ABSTRACT
The double culture of Israeli Arab education is not a literary or dramatic fiction, but the policy of the Jewish majority towards the Arab minority in Israel. Sami Smooha notes that this policy has two aims: “to prevent assimilation” as well as to help the Arabs to adapt and lessen the impact of their alienation as a minority group in a Jewish-Zionist state.3 (Smooha, 1980 p. 16) Smooha goes on to claim that this policy is directed at “de-Palestinization”, in order to sever as far as possible the cultural, national and identity links of the Israeli Arabs with their own people and to prevent the development among them of a national Palestinian consciousness.4 Since the 1980s, a turning-point has begun as a result of this double cultured Arab-Israeli education system: While the Israeli Arabs are expressing themselves in Israeli literature and theatre as if in their own culture, following the intifada they also waver between their Israeli identity and their cultural Palestinian identity.
