Teaching Arabic: The Most Urgent Change in Israeli Education

The results of Israel’s latest election are not merely another reminder of political deadlock and ongoing paralysis; they represent a harsh and resounding indictment of the very concept of Israeli democracy. Beyond the narrow coalition math of the morning after, these elections once again exposed the deep-seated, institutionalized racism that continues to feed the Jewish public: the automatic, sweeping, and ugly disqualification of Arab parties from holding cabinet seats or serving as legitimate partners in shaping national policy.

While a substantive liberal democracy relies on full civic equality, representation, and the inclusion of all its communities, Israel’s political system insists on maintaining a hollow, biased, and discriminatory democracy. In it, a fifth of its citizen population is marked in advance as illegitimate to participate in leading the state. This political and public boycott is neither an inescapable fate nor a genuine security requirement. It is the direct, intentional, and destructive product of an ongoing structural and ideological failure at the heart of the Israeli education system, a system that willfully surrenders the most fundamental tool required for shared civic life: the Arabic language.

As someone observing the country from the outside, having lived in the United States for many years, it is hard not to see how the Israeli Ministry of Education functions as a strategic instrument in a system of ethnic-national separation and the deepening of public ignorance. If there is one urgent, binding structural reform this system must adopt, not as a cosmetic fix or symbolic gesture, but as a deep, vital correction for the very survival of Israel’s democracy, it is making the study of both spoken and literary Arabic mandatory for every student in the Jewish sector, starting from the beginning of elementary school. Transforming Arabic into a core pillar of Israeli civic education is not an act of goodwill toward the Arab minority; it is an absolute and decisive prerequisite for shattering the political asymmetry, the exclusion of minorities, and the national paranoia paralyzing Israeli society.

To understand the magnitude of this educational and moral failure, one must examine the history of language instruction in the country and how the state deliberately erased Arabic from the public sphere. Before the establishment of the state, Arabic was a prevalent, natural, spoken language among many Jewish communities, who viewed it as an integral part of the region’s identity. However, with the founding of the state and the imposition of a harsh military government over Arab citizens between 1948 and 1966, a dangerous conceptual shift took place. The Israeli education system did not just enforce absolute separation between the two sectors; it actively security-oriented the Arabic language.

Arabic came to be taught in Jewish schools almost exclusively through the narrow, aggressive lens of military intelligence. The system placed near-exclusive emphasis on dry literary Arabic and the analysis of journalistic and military texts, while intentionally neglecting spoken Arabic and rich Arab culture. The system’s unofficial goal was never to foster dialogue, equality, or empathy, but to train the next recruits for Intelligence Unit 8200 (IDF’s NSA) and the security services. The Arab citizen was not presented to the Jewish student as an equal partner in citizenship, but as an intelligence subject to be monitored, decoded, and interrogated.

In the 1990s, the Ministry of Education made several reform attempts, including designating Arabic as a mandatory subject in middle schools. Yet, lacking proper funding and undermined by institutional neglect and a deliberate shortage of qualified teachers, these efforts collapsed, leaving policy decisions as mere window dressing. The most severe and racist milestone in this process came in 2018 with the passage of the Nation-State Basic Law. By explicitly downgrading Arabic from an official language to one with “special status,” the law provided constitutional and educational backing for the exclusion of Arabic from Israeli civic space. It sent an unmistakable message to Jewish students: Arabic is a foreign, unnecessary, and even hostile element in the public domain.

The result of this discriminatory policy is a severe civic asymmetry that exposes the hypocrisy of demands for Arab integration. Arab-Israeli students are required to learn Hebrew early in their education. They are exposed to Jewish-Israeli media, culture, and discourse, graduating with high proficiency in Hebrew. This fluency enables them to understand the majority, integrate into higher education institutions, and navigate civic systems. Conversely, the average Jewish student finishes 12 years in the public education system completely ignorant of the mother tongue spoken by a fifth of the country’s citizens.

This deliberate linguistic disconnect is not merely a pedagogical failure; it fosters cultural blindness, profound alienation, and primal fear that directly feed the demonization of the Arab public. When an entire society cannot understand the language, culture, and internal discourse of the minority living alongside it, it becomes easy to frame their elected representatives as a “fifth column” and disqualify them from democratic participation.

The political system in Israel, which openly refuses to include Arab parties in coalitions, does not operate in a vacuum. It draws directly from the ignorance and alienation planted by the education system in the minds of millions of Jewish citizens from early childhood. A democracy cannot function, nor claim to be liberal, when a fifth of its elected officials are excluded from executive decision-making solely because of their national and linguistic identity, neutralizing the ability to reach stable, equal democratic outcomes. True political partnership cannot rest on a master-servant dynamic or on emergency translation during political crises.

A genuine shift in the Israeli education system cannot end with adding a few marginal hours to the weekly schedule; it demands dismantling the security-driven nationalist mindset and replacing it with an equal civic approach. Arabic instruction must become mandatory from elementary school, an age when language acquisition occurs naturally and without prejudice. The system must shift its weight from dry grammar rules of literary Arabic toward spoken Arabic, literature, and history, aimed at building human-to-human dialogue. Furthermore, Arab teachers must be integrated into the Jewish school system to root out prejudice before it takes hold.

Another election cycle has passed, but the democratic decay will persist as long as state institutions and the education system continue to treat Arabic as the language of the enemy and its speakers as second-class citizens. Teaching Arabic to every Jewish boy and girl in Israel is not a political concession; it is the state’s most urgent moral and democratic test. If Israel wishes to stop being a democracy in name only and secure its future, the first step must begin in the first-grade classroom with one simple word: “Marhaba.”