Adalah’s Newsletter, Volume 14, June 2005 1 Arabic as a Minority Language in Israel: A Comparative Perspective By Ayelet Harel-Shalev 1 Establishing an official language in a multi-language state is a complex and extremely important task. Setting a language policy in deeply-divided societies has a long-term influence on the stability of the state and the durability of its democracy. This is due to the fact that language schisms, like religious and ethnic schisms, challenge the stability of a democracy in many ways. Furthermore, the decision to set an official language is only the first stage, since implementation of the language policy is no less important that its formal declaration. Every new state must cope with the challenge of determining which language will be its official national language and the status of the languages of the minority groups (Pool, 1991). The language is recognized as a central symbol of the state's identity and functions as an extremely important cultural institution (Laitin, 2000). From the state’s perspective, the decision over linguistic policy is an important power (Kook, 2000). Therefore, we should carefully examine how regimes in deeply-divided societies, composed of different ethnic, national, and linguistic groups, establish their language policy, and how they transform their official policy into public practice. Below, I shall present the findings of comprehensive research on how two deeply-divided democratic states, India and Israel, decided on their language policy, and the manner in which they apply their declared policy on two important minority languages – Urdu and Arabic. The research revealed that, in both cases, the state gives the minority language a minor status in the public sphere. In the case of Israel, significant differences exist between the formal policy on languages and its application. The research literature recognizes language as a significant part of individual and collective identity and as a dominant factor in all political and cultural interaction (Apte, 1976; Anderson, 1991; Van der Veer, 1994). In this context, Will Kymlicka argues that, regarding a minority’s language rights, the granting of individual rights and the prohibition on discrimination are insufficient to maintain the minority’s language as a living language. For Kymlicka, the economic, cultural, and other pressures to which the minority is subject will lead to the weakening and possibly even the extinction of the minority language in the absence of sufficient group protections that shape a protective language environment (Kymlicka, 1995). Consociational democracies define themselves as dual- or multi-lingual states. Such regimes cope with disputes by means of the joint rule of elite groups from all segments of the population, based on proportional representation and not majority rule. Accordingly, these states grant the minority’s language a respected official status. Among deeply-divided states which have succeeded in establishing a democratic regime for more than fifty years, Canada, Switzerland, and Belgium fit the consociational model. However, as these states selected a cooperative-type rather than a majority rule-type regime, the dilemmas in choosing a suitable language policy were few. For this reason, it would be interesting to examine the language policies chosen by states with deeply-divided societies, which are democratic and emphasize the principle of majority rule, and not consociational in the ethno-national context. To do that, I will analyze the manner in which India and Israel treat minority languages. The analogical important divisions in 1 Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Political Science, Tel Aviv University. The author’s doctoral dissertation is entitled “The Challenge of Survivability of Democracy in Deeply Divided Societies.” Her advisor is Prof. Gad Barzilai.