994 brought together Israelis and West Bank Palestinians in a new

way. Since 1967, Israel has expanded into the West Bank through its military and settlers.

Simultaneously, West Bank Palestinians have entered temporarily into the state of Israel through

work permits issued by the state.116 The stagnation and de-development of the West Bank and

Gaza economies following 1967, as well as decline of their agricultural industries, has meant that

more West Bank and Gaza Palestinians have depended on the state of Israel for their

113 The original campus itself is considered by international law to be part of the pre-1967 demarcations of the Israeli state, many of its new buildings such as its dormitories fall in Palestinian East Jerusalem. 114 Efrat, Elisha, and Allen G. Noble. "Planning Jerusalem." Geographical Review (1988): 400. 115 Lagerquist, Peter. "Fencing the last sky: Excavating Palestine after Israel's “separation wall.” Journal of Palestine Studies. (2004): 5. 116 Gordon, Neve. Israel's occupation. Univ of California Press, 2008. 33.

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livelihoods.117 Cheaper West Bank and Gaza laborers now replaced the PCI population, which

had previously performed most manual labor in Israel. Meanwhile, the Israeli occupation of

these territories had led to an increase in the size of Palestinian universities. This change was for

two primary reasons. One was the collapse and destruction of the Palestinian agricultural

industries that led to many having to depend on Israeli work permits for their livelihood. Not

unlike the Galilee region, the Palestinian population of the West Bank had lost their agricultural

lands to military bases and Jewish colonial settlements. Simultaneously, West Bank cities such

as Ramallah, Hebron, Bethlehem, and Nablus were not able to follow their natural growth as

cities and urbanize. This limitation led to what Ilan Pappé describes as the oxymoron of a “rural

middle class.”118 Pappé was referring to the PCIs in villages in the Galilee where agriculture had

ceased to be a means to livelihood and, thus, liberal professions had become increasingly the

norm. In the case of the PCIs, not being able to migrate to urban centers of capital due to

restricted housing contracts and institutional discrimination meant that university-educated PCIs

stayed in the countryside that had little agricultural trade. The same thing happened in the West

Bank. However, the main difference between the PCI and West Bankers was that while the PCIs

had freedom of movement within the state of Israel, West Bankers were legally barred from

visiting their economic and cultural capital, Jerusalem. Without a metropolitan center, the West

Bank languished in de-development. Following a similar trend to the PCI population, the West

Bankers entered university in order to escape the fate of unemployment or reliance on Israeli

117 Roy, Sara. "De-development revisited: Palestinian economy and society since Oslo." Journal of Palestine Studies (1999): 65. 118 Pappé, Ilan. The forgotten Palestinians: A history of the Palestinians in Israel. Yale University Press, 2011: 110.

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work permits for their livelihood. However, university education for West Bankers would often

lead to their emigration to other Arab states, primarily Jordan.119

As HUJ has played a significant role in the ideological creation of a Hebreophone

population, the introduction of Palestinian Arabophone students is no small matter. Likewise, for

Palestinian East Jerusalem students whose national identity, language, culture, and customs are

under attack by expropriation by the Israeli state, the choice to study in a Zionist, Hebreophone

university is a loaded decision. Similar to the PCI, the economic and political situation of East

Jerusalem and West Bank Palestinians is unstable, so university education is one of the few

means to social mobility.120

4.2 Hebrew University Ulpan and East Jerusalemite Palestinians

In order to study at the Hebrew University, East Jerusalemite students must learn Hebrew

in state-administered Ulpanim. Unlike the PCI population, East Jerusalem Palestinians schools

are not administered directly by the Israeli state and follow a similar curriculum to the one used

under the Palestinian Authority.121 Hebrew is not taught in primary and secondary education in

East Jerusalem. Likewise, many East Jerusalem Palestinian schools are not recognized by the

Municipality of Jerusalem and, thus, do not receive funding nor standardization of curriculum.122

As a result, the Ulpan is a requisite step for Palestinians to enter HUJ.

The Ulpan is the site where new arrivals to the state of Israel (Olim) are taught the state

language, Hebrew. While the notion of Aliyah, (ascendance) to Eretz Yisrael is the Zionist vision

119 Ali, Nohad. "Representation of Arab Citizens in the Institutions of Higher Education In Israel." Sikkuy (2013): 17. 120 For a PCI, social mobility could mean being able to move to a metropolis such as Nazareth or Haifa and work in the professional sector. For an East Jerusalemite, being able to find work in Jewish West Jerusalem can be the only means to survival in East Jerusalem. The legal residential status of East Jeruslaem is such that if one leaves East Jerusalem for a period of over seven years for whatever reason, s/he loses her/his right to reside in East Jerusalem 121 Hever, Shir. "Education in East Jerusalem." Alternative Information Center 13-15 (2007): 14. 122 Ibid, 16.

