Paper short abstract:

Palestinians inside Israel are judged for their supposed political 'quiescence' to subordinate citizenship. Analysis (avoiding normative nationalist traps) of codeswitched Arabic public discourse explores how this dissonant medium bears on civic conceptualisations. Research choices are questionned.

Paper long abstract:

Palestinian citizens of all political colours used Arabic on public Israeli platforms in 2015. Nationalist Hanin Zoabi demonstratively read an Arabic statement on 12 February at a parliamentary hearing. Communist Ayman Odeh gave part of his maiden speech to parliament in Arabic on 4 May. Journalist Lucy al-Harish who lit a beacon for Israel's Independence Day gave her speech political nuance by also speaking Arabic on a Zionist stage.

This presentation analyses Zoabi's codeswitching interactions at the hearing which decided on banning her from standing in elections. Her use of Arabic falls into several patterns, as do the Hebrew speakers' metalinguistic comments. The analysis draws on Monica Heller's work on bilingualism and its ideological coordinates. Here, the ideologies performed linguistically bear on conceptions of citizenship and the limits to their inclusivity. What is also questionned is the researcher's choice to analyse ethno-national civic limits by focusing on Palestinian positions in Israel, rather than religious and criminal limits which are relevant to cases where defendants are far-right supremacists. In monolingual contexts, the prism of bilingualism brings specific political problems into relief but not others.

Research on the politics of Palestinians inside Israel often queries their 'quiescence' to injustice and superficial forms of (un)belonging in their strategies for dealing with the state. Such approaches judge political behaviour, including linguistic, by nationalist standards. By applying sociolinguistic analysis to the new public Arabic-Hebrew codeswitching discourse, this paper can avoid some normative traps while exploring how Arabic is an ideologically dissonant medium in Hebrew-dominant settings.