Good afternoon. Welcome, everybody. Sorry for the short delay.
I'm very happy and delighted and honoured to present the speaker this afternoon.
Dr. Nancy Harker, who is currently a research fellow at the Aga Khan University, the Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations.
Nancy's main research has been focussed on the sociolinguistics of Palestinian, Arabic and modern Israeli Hebrew in zones of conflict.
And in 2013, she published her book titled Palestinian Israeli Contact and Linguistic Practices.
Her more recently published book, just in a very freshly minted book titled The Politics of Palestinian Multilingualism Speaking for Citizenship,
was based on her work as a living young fellow fellow here at Oxford and in Bennett's home.
Nancy previously worked at Amnesty International's secretariat in London,
and her current research analyses audience receptivity to women's testimonies that
have been translated between Arabic and English in human rights organisations.
And the title of her talk today is Palestinian Multilingualism, a perfectly normal adaptation to colonialism, conflict and Late Capitalism.
Nancy, thank you so much for coming. Thank you for inviting me.
And thank you, Stacie, for organising the logistics.
I'm really happy to be back here as I was last year for examinations in June, so it's quite nice to come back and engage with you.
I'm really curious to hear your reactions to what I have to say.
So definitely if you want to intervene during the talk, just wait till I've finished a sentence and then I'll be happy to engage on any of the points.
Um hmm.
So what I'd like to do today is, first of all, I'm going to present a snapshot of what the linguistic situation is for Palestinians inside Israel now.
And then I'll give the back story of how this came about. And this is going through the back story.
We'll go through chronologically, more or less the stages of colonialism, conflict and late capitalism,
and how the language analysis can give insights to the political and historical analysis that maybe would have otherwise been missed.
So on the basis of my research and the research of of other scholars of language and politics, what I'd say today is that in 2009,
when I published the book, the situation was that on state platforms in Israel, Arabic is silenced.
It is not currently permissible to speak Arabic on state platforms.
What I call in the book Zionist platforms,
because of course there are other institutional platforms which are Arabic specific, but on state platforms in Israel.
Arabic is silent. So that's one element. The second element is that Arabic has been now contained for Palestinians to in-group communication.
That means that it's avoided in situations which are possibly mixed where there might
be a Jewish Israeli present or somebody whose identity is unknown or to be negotiated.
So Arabic has now retreated into in-group communication.
However, also this multilingualism has now formed a repertoire for those Palestinians who can
command a range of registers and varieties as a kind of resource for pragmatic purposes.
So what they do with their multilingualism is that they can achieve specific rhetorical effects.
They can do things with the words in in Hebrew and in Arabic.
And I'll show you some examples for all three of these elements.
But meanwhile so I'll go back to the story, this narrative of how the situation has come about,
starting with colonialism, then conflict and late capitalism.
And throughout that, that story I'm going to highlight now and again how these rhetorical strategies and these
this sociolinguistics situation constitutes what makes a legitimate speaker in this polity.
And definitely, I'm looking at political discussions.
That's where I did my fieldwork. So as a result of this of this situation,
multilingualism has accrued on the Palestinian side of the of this very divided integrate a segregated society.
So on the on the Jewish Israeli side, there's been a progressive, as in other societies, progressive advance of monolingual ism.
So where there was a very multilingual Jewish Israeli society at some point in history.
Progressively Hebrew has become the hegemonic language, and the Palestinians have adapted to that by becoming multilingual.
So to do with a legitimate speaker issue, this is a quote from Helen McElhinney.
It is not enough to speak the legitimate language. You must also be a legitimate speaker.
So language ideologies not only rank speaking subjects as racialised gendered and class,
but they also produce those subject as racialised gendered and classed and locate authenticity of different values and kinds among them.
So I have noted here that the classed is in brackets,
and you'll see in my conclusion that I'm kind of going to offer a reclaiming of the that category and how that may
be interacts with Palestinian multilingualism as a class phenomenon as well as a national or racialised category.
Another way of looking at these ideologies, which is one of the analytical tools of sociolinguistics,
is that racial, linguistic ideologies produce racialized speaking subjects.
So it's not only that we can identify it in analysis,
but also these ideologies produce a political reality who are constructed as linguistically deviant,
even when engaging in linguistic practices positioned as normative or innovative when produced by privileged white subjects.
So even when the Palestinians and other Arabs in Israel speak Hebrew, that is constitute that is seen as deviant rather than as a normative position.
And of course, this is not a this is not confined to Palestinians.
This is a situation that is replicated in other colonial settings.
So here I've got a quote from Frantz Fanon.
And it's also during an election event which obviously is relevant to my research because I did most of my research on on election campaigning.
A woman fainted during an electoral speech by M.A. Caesar in Martinique in 1945 because those French were so good.
The power of language, she says sarcastically. So amazing.
There was an award winning French writing Caribbean writer, right, who then became for a long time the leading politician of Guadeloupe in Martinique.
So here, this kind of gives you the colonials, the colonised perspective on this linguistic dilemma,
either authentic and you don't speak the dominant language or you are authoritative and you you embrace the hegemonic language.
And so the dilemmas have to do with claiming authority, claiming authenticity and finding a platform.
So it may Caesar had a platform.
And you'll see how the Palestinian subjects of my study are looking for platforms in which they would be the legitimate speakers,
which is what I'll be highlighting.
So let's go to the first examples and how many of you would have guessed that at the opening of the first Knesset in 1949, Arabic was spoken?
Here you go. One of the speeches was by Amin, Salim Jarrah, who was the mayor of Nazareth.
He was a member of a party that was affiliated with Mapai, which was the governing party.
And he makes a speech, quite a short speech entirely in Arabic.
And it is a he says the young state of Israel shall be founded on principles of freedom, justice and peace.