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of this process, the Palestinian is an alien to the land. East Jerusalem Palestinians are new

arrivals to the state of Israel, who until 1967 lived under Jordanian occupation and today live in

separate East Jerusalem. To enter the Israeli state university system is to transform the nature of

the East Jerusalem subject position within the Israeli state itself.

The position of East Jerusalemite Palestinians is not far from where the Mizrahim were in

the 1950s and 1960s. Treated as backward and less sophisticated, the Ulpan reeducates the East

Jerusalem Palestinian. However, there exists an obvious tension that was not present with the

Mizrahi Jew: the East Jerusalemite Palestinian is not Jewish, nor an Israeli citizen, and will never

be received as one. While the Mizrahim held the hope that their children would be accepted as

Sabras, Palestinians cannot be born Israelis. This phenomenon is not just due to exclusivity in

Israeli society to Jews, but also because in order for that metamorphosis to occur, the Palestinian

would have to give up his or her identity completely.123 Unlike with the Mizrahim, only East

Jerusalemite Palestinians hoping to study at HUJ undergo the process of Ulpan.

East Jerusalemite Palestinians face much of the same institutional racism in Ulpan as the

Mizrahim did a half-century ago. As detailed in Chapter 1, the national and religious ideology

imparted through Ulpan resonates little with non-European Jews. In the case of Palestinian non-

Jews, it must resonate even less. However, Hebrew remains the most important second language

for Palestinians.124 The Hebrew University presents East Jerusalemite Palestinians with an

education unparalleled in the region. Endemic poverty has lasted since the beginning of Israel’s

123 Lefkowitz, Daniel. Words and stones: the politics of language and identity in Israel. Oxford University Press, 2004. 141. 124 Amara, Muhammad. "Teaching Hebrew to Palestinian Pupils in Israel." Current Issues in Language Planning 8.2 (2007): 245.

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occupation of East Jerusalem and the West Bank leaving Palestinians with deep uncertainty

about the future.125

East Jerusalemite Palestinians are neither immigrants to the land nor to the state of Israel.

They have lived under Israeli rule since 1967 despite being completely separated from the West

Jerusalem economic center. However, as the Mizrahim showed, the Ulpan is as much about

creating a new subject – one who knows his or her place within Israeli society – as it is about

Hebraization.

By not administering East Jerusalem schools, the Israeli state loses the opportunity to

exert coercive power over Palestinians through state curriculum and schools. Instead, the

coercive power any Palestinian would be familiar with is the army and the police. In Jerusalem, a

completely racially segregated city, a Palestinian is rarely spoken to by an Israeli unless the

Israeli is in a position of power as an employer, police officer, or soldier. These speech acts

undoubtedly solely occur in Hebrew and the Palestinian’s ability to respond in coherent,

uninflected Hebrew is privileged. In the case of the Ulpan, the power dynamics have not

changed. Just as Schely-Newman illustrated, the Ulpan is not a site of critical thinking so much

as it is a site of the state’s coercive power over vulnerable subjects in order to produce “happy

citizens.”126 Ulpanim prepare new Israelis for university or the army. Given that East

Jerusalemite Palestinians cannot go to the army, they are being prepared for university where

they will receive similar power dynamics from what they experienced in the Ulpan and prior to

it. As Schely-Newman concluded in her article, “The relationship between language and social

125 Gordon, Neve. Israel's occupation. Univ of California Press, 2008. 187. 126 Schely-Newman, Esther. "Constructing Literate Israelis: A Critical Analysis of Adult Literacy Texts." Israel Studies 15.2 (2010): 208-9.

