ABSTRACT
The institutional suppression of Arabic within Israel has been challenged since approximately 2010 with Arabic-speakers’ strategies of increased audibility on Zionist political stages. This chapter explores negotiations around the devaluing of a ‘minority’ language in a political system that is formed to reflect the one-nation-one-language equation, as evidenced in institutional discourse practices. It looks at two of the speeches where the Arabic silence on Zionist stages was deliberately broken: Lucy Hresh’s proclamation at the 2015 Israel Independence Day ceremony, and Hanin Zoabi’s declaration to the Central Elections Committee on the occasion of the vote for banning her candidacy, earlier the same year. The chapter examines the norms of suppressing Arabic in state institutions developed in a situation where Hebrew hegemony was instituted in heavy-handed ways around the middle of the twentieth century. The combination of Hebrew-only official records with audible Arabic and interpretation provisions is a textbook constituent of the ethnorepublican system.
