What Does Israel Fear from Palestine? by Raja Shehadeh

Author:Raja Shehadeh [Shehadeh, Raja]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile Books
Published: 2024-04-25T20:00:00+00:00

Unit 8200 is an Israeli intelligence corps unit that was established in 1952 for collecting signals intelligence and code decryption. It should be pointed out that the languages of the two sides, Arabic and Hebrew, are very similar. A number of Arabic words have become commonly used by Hebrew speakers, such as ahlan, a popular greeting like hello in English, and walla, meaning ‘by Allah, by God’. Fewer Hebrew words are used by Arabic speakers. With the exception of yom yom, meaning ‘daily’, and ramzon for ‘traffic lights’, most of the Hebrew words that entered daily parlance have a military or security connotation, such as makhsom for ‘checkpoint’, which is given the Arabic plural form makhaseem, and makhsheer for ‘walkie-talkie’.

Often Arabic words are turned into curse words in Hebrew: shababnikkim is pejorative Hebrew slang for right-wing extremist youth from ultra-Orthodox homes who are on the fringes of Orthodox society. They are often yeshiva dropouts who have picked up some of the anti-Arab views that can be found even in certain rabbinical writings. The word is rooted in the Arabic shabab, which means ‘the youth’. In Israeli society the word is associated with stone-throwing hooligans. In the various institutions that teach Hebrew to new immigrants the accent taught is European not Middle Eastern. This helps define the difference between Hebrew speakers who are Arab from the non-Arabs. At checkpoints and the airport if the guard is unsure he engages the passenger in conversation to find out from his accent whether or not he is Arab in order to apply the harsher rules for treating Arabs in such places.

Perhaps the most cynical and convoluted exploitation of these similarities in looks and language is when they are used by Israeli operatives, called must’arab’een (Arabised, or acting or pretending to be Arabs), who mingle with Palestinians to identify and arrest or kill activists. When soldiers masquerading as Arabs were attacked by settlers in the southern part of the West Bank, near the village of Susia, politicians in Israel criticised the army’s use of these look-alikes and excused the actions of the settlers because when they attacked the soldiers they ‘believed they were terrorists’.

On 26 August 2014 members of the Knesset from the Israeli parties Yisrael Beiteinu, Likud and Jewish Home submitted a bill to rescind the status of Arabic as an official language in Israel. They did this in the name of greater ‘social cohesion’ in the country. Later, with the passing of the Jewish State Law on 19 July 2018, the Arabic language ceased to be an official language in Israel. In September 2014 Israel’s Population, Immigration and Borders Authority released its annual statement for the Jewish New Year, which included a list of the most popular baby names in Israel. Whereas in fact Mohammad, an Arab name, topped the list, the official list hid this fact and claimed that most popular were the Jewish names Yosef, Daniel and Uri.

Sometimes the condemnation of Palestinian literature reaches absurd heights. The popular poem ‘Write I

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