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power is not recognized, nor transmitted to the student … producing “simple minded” citizens

that will not challenge the Establishment or endanger the social status-quo.”127

4.3 The Rothberg International School

Under the history tab of the Rothberg International School at the Hebrew University of

Jerusalem (RIS) information webpage, the second paragraph reads:

In the hallways of the School you can hear English spoken in the accents of New York, New England and the Deep South, of Britain, Australia and South Africa. You can hear students talking in Hebrew, Arabic, Russian, Polish, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Swedish, Norwegian, Korean and Japanese. The Hebrew University brings all these students, from over 60 countries, together in Jerusalem to share a common experience in Hebrew – their new common language.128

In this paragraph, HUJ aligns itself with the Global North: not one Global South country

is named. Likewise, the “in-gathering” of languages it lists also belong to the Global North. Just

as the original Zionist Yishuv was an in-gathering of European Jews, most of whom were fluent

in more than one language besides Hebrew before arriving to Palestine, this ad promises to give

polyglot students a monoglot experience through Hebrew.

The RIS YouTube page opens with an introductory promotional video. A foreign female

student with an Arabic-sounding name, Rasha Uthman, speaks in a North American accent,

“Rothberg is a truly unique environment because you have Arabs, you have Jews, you have

Christians, you have Muslims … all learning together in the same environment.”129 Later on the

video praises HUJ’s Ulpan immediately following it with praise for the Arabic program. The

aforementioned student says, “I was a bit insecure about my current knowledge of the Arabic

language and my professor allowed me to truly appreciate the Arabic language.” The following

127 Ibid, 209. 128 "History." Rothberg International School - Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Rothberg International School – Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 29 Mar. 2015. Web. 10 Apr. 2015. <https://overseas.huji.ac.il/?CategoryID=557>. 129 "The Rothberg International School." YouTube. YouTube, 30 Dec. 2009. Web. 11 Apr. 2015. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hIQwYlCKos>.

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section of the video praises HUJ’s Jewish and Bible studies program, during which a female

student named Amal Uthman appears on the video to say, “Being at this university has opened

my eyes, my ears, and my mind to learning about the culture and the history of the Jewish

people.”130 The video gives equal time to advertising Hebrew and Arabic. The students

interviewed are portraying HUJ the way it would like to be portrayed: diverse, liberal, and open.

The use of two North Americans of Arab-descent, one who expresses awe for the diversity of

HUJ and the other who expresses joy at having had her mind “opened” to Jewish culture by the

university, is deployed in order to portray the HUJ classroom as a veritable cultural exchange

versus a one-way flow of ideas and information.

At the end of the video, students speak about a four-day hike from the Mediterranean to

the Sea of Galilee that the RIS organizes. The images in the video show a Galilee devoid of its

two million inhabitants. A male student expresses his admiration: “It’s just a good experience to

travel in the land, to meet with other international students, to feel the land, and to develop a

strong connection with people from all the world (sic.).”131 This sentence echoes the Kibbutznik

ideology that started in the Yishuv era. As Daniel Lefkowitz wrote in Words and stones: “the

image of the farmer is also a core symbol of identity, historically claimed by Palestinian and

Israeli nationalist movements, and currently struggled over in Israeli public discourse.”132 In this

video, the foreign student is claiming the land for Israel by expressing his admiration for HUJ.

He closes the narrative of the video saying, “Rothberg is a gateway; it’s a gateway into Israel;

it’s a gateway into the romance of Jerusalem; it’s a gateway into the future.” Just as the series of

Ulpan books for Mizrahi adults in the 1970s was called Shaar (Gateway), this student, likewise,

130 Ibid. 131 Ibid. 132 132 Lefkowitz, Daniel. Words and stones: the politics of language and identity in Israel. Oxford University Press, 2004. 175.

46

utilizes this term. His statement acknowledges not only the state of Israel, but also its legitimacy

over Jerusalem, as well as Israel’s connection to the “future” and, thus, modernity and

“Europeanness.” His statements vary little from the original Ulpan books referenced at the end of

Chapter I and the Ulpanim that East Jerusalemite Palestinians take part in.

4.4 University of Haifa’s International School’s de-Palestinified Arabic

for Foreign Students

In 1962, HUJ opened the University of Haifa (HU) under its auspices. Haifa already had

a major technical university, the Technion. As with the establishment of the Technion forty years

earlier, HUJ opened its new branch in Haifa to fill in the educational gap of the north and attract

more Jewish settlement to the Galilee. In 1966, HU moved to its current campus atop Mount

Carmel overlooking Haifa and the Galilee and in 1967 became independent from HUJ. Unlike

the Technion, HU does not draw a significant number of Israeli Jewish students from other

regions of the state of Israel. However, as the only non-technical university in the Galilee region,

it serves as the only four-year university available to PCI students.133 This role for PCI students

was an unintended consequence of HU as it failed to attract more Jewish students from other

parts of the state. In fact, PCI students are now thirty percent of the student body. However,

despite the numbers of PCI students, 98% of the faculty are Israeli Jews.134

The University of Haifa offered courses in the beginning levels of Arabic to exchange

students spending one or two semesters at HU. Rather than being focused on security Arabic, the

textbook, written in archaic Arabic script with awkward syntax, focuses on dialogues between

