Bilingualism: Palestinians in Hebrew

The chapter investigates the writing in Hebrew by Palestinians through two models of the attitude to the culture of the majority. Literary bilingualism is not uncommon in societies where a minority culture evolves alongside or within a majority culture, but in Israel this minority culture has been since 1948 under constant threat from the majority culture—Arabic is not only the mother tongue of the Palestinians, it is the very embodiment of the minority’s struggle to defend and preserve its religious and cultural heritage. This explains why the phenomenon of Palestinians writing in Hebrew generally has remained limited to Arab writers belonging to the Druze and Christian minorities and took on some significance only in the 1980s, when Anton Shammās, who is a Christian, and Na‘īm ‘Arāyidī, who was Druze, began to make a name for themselves in Hebrew. Only a small number of Palestinian authors and poets have followed them and now write in Hebrew in addition to Arabic—in rare cases, Palestinian writers write only in Hebrew.