It will grant social and civil rights to all its citizens without distinction of religion, race or sex.
That's a quote from the Declaration of Independence.
With happiness, we see the buds that heralds the end of fighting in the Holy Land,
the end that will be followed by the signing of treaties with of good neighbours with the Arab countries.
So he's kind of trying to do a speech act in Arabic at this most Zionist of ceremonies.
Yeah. And making this kind of using the that little bit of inclusiveness in the Declaration of Independence to make this kind of peace message.
But what is interesting for me is that I use this this phenomenon to look at the kind of metal linguistic comments
that than his speaking in Arabic caused in the Knesset after that first that first Arabic in in the Knesset.
So here we have Moshe it was then still talk became shot at foreign minister who immediately as soon as the the the speech is finished.
He comments that he would like to complete the translation of the speech that Jeff Judah has just made.
And he says that the the translation was incomplete.
It should have mentioned that the speaker said that Israel should be a light of an example to other nations of how to build regional peace.
Yeah. And should took that.
Obviously his foreign minister chooses to highlight this.
This is picked up by Eliyahu Al-mashat, who was representative of the Sephardi party in the Knesset,
so representing Jews from the Middle East and North Africa.
And he says, Well, I request that the whole translation be included in be distributed amongst the members of Knesset.
And then finally, the last highlighted bit is Yosef Prince, who who's the chair of the Knesset at the time.
He says the full translation will be included in the stenographic report of this of this session.
And that's when the end of the. That's when they end that that session.
So what is happening here? This is what the Knesset looked like in that first in that first instance, they are setting up a system.
They are setting up the structure of this platform.
And the structure then is an ethno Republican platform, where it's a structure where Hebrew is the dominant language.
The record is only kept in Hebrew. But there's a managed diversity within it, and translation is managing that diversity.
Translation is provided from Arabic into Hebrew.
And. And this is signposted.
So the even the the Arabic is provided for the Palestinian and other Arabs.
But Eliyahu Alyosha and Musetta, who both speak Arabic, are the ones who are requesting the translation.
Why? Because translation knows. Translation demarcates where that boundary is between the language.
That is the other language and this language.
And they needed that boundary to be clear, because what they were doing is setting up a system that reinforces the one nation,
one language ideology, which was kind of the result of that of this new state.
They needed this to be clear. They couldn't have a blurred boundary in this situation.
Yes. Who can you recognise in this picture of the first six years of course is there at the opening.
So I. There's Hertzel there.
He's, he's, he's looking over them. Yeah. Golden on the on the far left.
Yeah. Huh. Yes. Yeah, yeah. So I can see only one person who might be wearing headphones.
Yeah, because a simultaneous translation was provided to those who were.
Who could not understand Hebrew. Yeah, there's one person here. So let's look a little bit.
So I've done the research a little bit for you. So you have on the right.
That's I mean, Salim Jazeera at the top.
That's much it should get that series of prints that and that's Eliyahu Elazar from a prominent Jewish family of Jerusalem.
Right. Another person who spoke Arabic in that first in that opening ceremony, it was Delphic to be Delphic to be was only 27 years old.
He was representing the Communist Party, and he also made a speech in Arabic.
Here you have the.
The reason I know it was in Arabic, there's obviously no record of it, is that it says translation from Arabic.
It's a much longer speech than Joshua's.
And here he he says the principles on which the Israeli state claimed to be founded are being violated and it's becoming an imperialist project.
And the the refugees or the evidence of this are refugees in camps all around the region, and they need to be brought home.
And how will this be arranged to you? Names the villages that have been emptied.
And he he goes into details about numbers and so on.
Already then, Tawfiq, to be near enough Hebrew to heckle speeches in Hebrew and that first Knesset.
Yeah. So who was the how was this managed?
This person in the middle. Is more shipment.
He was the first translator in the Knesset. He's from a family, also Jewish family of Jerusalem.
14 generations in Jerusalem by the 1940s. And he wrote an article about this in Middle Eastern Affairs.
It's only four pages long, but it gave me a lot of information.
And what it meant, the system that he was managing meant that Arabic was heard for long stretches in the Knesset,
because the the the Arabic speaking parliamentarians were made their speech in Arabic.
And there was consecutive interpreting of those speeches by Moshe Pimenta for for the for those parliamentarians,
those Palestinian and other parliamentarians who could not understand Hebrew.
There was simultaneous interpreting into headphones, which was an expensive and new technology at the time.
It had been most recently used at the Nuremberg trials, and it was it required a lot of skills.
And he was quite proud of shipment of being able to set this up.
He did complain a little bit of overworking even in this short article.
Eventually. He did get an assistant. Actually, he. Interesting story.
He. He he died in 2012. His brother was a very senior member of the Shabak.
So was Moshe Payment. He was he became an academic who worked at the Hebrew University.
He won the Israel Prize for scholarship in 1996.
And some of his work has to do with how Jewish Jerusalem varieties of Arabic were disappearing.
And he wrote extensively about that. He also was tasked in the seventies with setting up a curriculum for teaching Arabic in Jewish schools.
That would be a communicative method rather than as a passive comprehension comprehension method that was promoted by the military.
So and I think he has a nephew that was a rock star and something like that.
It's an interesting found. Anyway, one of my ideas for the future is to maybe do a biography of that.
So this is what it looked like again, from the inside. This is what it looked like from the outside.
It was done King George Street in Jerusalem.
It had just been moved to Jerusalem after the U.N. had made a resolution on on Jerusalem being administered internationally.
So as a reaction to that, Ben Gurion moved the Knesset to Jerusalem.
So, yes, you correctly identified Ben-Gurion that he is in the middle.
That behind him is Joseph Spencer, who is credited with setting up the parliamentary culture in Israel.
