ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights the material consequences of given structures, the unhinging of determinism in the research is demonstrated by the treatment of the Israeli authorities’ legal categories for Palestinian and other Arabs’ identity markers, Bedouin, Jews from Arab countries and from Palestine, and also Aramaean. Palestinians and other Arabs took up the discursive opportunity of political debate eagerly for the most part, and created platforms for discourse that were contested and negotiated, subversive and respectful, and often humorous. The discursive boundaries of the new Palestinian multilingual middle class are therefore relational, not contained in the specific utterances, but in the patterns of differentiation against what they oppose: the institutional silence of Arabic, and the bilingualism that contains Arabic through the principle of avoidance of Arabic in ‘mixed’ company. The chapter focuses on feminist work in sociolinguistics that has found politics built into discursive practices.