133 Legally, PCI students are not prohibited from studying in any Israeli university. However, with housing discrimination and limited campus housing in general, it is next-to-impossible for PCI students to move to other cities in the state of Israel for university. For more information, consult Arar, Khalid, and Mohanned Mustafa. "Access to Higher Education for Palestinians in Israel." Education, Business and Society: Contemporary Middle Eastern Issues 4.3 (2011): 207-28. 134 Ali, Nohad. "Representation of Arab Citizens in the Institutions of Higher Education In Israel." Sikkuy (2013): 29.

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two subjects: a Christian man from the PCI neighborhood of Wadi Nisnas in Lower Haifa and a

Druze man from Daliyat al-Karmal, a picturesque Druze village on Mount Carmel. Their

dialogues present the imagined reality of PCI existence, as the Israeli state would like it to be

seen. The terms Palestine, Palestinian, or Islam do not appear. Invocations of God’s name and

religiously-connoted blessings common in Arabic are noticeably absent. The two subjects in the

book are de-Palestinified and de-Islamified. While one of the men is Christian (and thus does not

identify as Muslim), the Druze man speaks of being “Druze” and never makes mention of Islam.

The shared cultural capital between these two subjects (besides speaking the same language) is

their adherence to the Israeli state.

In the case of Haifa University, it is impossible to shield students from the reality that a

substantial portion of the students are Palestinians.135 Teaching Arabic allows HU to bolster its

image of liberalism and plurality.136 Thus, when teaching Arabic from a state-mandated

textbook, it is in effect appropriating Arabic for state use. The Arabic in the state-written

textbook is full of spelling mistakes and anachronisms.137 The Arabic teachers at HU are not

Palestinians, but Israeli Jews. Just as the dialogues in the textbook are contrived in order to

reflect positively on the state of Israel, in the Israeli state university system, Jews hold the

monopoly on teaching Arabic. As such, language transmission from the teacher to the student

reflects the desired subject position for PCIs onto foreign students. Arabic becomes a Hebraized

language. All cultural references to Palestine, Islam, invocations to God, and recollection of an

Arabic geography including location names have been stripped away. What is left is a collection 135 As Lefkowitz points out, one must simply walk thourgh the halls of any building in Haifa University to hear Arabic being spoken. Due to this characteristic of the university, Israeli Jewish students refer to it as “Birzeit University” (the university in Ramallah). Lefkowitz, Daniel. Words and stones: the politics of language and identity in Israel. Oxford University Press, 2004. 152. 136 "University of Haifa." University of Haifa. Web. 1 Apr. 2015. <http://www.haifa.ac.il/html/html_eng/virtual_tour.html>. 137 Avni, R. (2002). Al-Arabiyya (Vol. 1). Ministry of Education.

48

of poorly written sentences, full of typos, written in an archaic script, spoken by characters that

the Israeli state wishes existed. Not unlike the creation of the Mizrahi Jew, the Palestinian Arab

subject under the state of Israel has little-to-no history and the little he or she has is mandated

and sanctioned by the Israeli state.

Israel’s situation is paradoxical: for primary and secondary education, PCI students are

forced to study in segregated schools where Arabic is taught and Palestinian collective memory

is passed down by the teachers, often clandestinely.138 However, as elaborated here, Arabic is

taught at the university level for intelligence purposes or in the international school, but HU (nor

any other Israeli university) does not sponsor cultural production in Arabic. During the events of

1947-1949, the state of Israel came to control Palestinian national archives and libraries. Not

unlike with the Mizrahim, the state thus came to hold the keys to access the written history

(while failing to monopolize control on oral history). However, the state project of Israel is

having mixed results. On one hand, the Israeli education regime for PCI students of Arabic-

Hebrew primary and secondary education and Hebrew-only tertiary education means that PCI

students must work harder to achieve the same results Israeli Jewish students do because of the

Hebrew language requirement.139 This requirement in turn causes many PCI students to struggle

to enter and graduate university, while for others it contributes to achieving the highest marks in

Israeli universities.140

In contrast with how Arabic is taught to Israelis in secondary school and at university, it

can be said that in both cases the state is exercising its power over speech and speech acts. In the

138 Pappé, Ilan. The forgotten Palestinians: A history of the Palestinians in Israel. Yale University Press, 2011. 104. .Feb. 2013. Web. 8 Apr. 2015. 8 11 ".ישראל ילידי יהודימ בקרב השכלה פערי: "מעורבימ"ו אשכנזימ ,מזרחימ" .ינונ ,כהנ 139 <http://www.yinoncohen.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/ילידי-בקרב-השכלה-פערי-ומעורבים-יהודים-מזרחים- .<pdf.יהודים-ישראל 140 Ibid, 9.

