Sociolinguistics and Development of Israel’s Arab Minority

Nydell, Margaret K. (. K. Understanding Arabs: A Guide for Modern Times. Intercultural Press, Yarmouth, ME, 2006.

“States,” by Edward Said is an essay written by a Palestinian man with first-hand accounts of daily life in that region of the Middle-East. Said was renowned in the literary community as one of the most “distinguished literary critics and scholars...” Born in Jerusalem in 1935, Said, at the age of twelve, fled with his family to Cairo during the establishment of Israel as a Jewish state. In his essay, Said begins to discuss the state of the Palestinian people. The content of his essay is an explanation and an informative look on the Palestinian people, as well their situation and their identity. In our English Composition class, we have been challenged to look past the aesthetics of “States” and look not at just

Thesis: All three authors portray the voice of many people, who, on a daily basis, are underprivileged of speaking their own language, thus, emphasizing onto the lives of linguistic minority students around the world and how they struggle to cope in school and at home.

Linguistic discrimination is an important issue; many have been discriminated and excluded from the public sphere due to their disability to practice the standardized language. In the Arab world, when second language speakers try to talk Arabic, they seem to have difficulties with the pronunciations. Consequently, this leads to limitations during the blending in procedures. The explanation

Further quoting Mavshan, Hebrew as a “nation building tool” was used with great success by the Zionist movement. This was used to combat the effects of “dispora” on the languages of the Jewish people. Not only did the Zionist movement encourage the use of Hebrew through extensive educational programs, but they also engaged in “active condemnation of alternative” languages. The article articulates this “battle” for the Hebrew language by documenting the early push for the national language in the city of Tel-Aviv.

Before we identify a few biases associated with the Middle Eastern population, we must first familiarize ourselves with several characteristics of their culture and linguistics.

What was once a relationship based on paternalism and condescension between Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Jews has gradually transformed into a more leveled socioeconomic platform between the two ethnic groups. The Jews of Ashkenazi descent, mainly from Eastern European countries and Britain, arrived in the decades before the creation of the State of Israel and were able to rapidly create a new society. Shortly after Israel’s independence, massive waves of Jewish immigrants flooded the country, of which a large part were Mizrahim Jews from North Africa and the Middle East fleeing discrimination in Arab lands. The dominant Ashkenazim viewed the incoming Mizrahi Jews as backwards and burdensome to the newly-founded country’s cultural and economic image and took measures to make them conform to their customs. This process of conditioning ultimately led to a wide socioeconomic gap between the two groups that prompted political clashes and riots. Recent trends and changes in the country’s political structure have narrowed the gap and point toward equal opportunities between Mizrahi Jews and Ashkenazi Jews.

The investigation assesses demographic shifts to Palestine in the context of the Arab-Israeli Conflict. It more specifically inquires about the impact of Jewish immigration on Palestine in terms of the effects it had on Jewish-Arab relationships in Palestine. It seeks to determine the extent the third, fourth, and fifth aliyahs of 1919-1939 had on the economic development of the Israeli State and its social implications. Monographs and general texts will be used to provide background on the conflict, including the rise of Zionism, the British Mandate, the White Paper, and the Peel Commission. This context will also be used to critically analyze the role of Jewish immigration to Palestine and the role it played in land reforms, rioting, and the implementation of restrictions set by the British government on Palestine. Two secondary sources, William L. Cleveland’s A History of the Modern Middle East and Howard M. Sachar’s A History of

Arabic, a once dominant language, is starting to take a back seat to English because of accessibility and communication on the internet. Instead of accepting diversity and the fact that English has a place in the Arab speaking world; many officials are discouraging the use of English and forcing Fusha Arabic on the public at a young age. This is an absurd effort from the government, as Arabic has influenced many other languages including English words such as admiral and scarlet. Arabic is also not a completely original language as it has had languages, such as Latin, influence much of the Arabic vocabulary. Instead of embracing the diversity and unifying the Arab world, the higher beings reject the language, causing much tension between the government and its citizens.

