I want to - I don't want to - I want to learn Arabic

A few weeks ago, my son and I had to go to Jerusalem. It was raining heavily and we missed our bus, so I decided to get a taxi.

I live in Modi’in, a sleepy suburban town halfway between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, about a 30-minute drive from both.

We found a taxi, agreed on a price, and got in. All was well. But then a few minutes after leaving the city, the driver's phone rang and he started speaking in Arabic.

And I found myself sliding into a state of total panic.

I knew that the driver was an Arab Israeli from his accent when I got in, but even if there was a brief moment of worry, I quickly brushed it off. We're a complicated country, but despite what you see in the news every day, right beside the complexity of it all there is a lot of everyday simplicity. Arab Israelis live and work side by side with Jewish Israelis.¹ My pharmacist is an Arab Israeli. The doctor who treated my father when he had COVID was an Arab Israeli. It's not a woo-woo ideal picture of the world and of course, there is still racism but there is also a lot of just people doing everyday people things, whoever they are.

Arab Israelis are also not a homogenous group of people. Some are Christians, some are Muslims, some are very religious, and some only a little bit. (Just like Jews in Israel are far from being a homogenous group, but that’s for another story.) Most Israeli Arabs identify as both Israeli and Palestinians to some extent and many have family ties to Palestinians living in the West Bank and/or Gaza.

One of the hopes of Hamas in this war was that Arab Israeli citizens would rise against Israel. It happened before. In 2021 during another round of rocket fire from Gaza that spurred another round of fighting between Israel and Hamas, there were riots in Israeli cities with mixed Arab Jewish populations. It was Ramadan, a sensitive time that always sees rising tensions around Temple Mount / Al Aqsa, the holiest site for both Muslims and Jews.

That spring three years ago, in mixed Arab-Jewish cities, Arab Israeli mob attacked Jewish property and Jewish mob often responded with the same, and then all of them had to sit side by side in bomb shelters whenever a rocket alert siren sounded because Hamas rockets don’t discriminate.

But this time it didn't happen. Quite the opposite, from the beginning Arab Israelis participated in the war efforts against Hamas just like Jewish Israelis, and all the polls since October 7th show that their identification with Israel is at all times high.

Those were flickers of light in the total darkness and I obsessively looked for those stories, especially in those first weeks following the most horrific events in Israel's history. Stories of humanity against pure evil.

A Bedouin Arab who saved countless kids from the Nova party.

An Arab Israeli paramedic who worked at the party refused to leave with all the other paramedics when the terrorists came, saying "I speak Arabic, I'll manage," and stayed to treat injured kids. He didn't manage, he was murdered just like everyone else.

Those stories are sometimes tinged with more darkness.

An Arab Israeli bicycle store owner donated hundreds of bikes to kids evacuated from the south. Then extremists from his village burned his store. The story went viral on social media and people from all over Israel donated money to help him rebuild it.

An Arab-Isareli-owned hummus restaurant in Haifa donated meals to soldiers and as a result, got boycotted by his community. That story went viral too and people from all over the country flocked to that restaurant, despite the war, to support them.

I remember thinking then that when the war is over I'll take a train to Haifa to go and eat hummus in their restaurant. I also remember thinking, not for the first time, that I should learn to speak Arabic before I go there. After all, it's the native language of 20% of Israeli citizens.

One reason I started this insane mission to learn 12 languages in 12 months was to run away from the reality of war, but, of course, you can’t run away too far when you live where I live. And in a way, this project is also a kind of statement sent out into the crumbling world. Because what you’re essentially doing when you’re learning a new language in an age when people have forgotten how to talk and how to listen (or when they only ‘talk’ in memes on social media) is saying to the world, “Despite everything, I have hope.”

I hadn’t planned in advance what languages would make the list but I knew from the beginning that Arabic would be one of them.

But now that the taxi driver started having a lengthy conversation in Arabic, I found myself shrinking in animal fear.

I am not even sure what was going through my head: oh my god he's going to kidnap us and he's just arranging the details now with his accomplices?

I don’t like that I had this reaction but I can hardly blame myself because, sadly, my only association with this language is that of people screaming *Allahu Akbar* before or after killing Jews.

