Arabic education builds peace one word at a time

A creative not-for-profit funds Israeli Arabs to teach Arabic to Jewish children, forging better communication across Israeli society, reports TOBIAS SIEGAL.

While Israeli Arabs are expected to know basic Hebrew, only 10% of Israeli Jews can communicate in Arabic – and many fewer can read and write.

Beyond any big strides on the political front, solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will ultimately come down to interpersonal connections between Jews and Arabs, and that requires communication.

The AMAL nonprofit organisation positions language education at the core of its mission to create meaningful engagements between Jews and Arabs.

AMAL, a Hebrew acronym for “spoken Arabic for all,” offers college scholarships to enable Arab students to teach Arabic to Jewish primary school students.

“The main issue for us was the lack of dialogue between Arabs and Jews, Palestinians and Israelis. Making progress in that regard is very hard when you lack the language,” says AMAL co-founder Ishmael Ben-Israel about the reasons that made him launch the initiative some 10 years ago.

Arabic was an official language in Israel until mid-2018, when the Knesset passed the 2018 Nation-State Bill. The controversial legislation defined the state as inherently Jewish and Hebrew its only official language, while Arabic was given a “special status”.

Learning Arabic in the Israeli Jewish education system is mostly optional, and data released by the Education Ministry in January found that the number of Jewish students taking matriculation exams in Arabic has dropped by a third in the past five years.

Several reports by the Education Ministry show that the main motivation for learning Arabic among Jewish students is potentially joining the security-intelligence establishment.

“Arabic has become the language of the enemy,” says Sima Wattad, who taught Arabic at a Jewish primary school for two years as part of the AMAL program, while she was a university student.

Wattad says her fifth grade students were curious about the military benefits of studying her native tongue. “I think it says something about the Israeli society, how kids here believe that the Arabic language is only good for security reasons that have nothing to do with human beings,” she says.

This militant mentality, fuelled by years of internal and external conflicts, tends to ignore the social and cultural benefits that speaking Arabic can provide – and the long-term value those may have in addressing the very threat it seeks to confront.

Encouraging personal relationships

AMAL encourages teachers to use their own personal and family stories to bridge cultural gaps and help students form relationships built on trust.

“At first, we strictly focused on teaching the language ... As time went by, we noticed that we were providing something of value to the Arab college students as well and the focus slowly shifted to promoting them and creating sustainable connections,” Ben-Israel explains.

“Language allows quality relationships and vice versa – a good relationship will make acquiring a foreign language easier, it works in both ways. And that’s the purpose – making such relationships a given in our landscape,” he says.

A recent study conducted by AMAL and Tel Aviv University found that the program created a positive change in attitude toward the Arab sector.

“Students were asked questions like: ‘Would you like to have Arab friends?’ and ‘Would you like to visit an Arab town?’ and at the end of the year their answers were much more positive and enthusiastic. That’s the whole purpose,” Ben-Israel says.

Involvement with AMAL also offers Israeli Arab teachers a new way of seeing their own identity.

According to some analysts, the self-identification of Israeli Arabs as Palestinians has sharpened in recent years, reaching a boiling point in last year’s May conflict sparked by tensions in Jerusalem and a successful campaign by the Gaza-based terror group Hamas to sway Israeli Arabs to violently oppose what it claimed was a Jewish-Israeli assault on East Jerusalem and the Al Aqsa Mosque.

Forming Israeli Arab identity

AMAL also offers its teachers seminars that include simulations of difficult situations they may encounter in the classroom or at home.

“What happens if our teacher is asked not to speak Arabic in the teachers' lounge? Or if a relative criticises them for ‘helping Jews use our language against us?’ These are examples of things that have happened, and we try to put it all on the table,” Ben-Israel says.

For Wattad, teaching Arabic to Jewish students led to a process of self-discovery. “Growing up in Israel, we didn’t talk about our identity … I grew up not knowing whether I was Arab, Palestinian, or Israeli. We don’t talk about our history,” she says.

“Those small, weekly meetings with Jewish children helped me better understand my language. They made me think about things differently and ask questions about my own heritage and identity.”

Expanding opportunities

AMAL is a private program that operates in 13 schools in Tel Aviv and Ramat Gan in central Israel. It is supported by the Tel Aviv Municipality, but it gets no direct support from the Education Ministry.

Responding to inquiries, the Education Ministry said AMAL was an approved program that principals could choose to include but not an official educational body.

“The Education Ministry sees great value in teaching Arabic. It promotes co-existence and serves the country’s security establishment. The ministry encourages high school students to learn spoken Arabic, but the process can’t be forced.”

A few children learn Arabic in a more organic way as part of bilingual programs.

“Considering we exist alongside each other in this shared space, it makes more sense to me that Arabic is part of my children’s daily experience. It feels more right than learning Arabic in a forced way in class,” says Noam Levi-Erez, whose son attends a kindergarten in the mixed city of Jaffa, where Jewish and Arabic children are encouraged to speak their native tongue.

“It’s not a didactic approach to learning, they just do everything in both languages. It sends a strong message of co-existence, of being among equals.”