In Israel, how many Israelis can speak Arabic, and how many Palestinians can speak Hebrew?

Question

I'm wondering this because is it like Iraq where the normal people cannot reason with the American soldiers invading their homes,etc because they cannot speak the same language.

Answer 1

"Israel has two official languages; Hebrew and Arabic. Hebrew is the major and primary language of the state and is spoken by the majority of the population. Arabic is spoken by the Arab minority and by some members of the Mizrahi Jewish community. English is studied in school and is spoken by the majority of the population as a second language." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israelis

Most Israeli Arabs understand Hebrew. It is a pity that more Jewish Israelis don't learn the language, but learning English is more important to a career and so there's little incentive. As everywhere, it's kids who learn a language before age 10 and students who are linguistically gifted (high MLAT score) who succeed in foreign (or more correctly, second and third, etc.) languages.

As with Switzerland (my country) and Belgium (where I went to university) English is the lingua franca. For political reasons, many Jews refuse to learn Arabic, many Arabs (see below) refuse to learn Hebrew.

Some, perhaps many or most, Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails learn at least passable spoken Hebrew. Others, for political reasons, refuse to do so. Within the Territories, there is economic value to learning Hebrew, but still English has priority.

This is the best Web site I've found on the subject of language usage in Israel: http://www.ethnologue.com/show_country.asp?name=IL

Answer 2

Both Hebrew and Arabic are official languages in Israel alongside with English (as the British mandate has decided).

Hebrew is more common, as it is spoken by the big majority of Jews, while Arabic is spoken by the Israeli Arabs, Druzes, Adygs (Cherkesians), Bedouins and Palestinians.
While almost all Arabic speakers understand and speak Hebrew (at least in a basic level), most of the Jewish Israelis do not understand Arabic.
Arabic lessons are an obligation in Jewish high schools for three years, and then the students are allowed to choose whether they want to study it further or not. Jewish students who study Arabic well are recompensed by the IDF with excellent intelligence jobs.

Most of the Palestinians do not speak Hebrew for political reasons, and mostly because they just don't integrate with the Jewish majority (they don't work in Israel, nor study there...), unlike the Israeli Arabs, Druze etc...
The Jewish people who speak Arabic speak it for three main reasons:
1) Some of them learned it at school.
2) Some of the unites of the IDF require studying Arabic, so many soldiers study it at the army.
3) Some of the Jewish people who speak Arabic speak it as their mother tongue, as they came from Arab countries such as Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Egypt, Morocco, Libya...

Answer 3

State of Israel, Medinat Israel. 6,199,008. Population includes 4,700,000 Jewish (1997), 805,000 Muslim, 160,000 Christian, 95,000 Druze, 300 Samaritan (1995 Central Statistics Dept., Israel). National or official languages: Hebrew, Standard Arabic, English. About half the Jewish people are Sephardi and half Ashkenazi. Literacy rate: 88% to 92% (Jewish), 70% (Arab). Also includes Bulgarian, Czech, Egyptian Spoken Arabic (25,000), French (40,000), Italian (7,249), Levantine Bedawi Spoken Arabic (50,000), Malayalam (8,000), Marathi (8,000), North Levantine Spoken Arabic (100,000), Northern Uzbek, Samaritan, Samaritan Aramaic, Spanish (60,000), Standard German (200,000), Turkish (30,000), Western Farsi, Western Yiddish, many other languages. Information mainly from D. Gold 1974; H. Kloss and G. McConnell 1974; H. Paper 1978; W. Fischer and O. Jastrow 1980; T. K. Harris 1994; J. Fishman 1985, 1991; J. Chetrit 1985; D. Cohen 1985; B. Comrie 1987; A. Saenz-Badillos 1993; P. E. Miller 1993; Y. Mutzafi 1992–2004. Blind population: 5,285. Deaf population: 4,500 to 306,242 (1998). Deaf institutions: 31. The number of languages listed for Israel is 34. Of those, 33 are living languages and 1 is extinct.

Answer 4

Mizrahi Jews or Mizrahim are Jews descended from the Jewish groups of the Middle East, North Africa and the Caucasus. The time period Mizrahi is utilized in Israel within the language of politics, media and a few social scientists for Jews from customarily Arab-dominated geographies and adjoining, certainly Muslim-majority nations. This involves Jews from Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Azerbaijan, Iran/Persia, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Kurdish places, Northern and Eastern Sudan, as good as Ethiopia, and inside and local Israel. Sometimes, Sephardi Jews reminiscent of Jews from Morocco, Algeria, or Turkey are erroneously grouped into the Mizrahi class for a few ancient factors. However, at present so much Mizrahi Jews are living in Israel, adopted through big populations in France and the United States, amongst others. Traditionally, Mizrahi Jews spoke Arabic, Judeo-Persian, Georgian, Bukhori, Kurdish, Judeo-Berber, Punic, Juhuri, Marathi, Judeo-Malayalam and Persian, relying on which nation/vicinity they have been from. However, so much brand new-day Mizrahi Jews talk Hebrew moreover to or as a alternative of the conventional languages.

Answer 5

There are many Jews in Israel who speak Arabic. In the 1940s and 50s about a million Jews came to Israel fleeing persecution in Arab countries.

There are about a million Arab citizens of Israel today, most of whom speak Hebrew as their second language.