Speaking Each Other's Language

It comes as no surprise to me that a quarter of the 400 students in the Yiddish department of Bar-Ilan University are Arabs. The Zionist movement has never liked Yiddish. And there is now a natural alliance between the Arabs and the main speakers of that language, the ultra-Orthodox Jews. An alliance, not a friendship. But the party of the Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister wishes to denaturalise them both. So an alliance is all that they need. Arabic, one should add, is one of the great languages of Judaism and of wider Jewish culture historically.

Israel needs to move to very extensive devolution to the very local level, Jewish or Arab, religious or secular, Muslim or Christian, and so forth. She needs three parliamentary chambers, each about one third of the size of the present one, with one for the ultra-Orthodox, one for the Arabs, and one for everyone else, the ultra-Orthodox and the Arab being already identified in law because of their arrangements in relation to military service. All legislation would require the approval of all three chambers. Each chamber would elect a Co-President, all three of whom would have to approve all legislation and senior appointments, as well as performing ceremonial duties.

Each chamber would be guaranteed a Minister in each department and at least a quarter of Cabinet posts. Yiddish would be recognised as an official language, the quid pro quo for recognising all the many currently unrecognised villages in the Galilee and the Negev. The alliance necessary to pull this off would take an awful lot of effort. But two peoples facing nothing less than denaturalisation could very well be prepared to make that amount of effort. The other lot should have had more children, or bothered to move there from places like London and New York. But they did not.