Mandatory Arabic Study Urged for Jewish Students to Strengthen Israeli Democracy

Recent Israeli election results have exposed a deep-seated institutionalized racism and a flawed democratic system, according to Yehuda Lukacs, Professor Emeritus of International Relations at George Mason University. He argues that the automatic exclusion of Arab parties from government and policy-making, despite Arabs constituting a fifth of the population, renders Israeli democracy hollow and discriminatory. Lukacs contends that this political and public boycott is not due to security concerns but stems from a structural and ideological failure within the Israeli education system, which he believes deliberately neglects Arabic language instruction.

Lukacs criticizes the Israeli Ministry of Education for acting as a tool of ethnic-national separation and public ignorance. He proposes a fundamental and urgent reform: making spoken and literary Arabic a mandatory subject for all Jewish students from elementary school. This, he asserts, is crucial for Israel's democratic survival, not as a gesture of goodwill, but as a necessary condition to dismantle political asymmetry, minority exclusion, and national paranoia.

Historically, Arabic was a common language among many Jewish communities before the establishment of the state. However, following the establishment of Israel and the military administration over Arab citizens (1948-1966), Arabic education in Jewish schools became securitized, focusing narrowly on dry literary Arabic and military/journalistic texts, while deliberately neglecting spoken Arabic and Arab culture. The unofficial goal was to train future intelligence personnel, not to foster dialogue or empathy, portraying Arab citizens as intelligence subjects rather than equal partners.

Attempts at reform in the 1990s, designating Arabic as a mandatory subject in middle schools, failed due to inadequate funding, institutional neglect, and a lack of qualified teachers. The 2018 Nation-State Law, which downgraded Arabic from an official language to one with "special status," further cemented the exclusion of Arabic from civil life, sending a message to Jewish students that it is a foreign and unwelcome language.

This policy has created a severe civil asymmetry, where Arab-Israeli students learn Hebrew from an early age and are exposed to Jewish-Israeli culture, while the average Jewish student finishes 12 years of schooling with no knowledge of the language spoken by a fifth of the country's citizens. This linguistic disconnect fosters cultural blindness, alienation, and fear, fueling the demonization of the Arab population and enabling the exclusion of Arab parties from the democratic process. Lukacs concludes that true democratic partnership cannot be built on such a foundation, and that teaching Arabic to all Jewish children is Israel's most urgent moral and democratic test for its future as a genuine democracy.