In preparation for my trip to Israel and the Palestinian territories this December, I’ve started brushing up on my Hebrew (which I spoke decently more than thirty years ago) and re-learning some Arabic (which I studied for two years in college thirty-five years ago, but never maintained). For Hebrew, I’ve gone through the first book in the series Encounters in Modern Hebrew by Edna Amir Coffin. One thing I noticed in this 1992 book is the complete absence of Arabs. The book is based on college student life in Jerusalem (hard enough to relate to at my age!). But never do the students discuss politics in general or Arabs in particular. When students in the sample dialogues talk about different countries and languages (“Where are you from?” and the like), we learn how to say France and Germany and the United States and Japan, but not Egypt or Jordan or Palestine or even the West Bank. We learn how to say Italian and Chinese, but not Arabic. The book’s Arab invisibility symbolizes the Arab invisibility in mainstream Israeli life. Arabs might be discussed as dangers, as terrorists, but not as ordinary people going to college, meeting other people, hanging out in the dorm or coffee shop, etc.
For Arabic, I started out reviewing the same text I had in college, Jochanan Kapliwatzky’s Arabic Language and Grammar. It’s not the actual book I had in 1967, but a copy I bought a few years ago. I think it was written around 1940 and then reprinted, unchanged. Re-learning the alphabet is slow going. Also slow is the content; instead of the modernized Hebrew college setting, the older Arabic text is focused on farm life: My ox is bigger than your ox. My brother is in the garden. The blacksmith went to Yaffa. It seems, today, quaint.
Yaffa is now essentially part of Tel Aviv. Most Arabs descended from those in 1940s Palestine aren’t allowed to go there.
To speed things up, in a few weeks I’m going to take an Arabic class at the local adult education center. I just bought the course book, published in 1990: Mastering Arabic, by Jane Wightwick and Mahmoud Gaafar. Leafing through it, it seems the subject matter is more updated than Kapliwatzky. More relevant is that the map in the chapter on The Middle East doesn’t include Israel. The borders are drawn lightly, but Israel isn’t listed, unlike Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and the rest (interestingly, Jerusalem is not listed either, though other Arab capitals are listed). I know that Arab countries generally maintain the fiction that Israel does not exist — even, I have heard, in Eqypt and Jordan, which have diplomatic relations with Israel. But Israel’s absence in a book desigined to teach English speakers seems to me unhelpful at best. I would rather the book taught the vocabulary we need to discuss the political situation. Simply omitting Israel, which exists legally, by leaving a blank space on the map makes a political point at the expense of looking silly. It also supports Israel’s claim that Arabs will never agree to co-exist with Israel despite the Palestine Authority’s formal position that co-existence is the goal.