Behind him, that is Moshe Pimenta. Now he's he's behind a screen so that he doesn't his his simultaneous translation doesn't disturb the speakers.
And they're on the. That's the stenographer. Taking the record in Hebrew only means there's no Arabic in the official records of the Knesset.
So that's the first element of constructing legitimacy of speech.
You create the platforms and you create how that platform is managed.
When Ben Golan came to speak after Jordan to be the next day, his what he said was for the first time in history,
members of the two nations, the Jewish nation and the Arab nation come together.
So for the first time in history, Jews and Arabs come together. Really?
But what he was doing, he was he was turning it into this equation.
These two speakers had spoken in Arabic because they were representatives of the Arab nation.
The Jews spoken in Hebrew, which must have been quite difficult for many of them.
Right. They had many of them were born in Europe and elsewhere.
But he was establishing this blood lineage, you know, the Arabs and the Jews.
And then he mentions children to be and welcomes them as if they are guests in this Knesset, which is I am.
But then he spends most of his time demolishing what to be had to say. But they weren't the only two.
There was a judge who ran to be and there was a third Arabic speaking member of Knesset, Saifuddin,
a zombie, who came later on, and he was also elected on a list that was aligned with the governing party.
He also was the mayor of Nazareth. According to Pimenta, to be a zombie could understand Hebrew just about, but he could not speak in it.
And that's when I looked through the parliamentary records. I only found instances where his interventions were pre-prepared.
He had sent in his interventions to be translated in advance.
So he doesn't do the spontaneous heckling that to be Tawfiq to be could do.
So this is one example from 1960 617 as or B he is starting off to say Nazareth has been put under military administration,
which was initially a problem for him because he had been mayor of Nazareth.
He had been the civilian mayor of Nazareth.
This there were some there was a kind of social crisis in Nazareth to do with the control of the municipality and the military appointed a governor,
a military governor. And the way he goes about complaining about this is that he says the governor cannot function because he does not know Arabic.
And most of the the population of Nazareth speaks Arabic and the staff of the municipality speaks Arabic,
and they find it difficult to operate with a governor who does not speak Arabic.
And then the underneath the other bit that's highlighted in yellow, it's the the deputy interior minister says the fact that the military governor,
Mr. Einstein, does not speak Arabic, does not reduce his effectiveness in any way.
Yeah. And the staff can cope perfectly well in Hebrew.
So, um.
And then finally 17 as I be comes back on to the to what the Deputy Minister of Interior had to say.
But the Speaker of the Chair, the chair of the session it's Carnarvon instructs the translator.
That's the highlighted bit to only translate the speech that has not been pre-prepared.
The pre-prepared speech does not need to be translated. And that's what's recorded in the in, in, in the official record.
So we can already see by 1966 there is a problem with Arabic on state platforms,
this kind of managed translation that made the most shipment they had wanted to institute
and that was present in that first year of the Knesset is now being withdrawn gradually.
The platform is is disappearing.
Hillel Cohen wrote a very good book about the situation of these of some of these Palestinian and other leaders who are
cooperating with the authorities and trying to maybe manage the situation cooperatively and did get some advantages from that.
For instance, the land wasn't confiscated quite as much as the land was confiscated from other Palestinians,
whereas the the communists were in a situation of opposition to that kind of cooperation with the authorities.
This is still felt to be a little bit older because he he did last a very long time in the Knesset.
Right. He he lesson from 1949 continuously to 1990, he was the last serving Knesset member who had also served in the first Knesset.
He is remembered for in 1985 introducing the basic law, which has a wording of the state for all its citizens.
And here's another there's another quote from the 1960s where Delphic to be is having an argument.
He has the floor and he's being heckled by another Arab in the Knesset called Jabal Mahdi.
And the way it's recorded in the Knesset protocol is, uh, there's an exchange of words between Mahdi and the speaker.
So it's not specified what the words were, to which Avraham Hertzfeld, who obviously could not understand.
He was born, I think, in Poland. He he asks, why is it necessary to curse?
So he's heard Arabic. He's heard these two Arabs speaking, exchanging words in Arabic.
And he's his intervention is to ask, why is it necessary to curse?
Now, obviously, there's no simultaneous there's no translation is happening.
That's why he felt feeling alienated from this situation where the Arabs are having an argument and Delphic to be resorts to translating himself.
Right. By then the translation has been withdrawn to such a degree that he says don't like to be says I'm not cursing.
Well, maybe he was, but we don't know. I'm just saying that the the Jabal Mada is not representing his own constituency, the Druze constituency.
And then so he's translating himself.
And then the chair says there's been a decision made that the exchange between Mahdi and to be has
not is not going to be translated and it's not going to be recorded in the official protocol.
And anyway, it doesn't matter because as the translator has informed me,
that the exchange between to be and Mahdi is of a personal nature and Delphic to be comes back again.
And he translates himself. He says, I do not have any personal matters between Jeb and modern myself.
I am just saying that he is not representing his his Druze constituency.
And then the decision is made, the translation will not be recorded.
And these these these words will not be entered into the record.
So we don't know. Maybe he was shouting to Mahdi saying, you are a reactionary because obviously to be was a communist.
But we don't know. Right. Because by then there'd been a retreat of Arabic and this is what I call the Arabic silence,
which seems to have gone from the middle of the 1960s until, as you will see, maybe 2010.
So that's the element of constructing the legitimacy of speech makes the audience.
So when when Delphic to me was speaking in Hebrew,
he did so because there were urgent problems of affecting the Palestinian and other Arab population.
And he was addressing the authorities. And the authorities were Hebrew speaking.
It was a matter of expediency, and he needed to resolve these problems in policy.
There were other Palestinian speakers at the time who had other platforms as Hanan Akara and alas, whosoever lawyers.
