In 2015 a BBC2 documentary, Children of the Gaza War, brought a flurry of complaints. One of the Palestinian children interviewed said in Arabic that “the Jews” are killing Palestinians.
However, the English subtitles translated this as “Israel is massacring us”. Many Jewish and Israel-supporting viewers accused the BBC of intentionally downplaying Palestinian antisemitism.
The documentary’s maker, Lyse Doucet, stood by the subtitle, saying: “We talked to people in Gaza, we talked to translators. When [the children] say ‘Jews’, they mean ‘Israelis’. We felt it was a better translation of it.” Israel has existed around Gaza for nearly 70 years and children there are still calling their Israeli neighbours Jews.
Ian Black opens his excellent new history of the Israel-Palestine conflict, Enemies and Neighbours, with a note on terminology titled Language Matters. He points out that in colloquial Arabic used by the Palestinians, Israelis are still often called “Yahud” – Jews. On the other hand, while until 1948, the year of Israel’s establishment, the term “Palestinians” usually referred to all inhabitants of Palestine, including Jews, it only gradually came to be used to describe one side in the conflict.
Only in recent decades have Israelis started to differentiate their next-door neighbours from the rest of the neighbourhood, calling them “Palestinians” instead of the more amorphous “Arabs”. Words matter. They are the building blocks of the contradicting narratives each side has continued telling themselves, and the world.
Palestinian-Israeli writer Odeh Bisharat is quoted: “If there is no shared narrative of the past, then let us at least write one of the future.” But as Enemies and Neighbours expertly describes, Israelis and Palestinians have spent the last century escaping each other’s narratives and are still doing nothing to write a new one.
A veteran reporter and former Guardian Middle East editor, Black spent decades immersed in both Israeli and Palestinian societies, fluently speaking their languages. He notes how the Hebrew and Arabic used by the warring communities, as well as their culture and daily lives, have been affected and formed by the conflict.
How the Jews, who began to arrive in the late 19th century, or “return” as they would have it, gradually coalesced into a new Israeli society. And how the Arabs living in Palestine began to define themselves as a distinct national group, in a large part as a reaction to the Zionist arrival and entrenchment.
The original article is published on: The Guardian
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