The sudden, surprising rise of Arabic on Israeli street signs

TWO years ago Ayman Odeh, the pragmatic new leader of Israel’s Arab parliamentary bloc, said that within a decade Arabic would be “on Tel Aviv street signs as part and parcel of the urban environment”. It is happening faster than he predicted. Across Jewish as well as Arab towns, Arabic signage is sprouting on highways, bus routes and, most recently, railway stations. Some 40% of the digital panels on public buses now list their routes in Arabic alongside Hebrew, up from near zero two years ago. By 2022, says the government, the service will be fully bilingual. A new department pumps out road-safety warnings in Arabic.

In tandem, a five-year plan, Resolution 922, aims to narrow the gap between Jews and Arabs in education, housing and policing. Though not the first, it is by far Israel’s most ambitious. It costs 15bn shekels ($4.3bn), and unlike previous plans was devised together with Arab representatives.

The government of Binyamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, is often derided as chauvinist. So its espousal of integration surprises many. Mr Netanyahu often plays up the Arab threat, particularly at election time. However, he sees pragmatic reasons for treating Israeli Arabs a bit better.

Israel’s 1.8m Arabs are citizens, and Arabic is an official language which most Jews study in school. But for decades after independence the authorities left most Arabs isolated in ill-funded villages and towns without transport to the country’s economic hubs. As of 2015, 53% of Arabs were poor, against 14% of Jews. The gap fed resentment. Israeli Arabs now fly Palestinian flags at their rallies. For years security officials have warned that, without integration, Israel’s Arabs would rally behind Palestinians in the occupied territories. Government economists add that including Arabs more fully in the economy would give it a boost—much as immigrants from the former Soviet Union did in the 1990s, says Amir Levy, who drafted the five-year plan.

Since the plan was approved in 2015, a third of the budget has been spent. The transport ministry is connecting Arab towns to Jewish hubs such as Tel Aviv with over 300 new and upgraded routes. One aim is to get more Arab women into work. Last month Mr Netanyahu opened the first of 17 police stations to be staffed by Arab officers in Arab towns. “If we want Israel to be strong, we need our minorities to be strong, with the same rights and budgets as everyone else,” says Gila Gamliel, the minister overseeing the plan.

The new policy has sometimes been implemented insensitively. Arab cities like Jaffa, Acre and Nazareth are given Hebrew names on Arabic signs. Especially galling is “Awrushaleem”, an Arabised version of “Jerusalem” in place of “Al-Quds”, the usual Arabic name for the city. Signs are also Hebraising what Arabs call “Tel Abib”: Arabic has no letter V, so the large sign at a Tel Aviv station has a workaround—three dots below the letter B—that make the sign look more like Urdu. “It’s humiliating to see Arabic treated with such disrespect,” says Mohammad Darawshe, an activist.

Some Israeli officials resist the spread of Arabic. The mayor of Beersheva, a southern town of 200,000 Jews surrounded by 100,000 Arabs, tried to ban bus announcements in the language. And Israel Railways has refused to follow Jerusalem’s tramline in announcing stops in Arabic over the tannoy. “It would be too noisy,” explained its chief executive. Banks offer online services in Arabic. But the only Arabic that visitors could find in the central bank’s corridors were prohibitions against smoking.

Some Israelis fear that a bilingual country might become a binational one. Mr Netanyahu’s cabinet is backing a bill designating Israel the nation-state of the Jews and stripping Arabic of its official status. “The more Arabic we hear, the more the government wants to downgrade its status,” says Yonatan Mendel, an expert on Arabic education. Israelis are justly proud of having revived Hebrew as a spoken language—a feat akin to resurrecting Latin in everyday conversation. But for some, that is not enough; Hebrew should have no rival.