So in the court also at the beginning there were there was translation by the time the sixties happen came about Nakuru and who could could
operate in Hebrew and Hebrew unless of course a complaint a lot he wrote a lot of complaints that he could no longer operate in Hebrew,
in Arabic, in the courts. But by the sixties, by the sixties, it was Hebrew only because the audience was the policymakers and the judiciary.
So was there a formal decision to.
No. No, it was just for. The only evidence we have all these little metal metal commentaries on the absence of translation.
So here we have a few events that happened during the Arabic silence on the institutional platforms.
So at the top head to recognise what's happening. So that's Anwar Sadat is in the Knesset.
So Anwar Sadat was obviously he was the president of Egypt and he was build it.
They were building up to the the peace accords of Menachem Begin, whose sofa Anwar Sadat visit.
There was simultaneous translation in both sides. You can see the headphones.
Hmm. So at one point of the one photo, it's the he's speaking in Arabic.
They have headphones on the beginning had just finished speaking in Hebrew.
Sadat has the headphones on.
So and what's happening in the bottom is Rabin's funeral is another kind of a state institutional platform, a Zionist platform who's speaking?
And he guesses it's a word Mubarak is speaking at.
So what language do you think he's speaking English? He's speaking English.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's speaking English. And the King Hussein of Jordan also spoke in English.
Can you imagine how it would have come across if Mubarak had spoken Arabic at Yitzhak Rabin funeral?
That was not the right he would. They were creating an audience which was in the nineties.
This the Bill Clinton's effort for the Oslo process.
This was, you know, the peace was going to break out in the Middle East.
If you remember, there was that time, but there was obviously you can see they needed translation into English,
I suppose, because all three of them are wearing the headphones. What the pushback from the Egyptians about about Mubarak speaking in English?
No, I think that was just accepted that English was the lingua franca for this type of diplomacy.
The initial. Yeah, yeah.
So that's the Arabic silence, the fact that Anwar Sadat spoke in Arabic, that it was because he was addressing the Arabs that were beyond the border.
It did not change anything for the local Arabs, because, in fact, when Sadat says We the Arabs,
he did not mean and the Arabs that were potentially present there.
He was definitely giving up on them and speaking on behalf of the Egyptians.
Right. So I'm fast forwarding a little bit because it's very hard to document silence linguistically.
So I'm going to 2015. This is a little bit to show you, to show you that silence.
So to go through the chronology of it,
I showed you the two speeches in Arabic in the inauguration of the Knesset and what Sadat speaks in Arabic and Amal Habib in,
who was a member of Knesset for the Communist Party. Also, for many years he was awarded the Israel Prize for Literature in 1992.
He was not given the opportunity to speak at that award. He had prepared a speech, but and it's not known what language he was going to say it in.
But he was it was thought that it would be too provocative to have him speak at that on that platform.
So he did not speak. Then you have the attack.
Rabin's funeral you rightly recognised two 2012 is the first record I could find
of an Arab going back to speaking Arabic in the Knesset and Talib Asthana,
who was a Bedouin representative in the Knesset. He managed to slip in 20 seconds of Arabic until he was shouted down.
And 2013 was the next instance as far as I could find.
Aviv brought out another Bedouin representative started started reading a Koranic verse in Arabic.
He got it. He didn't get to the end of it, and he was shouted down.
So you can see that's a far cry from those inaugural speeches in Arabic that were possible for Saifuddin and Zogby, for Jabara, for to be in 2012.
It becomes a different strategy they are doing speaking a few words in Arabic
in order to increase the audibility of Arabic on this Hebrew only platform.
Those who Eichler interestingly, he was a representative of a of a religious of a religious faction in the Knesset,
an ultra-Orthodox Ashkenazi faction.
He said one sentence in Arabic The military gives a sort of sentence in Arabic, and then then 2015, it really kicks off.
And that, funnily enough, is the year after I was awarded the fellowship to do to do a research on why there was no Arabic in the Knesset.
And then suddenly there were all these people. It was as if they did it on purpose.
Yeah, right. So how does it actually work in practice?
So I have here another excerpt from the transcript, the Knesset transcripts, Ayman Order, who was the leader of the Joint List in 2015.
So he was representing the kind of an alliance of four parties, of which three were the Arabic Arab parties and one the Communist Party.
And he just comes along and the 23rd of December, 2015, and he just wants to say something.
So he says, I'm just going to turn to my to my compatriots.
And then in the stenographers, there's a stenographer puts these brackets highlighted in yellow.
He says he speaks in Arabic from now on, recording the translation.
So he basically goes on to say, it's in in honour of Christmas that's coming and the birth of the prophet.
I would like to say to my my fellow citizens, happy holidays, etc., etc. immediately.
He doesn't even manage to go on with his speech at his interrupted by Ksenia Svetlova,
who stood saying something which is not recorded that's just unrecorded heckling.
And then he repeats himself. And this time it's recorded in Arabic because as column will jump heard.
And then he translates himself. He says, Happy holidays to everybody.
Then there's some more heckling. Uh, and then there's more transcription of Arabic.
He says, Shukran, thank you. Thank you. Happy holidays to you as well.
And then another email.
Bar-Lev feels a bit excluded from this Arabic all the time.
Yeah. So he says, Tell us what you said. And he says, Well, what I meant, what I said was just happy holidays for everybody.
And we are going to struggle together for a good life, a dignified life in our homeland.
And so then he starts being heckled again. What homeland, what historical homeland are you talking about?
And then he tries to change the subject, and then it just descends into shouts.
Yeah. So he's he. He can't continue with his speech.
He's being heckled. Finally he regains the floor and he tries to justify his Arabic,
his kind of forced into a position of trying to explain why he's he's speaking Arabic.