49

case of the HU International school, by only allowing Jews to teach, the university guarantees

that Palestinians, despite making up 30% of the student body and 50% of the population of the

Galilee, do not have the permission to pass their language on to foreigners studying there.

In order to decrease the role of the PCI population at HU, HU began to remodel itself as

an international university in 2009. The increase in students taking courses taught in English

additionally allowed HU to advertise itself to universities in other countries as an example of

coexistence in the state of Israel, as their advertising often does. With the creation of the

international school came a separate Arabic education program for foreign non-

Israeli/Palestinian students. Arabic education had existed at HU since its foundation, as all Israeli

universities provide, but it was primarily for military purposes.

On the University of Haifa’s International School’s welcome page, a YouTube video

greets visitors. The video begins with a welcome by University of Haifa Dean of Students and

Head of International School Professor Hanan Alexander. Soon after, a young American

exchange student gives her impressions of the university: “I have come to both know and

appreciate the diversity that the city of Haifa and the University of Haifa have to offer.” 141 Dean

Alexander comes back shortly after to say: “The University of Haifa has students from across the

cultural spectrum of Israeli society, we call this our shared Israeli identity. Come and join us to

study with Jews and Arabs, with Druze, Muslims, Christians and, of course, students from forty

countries around the world.” The narration of the video closes with Edy Kaufman speaking,

whom the video identifies as resident director of the University of Maryland in Haifa program,

141 "University of Haifa International School." YouTube. YouTube, 9 July 2012. Web. 11 Apr. 2015. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYjQWQSNipw>.

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“my sense is there’s (sic) no better place than the city of Haifa to show that coexistence is

possible and, within it, the university itself.”142 Underneath the video the text on the page reads:

The University of Haifa is the largest comprehensive research university in northern Israel. It is a microcosm of Israeli society dedicated to academic excellence and social responsibility. An exciting and inspiring cultural mosaic, the immigrants with native Israelis, a blend of the secular and the religious. Over 18,000 students study at the University of Haifa and we encourage you to be one of them. Come to the University of Haifa International School to investigate new subjects, expand your knowledge and explore new cultures in an atmosphere of coexistence, tolerance and mutual respect.143

However, HU’s promotional materials historically do not correspond to its actions. It

advertises itself as an open and diverse academic university. Its student body is certainly diverse

due to its presence as the only liberal research university in the north of Israel, a region where

more than half of the population is Palestinian.

It was at HU that in the 1980s a graduate student named Teddy Katz decided to write his

M.A. dissertation about the foundation of his birthplace, Kibbutz Magal.144 In his research he

discovered that the location of his Kibbutz was the pre-1948 Palestinian village of Zeyta. Ilan

Pappé chronicles this case in his book Out of the Frame: The Struggle for Academic Freedom in

Israel:

One chapter dealt with the village of Tamura, occupied by Jewish forces on 22 May 1948. From the evidence he collected, Katz concluded that during the conquest of Tantura by Jewish forces in late May 1948 a large number of individuals had been killed, possibly up to 225. He estimated that about 20 had died during the battle and that the rest, both civilians and captured fighters, were killed after the village had surrendered, when they were unarmed. He did not, however, use the word 'massacre' in his thesis.145

Afterwards, despite receiving a grade of 97% from the university, the association of

Alexadroni veterans accused of the expulsion of the Palestinian residents of Tantura sued Katz

142 Ibid. 143 "University of Haifa International School - Welcome." University of Haifa International School - Welcome. Web. 10 Apr. 2015. <http://overseas.haifa.ac.il/index.php/about/welcome>. 144 Pappé, Ilan. Out of the frame: The struggle for academic freedom in Israel. London and New York: Pluto Press, 2010. 71. 145 Ibid.

