The language gap – and why it matters - opinion

Language is more than a tool; it is a bridge and sometimes a barrier.

We often say that we speak the language of sushi in a region that speaks hummus; we say we must “speak the enemy’s language” metaphorically, when truth of the matter is that we don’t speak it literally, and when you don’t understand the language, everyone begins to seem like an enemy.

So here’s a question that must wake us up: How is it that we live in a country where millions of people speak Arabic, yet we, as a society, barely know the language?

From there, I moved on to spoken Arabic – and that’s where something deeper began to shift. I began to understand just how complex the reality we live in is, and how often we choose, consciously or not, to ignore parts of it.

Over 10 years ago – it was during the period often referred to as the “knife intifada,” a wave of attacks across the country – I was serving in the army in the Egoz unit. We were on an operation in an Arab village in the West Bank, tasked with arresting a suspect and locating his weapon.

It was a cold night, around 2 a.m., when all of a sudden, in the middle of the search, an old man came out toward us. He was wearing a keffiyeh and leaning on a stick, and shouting loudly.

We couldn’t understand a word he was saying. But for me – as I’m sure for many of my friends who grew up during the Second Intifada – a thought immediately crossed our minds: It doesn’t matter that he’s old. There had been suicide bombers before who didn’t fit the expected profile.

We tried to calm him down, speaking in Hebrew. He didn’t understand. He didn’t stop. The tension escalated quickly. At a certain point, both I and the deputy company commander had already raised our weapons, were aiming at him and had our fingers on the trigger, convinced that at any moment he might detonate himself right in front of us.

And then someone shouted: “Stop!”

One of the soldiers, who spoke just a bit of Arabic, understood what the man was saying. He wasn’t a threat. He was simply begging us not to dig up and destroy his yard. He went back inside.

But that moment – that breakdown in communication – has stayed with me ever since.

Fast-forward 10 years later: I’m at a level of conversational Arabic. During one operation in Gaza, we enter a house in an area believed to be empty of civilians, only to find a family hiding inside. The children were extremely frightened.

After we finished scanning the building and securing the area – and after one of the people found in the building pointed us to the location of a dangerous sniper nearby – I approached one of the young girls, gave her some chocolate, and told her in Arabic: We are here to look for bad terrorists, not to harm sweet children. She smiled.

It was a small moment but one that revealed the power of language.

A foreign language can intensify a sense of distance. When you don’t understand the person in front of you, it is easier to reduce them to “the other,” to dehumanize. But once you begin to understand – even just a little – something shifts. And this, of course, works both ways. (This does not negate the expectation that Arabic-speakers learn Hebrew, but it also does not exempt us from learning their language.)

How different might our history of wars have been, and our future be, if we just spoke each other’s languages?

For me, however, Arabic has never been aimed toward the security sphere. It is present in everyday life: at the supermarket, on the bus, in hospitals, and in everyday encounters – and more often than not, it is met with a smile.

But in the reality of recent years – especially during this long war – I’ve found myself relying on it quite often. On many fronts, this gap is not always immediately felt. But when operating in the West Bank, it becomes very clear. Most of the population there does not speak Hebrew, and in many army units operating in the area, there is only one Arabic-speaker – if any!

This is why it is difficult to justify avoiding learning the language. Whether one believes it is important for “knowing your enemy” (even if it’s just understanding what the people sitting behind you on the bus are saying), or for opening the door to human connection – in both cases, knowledge is power.

And yet, the reality speaks for itself: The vast majority of Israelis (around 95%) do not know Arabic at even a basic level, and only a small percentage speak it fluently. There is something almost embarrassing about that. But this is, of course, no coincidence, since spoken Arabic is absent from our education system.

How is it, we must all ask, that the vast majority of us cannot even ask a simple question – “Where is the bathroom?” – in Arabic?

As a teacher, I try to change this, even in small ways. On Purim, for example, I dress up with a keffiyeh and galabia and introduce myself as a substitute teacher – “Abu Oz” (named after my eldest son, Oz) – and use it as an opportunity to explore the connections between Hebrew and Arabic, like similar words and expressions that have been borrowed from one language to the other.

In addition, I teach the students simple phrases in Arabic: thank you, goodbye, how are you. And, honestly, it excites them. Many students take it further and continue learning on their own.

Over the years, I’ve had a range of study partners for Arabic – a Lebanese woman (from a South Lebanon Army family), a Druze, a Circassian, a Bedouin, a Palestinian Arab, and an Arab Israeli. At times we exchanged Arabic for Hebrew, and at others, Arabic for English. On one occasion, we even combined spoken Arabic with studying passages from the Talmud. That blend – between worlds – is exactly the point.

In the podcast, I choose stories that any parent – regardless of culture – would want their children to know: stories from the East and the West, alongside stories from our own tradition, such as “The Rabbi and the Goat” or Rabbi Nahman’s “Treasure Under the Bridge.”

Perhaps the time has come for a different kind of Zionism, one that is both more resolute and, at the same time, more engaged.

On the one hand, we must stand as an “iron wall,” as famously articulated by Ze’ev Jabotinsky. But on the other hand, we must learn to do so in a new language, knowing how to clench one hand into a fist and fight our enemies, while extending the other, open, in search of potential friends.

Zionism taught us to return to our land and to our language. Perhaps now it is calling us to learn how to speak with those who live among us and beside us.

You might say: This is difficult. You might ask: Are we really expected to learn a new language now? Of course it is difficult. But we have a precedent. Just a few generations ago, our ancestors accomplished something extraordinary, reviving Hebrew as a living, spoken language, something even Theodor Herzl once considered unrealistic. It took one generation, committed to the task, to make that happen.

And so, with all due distinction, perhaps something similar is required of us today regarding Arabic – we need enough of us to choose to commit in order to create real change.

So is the language gap the missing piece? I don’t know. But it is certainly missing.