I remember the second intifada in the early 2000s. I lived in Jerusalem and just started university. We got used to things we were not supposed to get used to. After every suicide bombing (they happened at least once a week), call all your friends and family to make sure they're all alive. One time my brother missed his bus by 10 seconds. That bus was blown up. Another time my boyfriend and I went to a supermarket some 10-minute walk from his parents’ place and lingered on the way out to chat with the Russian-speaking security guard, before heading back. When we got to his parents’ place, they were glued to the TV: that supermarket was just blown up. The Russian security guard was killed.

Every time I rode a bus at that time I was on high alert. Often when I thought that a Muslim Arab got on the bus I would get off before my stop. It was a ridiculous precaution measure, because only Muslim women are a visible minority, while Arab and Jewish men look the same. So it was basically "If you see a Muslim woman or a dark-haired man with a mustache and a large backpack — run." I am not proud of myself for that behavior, and I can only imagine how much pain it caused Muslim women (and people with oversized backpacks) but I suppose, our desire to not be blown up into pieces causes us to be not the best versions of ourselves.

And I bet if you knew that people with curly hair and only curly hair sometimes blow up buses, you would avoid people with curly hair at all costs, even at the risk of hurting their feelings.

Still, I didn't expect the Arabic-speaking taxi driver to trigger such a negative reaction in me. I tried to think of all the good associations I could tie to this language. I thought of all the people, Arab Israelis, who participated in the war effort. I thought of that young Druze² man who addressed Hamas terrorists in the first days of the war in a Facebook reel saying, in Arabic "Shame on you, attacking grandmothers and babies. Shame on you for using the phrase *Allakhu Akbar* which is the most sacred phrase and dirtying it like that. Shame on you, we will come after every single one of you."

But you can't fight animal fear with positive thinking. So I took out my earphones to listen to Grace’s Beginner Thai stories and to block out the Arabic. But only a few minutes later, Yannai tapped on my shoulder and gestured to the driver with his chin. I understood that the driver was talking to me. I took out the earphones. "Where are you from?" he asked in Hebrew. I said, "From Modi’in." "Oh," he replied, "I thought maybe from the south, I wanted to ask if it’s raining like this there as well."

I relaxed. We're talking about the weather. We're ok. He's a good man. Bad people don't talk about the weather.

"Where are you from?" I asked.

"From Jerusalem." he replied "But I prefer to work in Modi’in," He added, "No traffic, the roads are empty. Driving is so easy here. Also, people are nicer, everything is a lot more relaxed. In Jerusalem, by 10 am I might get ten cancellations. Just because somebody doesn't like my name. Here it just doesn't happen. Maybe one cancellation a day." He laughed good-heartedly. "What's my name gonna do to them? I'm just a taxi driver. I take them from one place to another, pick them up and drop them off and never see them again. Does it matter if I'm named Mohammad or Mustafa or Yossi or whatever?"

We were quiet for a few seconds.

"Jerusalem is a complicated city," I said, looking out the window.

And we're a complicated country, I wanted to add but didn't want to get into it.

And I should learn Arabic finally, I thought to myself.

Photo by Abigail on Unsplash

P.S.

I’ve never been this scared to hit ‘publish’. I avoid talking about the complexities of Israel because the public discourse surrounding it often resembles a game of soccer: if you’re not driving the ball into the other team’s goal, then you’re most definitely driving it into your own.

So I ask the reader to approach it with a beginner’s mind. Because the unfortunate truth is that if you only know about Israel from the mainstream English language media, then you likely know next to nothing about this country.

Also, because I know that Gaza is on everyone’s mind these days, I’m going to answer questions before they are asked:

1. War is bad.

2. I don’t want innocent people to die.

3. Israel has as much right to exist and defend itself as any other country.

4. The people of Gaza also have the right to exist and live in dignity.

5. Hamas is the ultimate evil that is responsible for the colossal loss of human life that this war has caused.

6. The rest of the world and its obsession with Israel have contributed to this disaster more than people realize.

That’s it. This is as political as I will ever get here.

1. To provide some background, Arab Israelis are Arabs who ended up within the borders of Israel after the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 and the war that followed. Unlike Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, they have all the rights of Israeli citizens.

2. Druze are an ethnoreligious Arabic-speaking minority living in Israel.