Language Engineering and the Israeli Hebracization of the Palestinian Landscape: A Study in Palestinian Resistance Discourse (1997-2010)

This study explores Israeli language engineering and the Hebracization of the landscape, with a special emphasis on the cultural and the legal discourse of Palestinian resistance from 1997 to 2010.

Because Palestine lives under a harsh colonial condition under Zionist occupation, the language of struggle and the struggle on language needs to be dealt with accordingly.

By understanding the dynamics used by Palestinians in terms of counter-language engineering, this study is both an analysis of the language used in the construction of the nation and the state, as well as the resistance to this form of colonial and state power.

The analysis of legal and cultural resistance regarding Israel’s Zionization of the Palestinian landscape is perceived as one of the most distinctive features of this counter-engineering.

The study consists of four complementary parts: Part I, focuses on language engineering and the Hebracization of the official and the legal discourse of the state; the geographic, demographic, and historiographic landscapes; and all the subjects of the public sphere in general.

Part II is concerned with understanding the major dynamics Palestinians developed in the legal and cultural fields between 1997-2010 in their confrontation with the apartheid Israeli regime.

This included refuting and rebuking Israeli laws and institutional measures that were created to undermine and desecrate the legal and cultural rights of the indigenous Palestinian community in the parts of historic Palestine in 1948.

This juridical resistance exposed the contradictions in the Israeli legal system and the racial overlapping between the different state apparatus jurisdictions and its implications on the Arabs and their basic rights.

Part III, investigates.

the impact of an absence of Palestinians from international bodies that monitor the national and international name committees and their politics of toponymy.

It deals with the possible scenarios of the mapping of “Greater Israel” and “Lesser Palestine” in the light of this absence.

Part IV, delves through the institutionalized racism of the Israeli state that is antagonistic to Arabs and their language.

In terms of methodology and sources, this study examines the daily work of several institutions that collaborated in their work to resist the Hebracization of Palestine.

By mapping this genealogy of resistance, this study highlights the work of various institutions including: Adalah-The Legal Center for the Rights of the Arab Minority in Israel (in Haifa), Clinic for the Rights of the Palestinian-Arab Minority at the School of Law at Haifa University; The Association for Civil Rights in Israel (in Jerusalem); The Arab Language Academy (in Haifa), The Arab Cultural Association (in Nazareth); and Ibn Khaldun-The Arab Association of Research and Development (in Tamrah).