He says, I actually consider the fact that Arabs are multilingual to be an added value.
And if you know another person's language,
then you you it's enriches you as a person and you can really understand somebody else's history and their culture.
So he sees it as added value. That's his actual words and says.
I'll come back to that when I'm talking about class. Language resources is added value.
So what changed between 1992 when Arabic was silenced and 2015?
And what I argue is that what changed in those intervening years was the advent of late capitalism.
So on the left of Amel Habib, definitely not a capitalist.
He was in the Knesset office for quite a long time as also a novelist.
And you can see here his mouth is closed, his eyes, or somehow he's looking to the side.
He knew at the very at the award ceremony for the Israel Prize for Literature, he was being heckled by a right wing politician.
So maybe he's looking at him, Lucy Owlish or in Arabic, Lucy Koresh.
She was given the honour of lighting the torch at the Israel Independence Day on Mount Herzl in 2015.
She is there with her mouth open as she is allowed to give a speech.
She was also heckled by the right wing for for being an Arab, speaking on a Zionist platform.
But in the intervening years, what happened was these kind of phenomena of late capitalism.
So the percentage of school leavers who went into higher education more than doubled,
which was in line with the developments in in all the Western capitalist democracies.
In Israel, it's specifically interesting because tertiary education is one of the disaggregated spaces.
So it would be perhaps for many Palestinian and Arab citizens and for Jewish Israeli citizens,
the first place where they'd encounter somebody of the other nationality or ethnicity.
It's also an instance of neoliberal education, marketing.
Marketing these skills is is a marketable resource.
Yes. So this it becomes a new idea of what knowledge means. And it's something that you can buy and add on your CV.
At the same time, however, these graduates in 2016, when I got these statistics,
they came against some structural inequalities of Palestinian citizens,
of Palestinian graduates from Israeli educational systems would earn a lot less.
Usually they'd go to work in education rather than in their area of expertise.
So these are the people who who came of age, political age at the time when I was doing the fieldwork.
These are the people who are wanting to vote to change the of this kind of structural inequality in a materialist terms.
Also, at the same time, it's a number of shopping centres of Israel increased dramatically.
I my count was that currently there are about 116 big shopping centres in Israel.
So that's yeah, the rise of consumerist leisure.
So the idea that you can, you can buy your free time outside of a political context and the product of this
and I'm using Lucy at least a little bit maybe as an emblematic example of,
of the rise of this consumerist generation, this late capitalist generation.
She's a news presenter. Therefore, her linguistic skills are her resource.
She was a first Arab to be on mainstream, mainstream TV, the newsreader.
And here she is at the ceremony for the Independence Day.
So she's presented you can see this is the video of the of the ceremony and she's presented as an, um, she's an interviewer and a journalist.
She's a muslim Arab. She pioneered the advancement of respectful dialogue between Arabs and Jews.
And then she says of herself, I am the daughter of Selwyn model.
And Selwyn Maarouf are Arab names. She is claiming on this most Zionist of platforms Arab identity.
Then she makes this speech full of pathos and, you know, sincere.
I mean, these are emotions that she has expressed also elsewhere.
And she ends with one sentence in Arabic.
And then she says, I am lighting this torch for the glory of the state of Israel.
Yeah. So what she is doing, is she on this Zionist platform?
She is saying we the Israelis in Arabic which.
She's claiming some kind of liberal transformation of the state that would include this multilingualism as a resource for her success.
So this is of course, she you know,
it provoked negative reactions from Palestinian nationalists that provoked negative reactions from Lehava and the anti US anti assimilation,
Jewish supremacists, fascist faction as well.
So going on from that, I know I'm going a bit quickly, but this is a third element.
So you can see how in this context of colonialism and conflict,
some speakers are trying to increase Arabic audibility on Hebrew monolingual platforms.
But there's something else. There's how to use your repertoires to do speech acts that work, how to claim legitimacy through speech acts.
Speech acts are as, yeah, an element of language philosophy.
It's been analysed as words that can be said within certain contexts and certain
circumstances that create some kind of material difference in the real world.
So this is now drawing on my own field work and the situation as one of these two speakers.
So we have two Communist members of Knesset, different in a very active member of Knesset for the Communist Party.
He resigned in 2019 and credited with introducing the best legislation for the protection of women from violence and for environmental protection.
He was awarded a UNICEF award for in 2014, for that year, for doing the most for the protection of children.
And here he is in this Bedouin tent in La Kiev, where I did a field work just a few weeks before the elections in March 2015.
The other Knesset member, Ida Touma Suleiman, a new member of the Knesset, also communist.
And as she is being introduced by talking to these Bedouin women who know of Haneen for a while,
so in this Bedouin tent, we have the representative of this women's cooperative,
the director of the organisation of Haneen I,
the two Muslim men and about 12 women from the from the cooperative who are women who are severely deprived in socioeconomic terms.
And this is the speech that I'd like to analyse with you.
And the speech was mostly in Hebrew.
Dobrynin is a Jewish Israeli. He does. He is highly educated.
And but in in respect for him, the most of the the conversation was going on in in Hebrew.
But at this point,
two mostly men is taking the floor and she is signalling that she is now going to switch from that language that had been going on for a while.
And now she will speak in Arabic and Ukrainian, understands immediately that this is asking permission of him.
So he says, yes, yes, you can speak in Arabic.
So in my transcript, the italics is Hebrew and the regular font is Arabic, in case you can't read the transcript on the left.
So I the two Muslim man, is claiming some kind of authority on one subject, which is women's rights in the niqab.
I'm thinking this way. And then she addresses the director of the cooperative maybe for a long time we the subject of the women in the niqab.
You know, as far as I'm concerned, this is a subject that has occupied my mind for more than ten years.
So the poses are marked as brackets with dots.
