I've been a really bad blogger so far, but I hope that this post will make up for it. As I mentioned in my last post, my head is very much all over the place, and I'm trying to process so much that it's hard to write spur of the moment while being coherent. Having said that, This post is going to be really cool. It's all about languages and my experience living my life in Hebrew, Arabic, English, and Sign Language.
Arabic/Hebrew Fusion
Whenever I want to talk to Arabs in Haifa in Arabic, it's a struggle. Largely, this is because my Hebrew is so much better than my Arabic, and they all speak Hebrew. In fact, many Arabs here (particularly Druze) speak a language that is a mix of Hebrew and Arabic, with words of each used in every sentence. It makes it very hard for me to separate the two languages, and even harder for me to just speak in Arabic. Coming into this semester, I knew that my head was going to explode because of all of the languages going on, but I didn't realize that I would have experiences in which I was literally switching back and forth between 4 different languages. This exact thing happened last week.
I went to the shook (a farmers market on crack and way less organic) with two friends from the international school. One of them is deaf, and one of them doesn't speak any Hebrew. Because shop keepers are Hebrew speaking and Arabic speaking (and discounts tend to be given when you speak in their language), I was literally flipping back and forth between four languages (if you include sign language), translating, and trying to prevent my head from exploding. I felt both really pretentious and really cool.
Taking Arabic in Israel is really interesting. In Haifa, where there is a large Arab population (including my roommates), one would assume that the Arabic language teaching is incredible. To say the least, I have not found that to be true. As I mentioned in the Jordan blog, Arabic has a formal language, and colloquial dialects. I'm taking modern standard Arabic, and the class is terrible. Having said that, I've learned a lot about the way Israeli Jews look at Arabic through the textbook.
The textbook we use is made for Hebrew speakers. Consequently, instructions, translations, etc. are in Hebrew. For me, a person that knows Hebrew, this is fine, but my classmates are perplexed to the max. What makes this interesting for me, though, is that the examples used are very Israel specific. But Arabic. So how does that work? A vocab word was "new immigrant," and the example sentence said that someone was a new immigrant from Russia. I try to think how my Jordanian professors would think about this. The short texts in the book will often include names of the nearby Arab villages, but it never mentions the word Palestine, even though the spoken language is Palestinian Dialect.
Now is as good of a time as any to mention that my Arabic teacher (who happens to be the head of the international school's Arabic department) is Jewish--and not Arab.
The most interesting part of the textbook, though, is a map I saw while bored in class.
Get Out The Map: Where Am I?
When I was in Jordan, I paid a lot of attention to maps and the way that people spoke about Israel/Palestine, particularly looking at where they put borders. Many English language maps drew in 1967 borders and wrote Israel. If they did, the West Bank was seldom referred to as Palestine and Gaza was always referred to as just Gaza--not Palestine. I never saw the word Israel written in Arabic on a map. When I conducted research that included having students label countries on a map, fewer than 5% of students mentioned Israel in any capacity on the map.
In Israel, I pay attention to maps too, in addition to how people talk about the land in which they reside. I was flipping through my Arabic textbook one day, and I came across the following map:
As mentioned previously, my Arabic textbook is made for Israelis. It attempts to be apolitical, but any time you show a map of this region and put in the names of a city, it's political. Is it Jerusalem or is it Quds? Tel Aviv or Jaffa? Al-Ramla or Ramle?
Lets take a look at this map. Yes, it labels the whole thing as Israel. That's not rare here--the official government tourist maps do that too (if you want, I can write a whole post about that). What is rare to me is seeing this map in Arabic, seeing the word Israel in Arabic, and seeing a very Jewish-Israeli mentality applied to a map in Arabic. Other than the borders, two things stood out to me:
1) It doesn't ask for students to label Yaffo--it asks for Tel Abib (Arabic has no V).
2) It doesn't ask for students to find Jerusalem OR al Quds. It does, however, ask for students to label the capital of Israel.
I don't yet have a so what for the section, but I thought it was interesting all the same.
The question of the map becomes more interesting when talking to Arabs in Haifa. To help you understand what I mean, let me give you a simple example of what I mean.
Let’s start simple, using my current location, the university of Haifa. Where am I? What country am I in.
As of 1948, Haifa is in Israel. Therefore, Becca is in Israel. Becca is studying in Israel right now.
Oh wait. My dorm is a suite, and I have three Druze suite-mates. The Druze religion is like the Jewish religion in that the religion and its people can exist and live in any state. They have Israeli passports, but they are Arab. If you ask them if they are Israeli, they say yes, but it’s complicated. If you ask if they are Palestinian, they say no, but it’s complicated. If you ask if they are Arab, they say sort of, but it’s complicated. My Druze Suite-mates are in Israel*.
Oh Wait! I also have a Muslim suite-mate, named Miriam. She holds an Israeli passport and acknowledges that the State of Israel exists and is a reality here. But, when asked where she is from, she does not say Israel—she says the name of her village. I haven’t pressed her on it yet, but based on other Muslim students I’ve talked to here, I’d guess she would say she is from Palestine. Miriam is in Palestine.
Oh wait! My friend Amir lives a few buildings over from me. He is a Muslim from Haifa who went to Jewish schools, and not Arab schools. He considers himself a Palestinian, although he holds an Israeli Passport, and his Hebrew is better than his Arabic. He would say that right now, we are in Israel, but he wants it to be Palestine.
Oh wait! I haven’t talked to my Jordanian host family since being here, but if I were to see them, I guarantee they would ask me how I’m doing in Palestine. Yes, they would say, there is country that calls itself Israel—but the land is the land of Palestine.
To be clear, Haifa is a city in the country of Israel. It has never been up for negotiations in any agreement, the UN recognizes it, and the name of the city is the same in both Hebrew and Arabic. Relatively speaking, Haifa is simple. Imagine if I were to apply this same type of logic to Jerusalem/Quds? Ma'aleh Adumim (the largest settlement in the West Bank that functions as a suburb of Jerusalem and is considered a part of Israel by Israeli Jews).
Summary
The point of all of this is not to make you confused, depressed, and overwhelmed at how much of a mess my head is, but rather to give you an understanding of the kind of things you notice about the interactions between Arabs and Jews in Israel when you start digging below the surface.
If you read this whole post, props. If you didn't, you probably didn't see this anyways, so whatever. Have a good Purim--I'll be in Jerusalem, so I know I will.
Becca
