Former House speaker Newt Gingrich yesterday described bilingual education as teaching “the language of living in a ghetto,” and he mocked requirements that ballots be printed in multiple languages.
“The government should quit mandating that various documents be printed in any one of 700 languages depending on who randomly shows up” to vote, Gingrich said. The former Georgia congressman, who is considering seeking the GOP presidential nomination in 2008, made the comments in a speech to the National Federation of Republican Women.
“The American people believe English should be the official language of the government. . . . We should replace bilingual education with immersion in English so people learn the common language of the country and they learn the language of prosperity, not the language of living in a ghetto,” Gingrich said, drawing cheers from the crowd of more than 100.
As their physical separation grows, a shrinking number of Israelis and Palestinians are studying each other’s language, a casualty of the enduring hostility between two peoples still sharing one land. Those Israelis and Palestinians studying Arabic and Hebrew, both official languages of the Jewish state, are doing so for reasons that reveal vastly different outlooks on the future.
“The attitude on both sides toward the other language, and by extension those who speak it, is very disappointing,” said Sasson Somekh, who helped found the Arabic department at Tel Aviv University nearly 40 years ago. Now retired, he is lobbying against its closure. “Both sides are just very afraid of the other,” he said.
Judging by enrollment in universities and private institutes, the number of Israeli Jews and Palestinians choosing to study the languages has fallen by a third in some places and nearly disappeared in others since 1993, when the Oslo peace accords established the semiautonomous Palestinian Authority and began separating the two peoples.
Many Israelis look to Europe as their prime economic and cultural reference point. In business, the language they need is more likely to be English or French than Arabic. Today, among those Israeli Jews studying Arabic, many more than a decade ago are doing so for one reason: preparing for service in the Israeli security agencies.
By contrast, many Palestinians view Israel’s thriving economy as the nearest path to prosperity, even though fewer and fewer of them have permission to work in Israel. For ambitious Palestinians, Hebrew remains the lingua franca of business and a useful tool for navigating the Israeli military checkpoints.