She's claiming authority and her switch is taking the floor from defining who is the more senior politician.
So director continues for a while in Arabic, she says, But I have something I need to say.
I would like to get it across. I mean, I'd like to get the message through. Is it okay to say a word?
I don't know if Dov understands Arabic well.
So there's an activist there, Jewish-Israeli rights activist, who intervenes in Arabic.
In her Arabic, which has mistakes, but it's Arabic.
He understand Arabic well better than me and of Hanin understands.
He's understands well enough to laugh. He understands that it's a tease and a joke.
The director's back. The director is serious, she says.
It is very important. It is very important that the front, such as the Communist Party understands exactly the mood in the niqab.
And then she switches to Hebrew to. Make sure that the point gets across.
So what I look at this and of course, her switching back to Hebrew means that the local women who were women,
who had very little formal education, they could not follow the Hebrew.
But the point that needed to get across was just how deprived these women were.
But to voice their deprivation to the authorities, they had to somehow be excluded.
From the discourse. They could not understand the Hebrew, but it had to be voiced in Hebrew.
And that may be in this I can see the urgency that don't feel to be alone in the to fill
felt in those early years when the dispossession of Palestinians was still very fresh.
Another example where, again, I'm going to look to see what language do you need to create your legitimacy for your speech,
to create authority for speeches from Hura another another Bedouin locality at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale,
who was built in the 1970s to force the centralisation of Bedouin.
And so gradually they did move in the Bedouin and but sanitation was only introduced in the nineties, I think, anyway.
So it's a very deprived place. And here I am in this town hall again, and now there's not even a single Jewish Israeli presence in Jenin, isn't there?
It's a town hall debate with representatives of the Arab parties and of of the joint list,
therefore, in 2015 and of the advocates for boycotting the elections.
So it's a political hustings, let's say, before the elections, and an argument has just broken out.
And the audience is very engaged, very keen on debating ideas of the common good and who to vote for.
And now, if nobody who says no to this and is the chair of the debate,
he's a local journalist from one of the local tribes, and he is trying in formal Arabic to get them to quiet down.
And he's saying, please. REGION Yeah. JAMAL Gentlemen, brothers, please, sir, no, we cannot go on like this.
They are shouting on top of him on the recording. His voice is kind of like a distant, distant, very polite voice, trying to get them to quieten down.
But then he says it smartly, and then he turns to one of the one of the voters in the audience who has been particularly argumentative.
And he says so and so. And then he switches to Hebrew.
This very polite, speaking in very formal Arabic, suddenly switches to Hebrew.
And he says, I'm calling you to order for the third time.
And then the vote to understands this. He knows what's going on. Oh, dear, oh, dear.
I'm in trouble now. You know, this is sarcastic. Oh, dear.
The seed and the chess was written.
The security is. If I could now call the security from the door.
Of course there's no security. This is you know, this is a dust filled sports hall.
Security. And he says to him, they're sitting behind you now. So what is he doing?
Why is he using Hebrew? It's the authorities.
Yeah. Yeah. There's the bogeyman, you know, with the con will come.
That's like as bad as it gets, but also as an equal set up, I'm sure sheet.
This is exactly what the Knesset chair says when the parliamentarians get out of order,
because if you're you out for the suit, you know, you interrupt for the third time, you're out.
Right. And they don't want to sound like those rude parliamentarians.
It's an in-joke. Yeah, we. Yeah, come on.
We are better than that. So he is creating he's parodying the Knesset chair in order to create a solidarity.
And it works. The guy did quieted down and he could go, but they could go back to taking turns,
which was what the chair wanted, was to have this polite political debate.
He didn't want them to be shouting at each other. Partly, I think maybe because I was there, I was the only outsider.
He wanted them to not be not be unruly Bedouin, you know, to take turns and discuss it politely.
So another way of creating a platform in which you get authorities Arabic language day in the Knesset,
which was instituted in 2017 for the first time. It's a little bit like having International Women's Day in the situation of rampant sexism.
You have an exception to the rule.
You have an exception where by having Arabic language day for one day, the institution or multilingualism that's normally there becomes more obvious.
But interesting things happened. And I included this for you.
So you'll see. Yona, whose parents were born in Iraq, took the floor in Arabic on that day.
And people have to ask, should we put the headphones on blessing was it.
Yeah. And he says yet to put on your put on your headphones because now I'm speaking in Arabic and he's he's an academic
Yossi Yona for the Labour Party and he speaks in Arabic and he obviously was recorded as the translation as usual,
everything's recorded in Hebrew, even though it's Arabic language day.
And he's saying that it's so great that his preferred leader of the Labour Party was elected in the primaries in Arabic.
And the reactions to that is not to do with the content, it's to do with the language.
Once again, the linguistic analysis is what interests me.
And another Labour Party member says, come on, is it's painful enough in Hebrew, you don't have to rub it in in Arabic.
Yeah. And then Yesh Atid, Yael Gellman says he said thank you to Allah.
She picks up on this that when he says and Oscar I love that you know, but he used an Arabic word for Allah.
And and so in the end, the discussion becomes about this, about whether it's can be ordinary to speak Arabic.
And this is what he's trying to say. So the last bit I highlighted was this way.
He says, this is ordinary, isn't it? While really it isn't,
that was the whole point of Arabic language day know you cannot take what was
ordinary for him to speak in Arabic with his parents and put it in the Knesset.
Right? Sure. Yeah, we're nearly there.
So can you use Arabic and be a legitimate speaker?
Well, some people have managed.
So I apologise to those who don't know Hebrew or Arabic, but it will be quite clear this is media to give who's a Likud so to.
Oh yeah they won't doesn't do it doesn't. So she's coming up on a debate about access to Haram al-Sharif, Halabi,
Temple Mount and Jerusalem and the old city of Jerusalem, which was a matter of contest at the time.