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for libel for one million Israeli Shekels (approximately $250,000 USD).146 HU did not support

Katz in his legal case, but actually erased his name from the registry of students graduating with

honors.147 This incident occurred at the time of the First Intifada (1987-1993) when HU

prohibited any display of Palestinian nationalism or solidarity on campus. HU removed Katz’s

dissertation from the university library.148 Katz lost his legal case, having suffered a stress-

induced stroke weeks before trial.149 He resubmitted his dissertation with six misquotes removed

by court order. His dissertation was given a failing grade.150

Pappé himself left the University of Haifa in 2008.151 In justifying his decision, he writes

that “Zionism in 2005 and 2006 was reduced to a discourse about and actions against the

Palestinians wherever they were.”152 In 2005, HU hosted a conference entitled “The

Demographic Problem and Israel's Demographic Policies” regarding ethnocratic planning issues

in the state of Israel regarding its PCI community, in spite of its 3,500 PCI students.153 The same

year it advised its international students not to go to PCI towns, but redacted its warning after

PCI student outcry.154 HU receives perennial denouncements of overt institutionalized

discrimination against PCI students. It has fought battles against its PCI students for organizing

Nakba Day commemorations. Dean Hanan Alexander, who appears in the promotional video

146 Ibid, 73. 147 Ibid, 74. 148 Ibid, 83. 149 Ibid, 76. 150 Ibid, 85. 151 Ibid, 144. 152 Ibid, 157. 153 Ratner, David. "Haifa University Students Protest against 'racist' Conference on Demography." Haaretz 17 May 2005. Web. 1 Apr. 2015. <http://www.haaretz.com/news/haifa-university-students-protest-against-racist- conference-on-demography-1.158723>. 154 Traubman, Tamara. "Haifa U. Apologizes for Warning Students Not to Visit Arab Towns." Haaretz 23 Sept. 2005. Web. 2 Apr. 2015. <http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/haifa-u-apologizes-for-warning-students- not-to-visit-arab-towns-1.170480>.

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quote before, suspended two PCI students for organizing commemorations in 2014.155 Student

groups such as “Sons of the Village (Abna’ Al Balad)” and the Israeli Communist party that

advocate for Israel state recognition of the 1947 to 1949 ethnic cleansing of Palestine had their

activities on campus forbidden in 2014.156

4.5 Technion – Israel Institute of Technology

At Technion, founded nearly three decades before the establishment of the state of Israel,

debates took place regarding the language of instruction in the first Jewish-founded university in

the Yishuv.157 Due to the non-existence of engineering and scientific texts in Hebrew at that time,

many of the Technion founders favored the use of German as the language of instruction. Eliezer

Ben-Yehuda, the ideological head of the Hebraization movement opposed this proposition on

nationalist ideological grounds. According to him, the project of creating a Jewish nation-state in

Palestine would be compromised by using the language of galut (exile).158 Technion, originally

called the Technikum, was founded in the Hadar neighborhood of Lower Haifa. The choice of

Haifa over the holy city of Jerusalem or the port city of Jaffa was due to Haifa’s connection to

the Hejaz railway that connected it to Damascus and the Ottoman market as well as its strategic

155"Haifa University Suspends Two Arab Students for Organizing a Commemoration for Nakba Day on Campus - Adalah." Haifa University Suspends Two Arab Students for Organizing a Commemoration for Nakba Day on Campus - Adalah. Adalah: the Legal Centre for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, 19 May 2014. Web. 9 Apr. 2015. <http://www.adalah.org/en/content/view/8279>. 156"Adalah Petitions Court against Haifa University's Decision to Prohibit Activities of Arab - Adalah." Adalah Petitions Court against Haifa University's Decision to Prohibit Activities of Arab - Adalah. Adalah: the Legal Centre for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, 1 June 2014. Web. 8 Apr. 2015. <http://www.adalah.org/en/content/view/8284>. 157 Spolsky, Bernard, and Elana Shohamy. "Language in Israeli society and education." International Journal of the Sociology of Language 137.1 (1999): 93-114. 158 Safran, William. "Language and nation-building in Israel: Hebrew and its rivals." Nations and Nationalism 11.1 (2005): 50. Rabkin, Yakov M. "Language in Nationalism: Modern Hebrew in the Zionist Project." Holy Land Studies 9.2 (2010): 133.