The year 1948 witnessed the national independence for Israelis and “Al-Nakbah the disaster” (Sa'di 177) for Palestinian Arabs. Jewish Holocaust, Zionist movement, British interference, Arab awakening, religious conflict and disputes over territory built up into this catastrophic war. In consequence, on the one hand, millions of Palestinian Arabs fled into neighboring Arab countries, refugee camps and western countries (Mattar 395). On the other hand, militarization and securitization in Israel disrupted the normal life of its citizens (Éigeartaigh and Getty 18).

They express many experience such as "racism, sexism, heterosexist, homophobia, ageism, poverty, indigotic. The Arab American writer contribute to the production of a critically recuperative voice exposing the ambivalence of the location of Arab Americans in the United States. It also articulates forms of self-division resulting from the different and sometimes contradictory strategies of belonging these authors negotiate. And by Reading their work against the backdrop of recent scholarship

Israel is a state complete with a multitude of ethnicities. As Jews began to immigrate to the newly formed state, they brought with them distinctive cultural values and traditions that shifted Israel from a more homogenized community into a definite “melting pot”. Significant waves of Jews came from Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Africa and even North America. The impact each of these groups had on Israeli society differed from group to group. Two of the most recent waves of immigrants to Israel came from Ethiopia and the former Soviet Union. Both groups changed the dynamic of Israeli society in ways previous groups had not.

The focus of ethnicity and ethnic issues in the Middle East has been associated with the Arabs in the Palestine and the Jews in Israel. Research carried in the previous researches confirmed that these issues are directly or indirectly affected by the political disputes. In a sample of the students who were involved in the research, 46.9% ranked the religion to be the major factor of the formation of the identity. Some students said that the term Israel was not the appropriate identity and a section about 50% said that Palestine was the right identity. When given six ways of characterising the identities, that is the Arab, Israeli, Israeli Arab, Palestinian Arab, Israeli Palestinian, and Palestinian. Palestinian Arab received the more endorsement by around 34%, followed by the Israeli Arab by 30%, Arab followed by approximately 20%, then Israeli Palestinian by 11.7% and Palestinian 4% the remaining 2.9% characterised themselves as Israelis. The implications of these data are discussed in this work.

To be considered Arab, you or your ancestors live or lived in the Arab world and speak Arabic. The “Arab world” is made up of 22 states and territories whom are part of the Arab League. However many people in these states do not consider themselves Arab, thus the Arabic language is the unifying factor among the Arabic people. A lot of the individuals who speak Arabic today are very diverse. There is a myriad of dialects of Arabic and over 150 million people speak it. Twenty-five countries consider Arabic an official language (even if few are fluent in it). They vary from African to West Asian countries, however Arabs also live as minorities in many other nations. For example, the United States (Banks, 2009).

Pan Arabism was a movement that reached its high point in the 60’s and 70’s that called for the unification of countries from North Africa and Asia to create a national Arabic identity. Although Pan Arabism was its own movement, it closely was tied with Arab Nationalism, which basically wanted a unified Arab country with lesser western political intervention. In this paper I will talk about what lead to Pan Arabism and how it came to become an actual movement. I will also cover Arab Nationalism because of its close relation to Pan Arabism. After I talk about Pan Arabism, I will talk about the importance of Arabic language to the actual Arabic identity and the efforts that are taken to prevent the downfall of this language. I will also cover the Politics of the time period of Pan Arabism talking about Nasserisim and the Bath Party. Lastly, and most Importantly, I will talk about unity in Pan Arabism covering the United Arab Republic, the Islamist Arabic Union, Maghreb Union, and many more. Basically, I will talk about what time frame these unions were introduced, what caused them, what their intent was, and why they failed if they did so. I also intend on presenting the case as to whether a true Arab identity exists and what makes it up. Initially, what caused the movements of Pan Arabism and Arab Nationalism to fail is inevitable political intervention of western nations. I also believe that language and geographic positions were not enough for nations to unify. That is what