And this is how she deals with it. What you have here is a little uncomfortable because I just wasn't convinced that it
meant that settling any deals in the deal suddenly was not a glass of blackness.
It kind of just having a moment ago of a bite to bear then.
In Wyoming, a Zion boy. And it's so funny show that Lincoln Malibu Martha Amy on the show we'll tell you about so it's like give it to Mrs. Spock.
La la la la. Well, how mad that I saw that doc, right?
So she's saying, uh, you know, what was the point of the of the 1967 war if now a Jew cannot go on to a temple, the Temple Mount?
Is it necessary, therefore, for a Jew to say this sentence,
which is the Muslim conversion sentence in Arabic, in order to be able to get access to the temple?
No, go. No, I never go get my sense.
I don't know. I know, I know. Niacin, right.
So I think that gives you an idea. Yes. So this is a kind of theatrics of of political debate.
But this is the way that Arabic has been used by right wing politicians.
She she made it to a high rank in the IDF.
And possibly that's where she has found a way of using of learning Arabic.
Then we have, you know, my girl and this is from 2015 again.
So he you know, and my girl was representative for Jewish home about the Yehudi he has a B.A. in Middle East studies from Hebrew University.
So that gives you a warning about what education can do to you.
And so he decides to speak in.
He uses his 3 minutes. So the way that's structured is that when you have the speaker's podium,
you have 3 minutes for your speech and he uses his 3 minutes to speak in Arabic,
as you will see,
and in which he talks about Jewish the exclusively Jewish rights to Israel due to Israel Jewish history and the exclusion of Palestinians from that.
And he's threatened. He is yeah. He threatens the the representatives of the Palestinians and other Arabs.
So I'll let you listen just because. Well, Sally Field Bell, a 50 year old, his middle name.
Yeah. So he calls them now cousins. So here I've just stopped it because the camera has picked up and picked up the members of Knesset,
which are from the Arab parties, just trying to look at their reactions when they're addressed in Arabic.
Also, these strategies seem to work because not every parliamentary session is recorded in this way with videos.
So once once they do some theatrics like this, it does get picked up by the media.
Yeah. So now when I come up at night to watch like one below Libya late, late and this is more like Zoom not to long at the hardest.
We like to be set up so it's lonely, not know what I'm really glad now about.
And since then I feel sad that well, it could be slow.
Zay had that issue when he would run.
Now I hate them. Well, I got to feel cool.
I'm soon to survive Are you are Mia will see to what role will you have?
Like what would you let me one. Okay so right so he he gives the kind of narrative of returning to the homeland after 2000 years in exile.
And, you know, he says and you cannot oppose this through violent resistance and terrorism.
And he's also dismissing the way the Palestinian and other Arab representatives are portraying history and says,
what I'm telling you now is the truth. That's why I have to say it to you in Arabic, says to communicate with you directly.
Anyway, he got done in on sexual harassment allegations.
So that's a that's a way of going about it.
But he obviously he also served in the Army and he that what you need.
And also one of the scholars of Arabic in Israel, Yonatan, has written a book on Israeli Arabic.
And so the way he portrays it, Israeli Arabic is a way of using Arabic by Israelis,
Jewish Israelis in order work as through an education which was promoted by the army.
So using Arabic in these kinds of settings by rightwing Jewish Israelis, and I'm using right wing as a kind of shortcuts, you know,
to describe a certain position on the on the conflict is to display this kind of legitimacy,
this kind of authority associated with with militarised education in some way.
You know, I've I've gained this knowledge of Arabic through a type of education that is supported by the military.
I can display my credentials not to the Palestinians or the Arabs, but to other Jews, to the Jewish-Israeli voters.
And anyway, you can look at your NIS really excellent analysis, looking through the archives of of how this education system was created.
So to cheer you up a little bit. If these platforms don't work,
then it seems that Palestinians and other Arabs in Israel have just created other other ways of going
about and using their language as a resource to create very entertaining cinematic productions.
So this is this is of I would have it both said Kashua would love.
It was a sitcom that started being broadcast on mainstream TV in Israel in 2007.
In English, it was rendered as Arab labour. But everyday, all of it also means it's a pun.
It also means shoddy work.
And aside, Kashua is one of those people who has high degrees of multilingual proficiency, and he uses it as a way of doing humour.
I don't think that video works, but. Hmm.
Anyway. Never mind. So in this. In this. Anyway, it's very funny.
And he uses puns in both languages to kind of highlight a very nuanced identity that's not exclusively Israeli or Palestinian.
And kind of putting the conflict as a background rather than the centre of the.
Of the of the of the narrative. And there was a kind of rise in cinematic productions in after the end of the second intifada inside Israel,
again, multilingual cinematic productions and a lot of them very successful.
All of these that I've got here are were award winning.
So, I mean, in 2009, set in a deprived district of Jaffa, um, talking about drugs and social deprivation, using multilingualism.
In between was about the situation of Arab women in Israel.
Also very funny. And 2008.
I really recommend if you have not seen Tel Aviv on fire, it is a very, very funny film about a screenwriter who's Arab.
And this has to cross a checkpoint in order to get to to work every day and to check the head of the checkpoint wants
to contribute to this film script and keeps having suggestions on how you doing could portray different characters.
And so all of these relatively successful productions again, are using multilingualism as a resource.
But the most successful, multilingual cinematic production of this decade has been folder, which got a Netflix Netflix contract.
Photo is an Israeli production. It's about an elite commando unit that is infiltrates armed groups,
Palestinian armed groups in the occupied Palestinian territories by speaking Arabic so well that they can pass for Palestinians.
So again, this is using multilingualism as a skill, as a as a resource.