53

position as a port city.159 Likewise, Zionist colonial settlement at the time was concentrated in

central Palestine between the holy city of Jerusalem and in the periphery of the port city of Jaffa

and newly established urban settlement of Tel-Aviv. Likewise, Technion’s positioning in the

north of Palestine was seen as a calmer position for the university, farther removed from the

social turmoil that would build in Central Palestine. The choice of the language of instruction

posited practical considerations against ideological ones. Despite the majority of the Technion

trustees voting in favor of German, Hebrew was mandated instead. English, the language of the

colonial occupier of that period, was proposed as an alternative that would have allowed

Palestinian Arabophone non-Jews to form part of the university. However, on ideological

grounds this was also discarded. The Technion would remain at its Hadar location in Lower

Haifa until the early 1950s. Technion’s own historiography claims that the university moved

from Lower Haifa up to its current location on top of Mount Carmel due to issues of limited

space. However, taking into consideration the demographic rupture that occurred between 1948

and 1952 in Lower Haifa as a result of the 1947-1949 ethnic cleansing of Palestine that saw an

influx of Palestinian internally displaced peoples from the agricultural lands of the Galilee

collect in Wadi Nisnas of Lower Haifa, as well as the influx of Mizrahi Jews who would come to

be interned in the Wadi Salib and Hadar neighborhoods, the decision to move the campus seems

more influenced by demographic considerations.160 In fact, up until the 1980s, the Technion

remained a university whose faculty and students were overwhelmingly Israeli Ashkenazi Jews

or foreign non-Jewish visiting researchers.161 In the 1980s with the rise of Israel’s high-tech

industry in a period of neo-liberalization in Israel’s economy, the university started integrating

159 For more on the history of Technion university, consult: Alpert, Carl. Technion: the story of Israel's Institute of Technology. Sepher Hermon, 1982. 10. 160 Ibid, 12. 161 Ibid, 13.

54

more PCI students as well as foreign students.162

The Technion provides a different insight into the previous two Israeli state universities

examined. From the standpoint of Hebraization, the Technion is no longer as contentious a factor

as it was in the 1920s during the Language Wars. In accordance with a global trend in academia,

it now teaches standalone diplomas in English and, likewise, has visiting student classes taught

in Russian.163 In addition to partnering with other technical research universities worldwide, the

university is in the process of building a satellite campus on New York City’s Roosevelt Island

in partnership with Cornell University.164 Likewise, it is doing the same by opening another

satellite campus in Guangdong, China.165

Technion, unlike the University of Haifa and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, does

not require any Hebrew classes to receive its four-year bachelor of science in Civil or Chemical

Engineering.166 Like other Israeli universities, it requires the highest proficiency of English of all

its undergraduates due to the dominance of the English language in engineering and science. The

“Language War” of the 1920s has given way to English, and to some extent Russian and

Mandarin, but not Arabic. What the Technion might have given up in terms of linguistic

162 Ibid, 27. 163 "Technion Facts:." Technion. Technion - Israel Institute of Technology. Web. 8 Apr. 2015. <http://int.technion.ac.il/about/technion-facts/technion-at-a-glance/>. 164 The Technion received USD$100,000,000 from the City of New York through Mayor Michael Bloomberg. It receives funding as well through its collaboration with the US army and the global arms industry, particularly through the development and sale of drone technology and surveillance equipment. Cf.: "'New Yorkers Against the Cornell-Technion Partnership' Oppose Technion's Role in U.S. Militarization and Domestic Spying." Mondoweiss. Mondoweiss, 17 Nov. 2013. Web. 5 Apr. 2015. <http://mondoweiss.net/2013/11/partnership- technions-militarization>. 165 "Technion – Israel Institute of Technology." Technion Israel Institute of Technology. 3 Feb. 2015. Web. 8 Apr. 2015. <http://www.technion.ac.il/en/2015/02/deepening-ties/>. 166 "Undergraduate:." Technion. Technion - Israel Institute of Technology. Web. 12 Apr. 2015. <http://int.technion.ac.il/academic-programs/undergraduate-3/bsc-in-civil-and-environmental- engineering/>.

55

ideology, it gains from its ties to the global military-industrial complex.167 PCI students are at a

major disadvantage for entering into most of Technion’s faculties due to not serving in the Israeli

military.168 Technion’s language may have changed, but the ideology is the same.

