WELL, HOW DO you say ‘Israel’ in Arabic? The wrong way to answer that question is by consulting a textbook for first-year students of Arabic. Those textbooks will instruct you almost immediately how to say ‘Palestine’ or even ‘Mauritania.’ One of them even includes a handsome drawing of the young Yasser Arafat, with his full black beard. But when it comes to Israel, these textbooks remain silent.
Two textbooks for introductory Arabic predominate on American campuses. They are Al Kitaab fii Ta`alum al-`Arabiyya: A Textbook for Beginning Arabic, published in 1995 by Georgetown University Press and Ahlan wa Sahlan: Functional Modern Standard Arabic for Beginners, published in 2000 by Yale. The production of the former, known to students simply as Al-Kitaab (literally, “the book”), was supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