And the passing for issue, as you can see on that photo,
it's the the the person in the forefront is the military commando an Israeli and as a the person in the background is the terrorist Palestinian.
And you can see it's kind of playing on the idea that these they look quite similar and as a its
identity the bounded ness of their identities can be destabilised by passing for the other group.
So even though it destabilises the exclusive categories that destabilisation is a threat to security and the obviously the winners are the,
you know, the big fat commandos and they don't win by using books or humour, I can tell you that.
So and as a result of the success of Folder, um, which maybe was the first time some Jewish Israelis saw Jews speaking Arabic so well,
there was an increase apparently in sign up for Arabic classes in Israel.
That's, um, that was reported by commercial providers of Arabic language courses that some of many more students and gave
is the reason for signing up that they had seen Arabic on Fouda and that they wanted to speak like that.
I see that as the in meshing of securities and with consumerism you know in the in the context of less late capitalism.
So that might be what we are looking forward to. Right.
So why am I doing this? So these are some of the sources.
This is the some of the scholarship that I like on Arabic and Hebrew in Israel.
Um, and then I, Lefkowitz did a study which was anthropological, going around listening to people and how they spoke.
He was based mostly in Haifa,
and he brought with him from us studies a kind of idea of the the mapping of language and ways of speaking on racial categories.
Ronnie Henkin I like very much because she uses pragmatics to analyse speech acts, so that's definitely the method I was inspired by.
And she use it to uses it to highlight the way multilingualism can be used for humour.
Yonatan Mendel I mentioned him with regards to the education system and how Arabic was promoted as part of the security security system in Israel.
Bill Cotton Uri Hirsch did a variation of study,
which is a sociolinguistics way of studying phonetic change about how refugees from Jaffa started to speak slightly
differently from those who would did not become refugees throughout the ages as a result of the history of 1948.
And Tomaso Milan in 11 have done work on how language is used to claim a kind of a type of multilingual pluralism in Israel,
including for LGBTQ rights in Israel, a kind of inclusiveness that maybe doesn't exist as much as some people allow.
And the what the the scholarship of scholarship that I'm reacting against is the scholarship that sees these languages as kind of in conflict.
That's as if that's the only way of looking at it. So this is one quote, interference from local sedentary dialects have, in the meantime,
penetrated the Bedouin dialects more deeply as one language versus the other language,
and they penetrate each other, and that's a source of a problem.
Here we go. More penetration and more serious penetration occurs when the knowledge of Hebrew is traceable among younger groups in educational domain.
And this is attributed mostly to the truths and may be the male Bedouin.
And it's linked and this kind of generalised summary to and serving in the army.
And look here we have penetration again. I wonder what Sigmund Freud would have to say about this.
Here it's Rahman Marty, who says,
Does the massive lexical penetration of Hebrew into Arabic constitute a danger to the essence of the presence of Arabic in the country?
And this is mostly how the scholarship looks at it.
Another way of calling penetrations interference. That's another way it's generally been referred to.
And here we have referred to Roman Arabic as a minority language in Israel.
One may recall the intensively quoted words of the Arab Knesset members, Orbih,
who expressed his concern back in 1966 about the disappearance of Arabic from use in the state of Israel.
The facts hardly justify this pessimistic view, although Zombie's impressionistic evaluation may be judged somewhat differently.
After consideration of the role of Hebrew interference in the Arabic used by the Arab citizens of Israel.
So what is going on here?
Obviously, Zogby I if you remember the beginning of the talk, Zogby did complain in 1966 that the administration of Nazareth did not speak Arabic.
Now, this is how it's reported in the scholarship, you know, 30, 40 years later,
without actually referring to the political context of what Zombie's complaint was about.
And then so first, zombies complaint is kind of dismissed.
You know, this hardly justified.
But then maybe actually the Hebrew interference means that is correct, that he Arabic is disappearing in the state of Israel.
Was what Zogby was complaining about was not that his Arabic speaking constituents in Nazareth were losing Arabic.
On the contrary, were saying they do speak Arabic.
The problem is that the state does not speak Arabic, its use of Arabic not in the state of Israel, but use of Arabic by the state of Israel.
So this is what gets to me. This is why I think we need a reframing of a scholarship that has gathered a lot of evidence.
But what I am hoping is that by putting it into the framework for a framework of analysis of what makes a legitimate speaker,
we can use this evidence in a more politically sophisticated way.
And why is it important? This is don't worry. This is my final slide.
What makes a particular language authoritative in community members eyes and.
What relationship to language allows a government and its institutions to be perceived as legitimate?
And what entitles a speaker to use a language freely and to convince others without use?
Monolingual speakers of dominant languages rarely have to pause to consider such questions.
But members of bilingual and minoritized speech communities routinely confront them implicitly and explicitly.
The answers matter because the foundations of linguistic authority are also the foundations of identity, community, nation, polity and citizenship.
And for me, what I'm looking at is this group of speakers,
these Palestinian politicians and and and filmmakers who are trying to reform the foundations of linguistic authority.
And here it is, because these foundations are not fixed forever.
They are negotiated constantly. And to change it, you need resources.
This is why I call them the new middle class. They have the resources, including the discursive resources, to try and make this reform possible,
to be included in the polity, included in the ideas of citizenship.
And so what I'm proposing is that if we introduce not only nationhood,
which is so clear cut with the Arabic and Hebrew indexing very strongly that two different nations,
but also class to see more the dynamics of power in that negotiation,
then we can call this new middle class multilingual as those who have who are the owners of this discursive means of self production.
That's my proposal for defining class in a useful way for social linguistic analysis.
Oh, and look, somebody wrote something about it. Okay.
Right. So this is a yeah, this is what the book looks like.
And I can pass it around in case you're interested.
It was out earlier this year. Thank you so much.