Conclusions

This paper has sought to track the history of Hebraization and Othering of European

Jewish settlers in Palestine, followed by European Jewish Holocaust survivors, Mizrahi Jews,

Palestinian citizens of Israel, and East Jerusalemite Palestinians. Posited alongside this

development is the evolution of the Israeli state university system as one site of five in the web

of Hebraization, the teaching of Hebrew literacy and Zionist national consciousness to aliens to

the state. Looking at the state-sanctioned teaching of the Arabic language allows us to examine

Hebraization through a different lens, this time teaching passive Arabic comprehension but

imparting the same values of the state. The Palestinian in the Ulpan illustrates the case of the

Palestinian as “native foreigner” who can never integrate into Israeli society. Hebraization was

always in opposition to the undesirable internal linguistic and cultural other. Originally it was

Yiddish, spoken by the exilic ghettoized Jew, whose life was an experience of alienation,

rootlessness, and weakness. The five sites of Hebraization succeeded in eliminating Yiddish as a

spoken language between non-Chassidic Ashkenazi Jews. Later on, Mizrahi Judeo-Arabic came

to represent that which the Israeli state had sought to “eradicate” in Palestine and Judaism:

Eastern-ness, backwardness, hyper-religious superstition, and adherence to traditional non-

socialist power structures. The Ulpan explicitly set out to educate Mizrahi adults in Hebrew to 167 Howard, Esther. "Arms Suppliers to the Dictators." Journal of Palestine Studies (1983): 229. Zureik, Elia, David Lyon, and Yasmeen Abu-Laban, eds. Surveillance and control in Israel/Palestine: Population, territory and power. Routledge, 2010. 157. 168 Institutional discrimination by requiring military service is a theme that has recurred throughout this paper. Cf.: "Structures of Oppression: Why McGill and Concordia Universities Must Sever Their Links with the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology" Tadamon! Tadamon!, 26 Oct. 2010. Web. 10 Apr. 2015. <http://www.tadamon.ca/wp-content/uploads/Technion-English.pdf>.

56

the point where they could take part in the military and study in university. In theory, these two

sites of Hebraization would prepare the Mizrahi for passage from the Development towns and

Moshavim to life in the Ashkenazi kibbutz and urban center. In practice, however, the Mizrahi

was never allowed direct entrance into the kibbutz or urban center except by marriage to an

Ashkenazi. The Palestinian citizen of Israel suffered the same essentialist depictions as Mizrahi

Jew however the Palestinian non-Jew was barred the military in addition to the kibbutz and

urban center. The Israeli state has assimilated PCIs as second-language speakers of Hebrew in

order to perform service sector labor or to fill gaps in white-collar professions created by a

Jewish brain drain due to a stagnant economy in the Galilee hinterland. As a result, the majority

of PCIs in the Galilee are fully bilingual. However, bilinguism is unidirectional with no

substantial interest existing among a large segment of Israeli Jews in learning Palestinian spoken

Arabic. As the final chapter highlighted, the Israeli state teaches its own de-Palestinified Arabic

to its Jewish citizens to represent its Palestinian citizens and occupied subject as the “native

alien.”

My final conclusions are that the five-site web of Hebraization intentionally produced

and produces social, linguistic, and racial difference in order to posit the Zionist subject in

opposition with an ever-changing definition of “Palestinian.” Hebrew as spoken today and the

five-site web of Hebraization cannot exist without the Arabophone Other. Similarly, within the

state of Israel, spoken Arabic without vernacular and syntactic influence from Hebrew is equally

non-existent. However, despite the symbiosis of these two languages and peoples, they remain

completely separate. Language education in the state of Israel reinforces the dominant European

Zionist narrative and ideology that invigorate this separateness in Israeli society. Israeli

universities, as institution of the state, perpetuate this separation.

57

As Israeli state universities globalize, it is necessary to critically examine the role the

Israeli state plays in its universities. When observing these universities’ positioning towards their

Palestinian students as “native aliens,” it seems as if the Israeli state globalized its university in

order to achieve its nationalist ideology. The three Israeli universities with the highest Palestinian

enrollment are also the three largest receivers of foreign visiting students in Israel. Today there

are less entrance barriers for a non-Jewish US citizen to study in certain Israeli university

departments than for a Palestinian. These universities in turn utilize members or representations

of their Palestinian student body to distract from documented reports of overt institutionalized

racism in a growingly nationalist university system.

By tracing this longue durée genealogy of these two sites, the Ulpan and the university, it

is possible to critically reflect on the future of the state of Israel and its citizens as reproduced by

its five-point web of Hebraization. Each site tells us about the other four while the four magnify

the one. Israel may truly be one of the world’s few states where “the mother learns her tongue

from her children.” But what did her children (un-)learn from her?

58

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