Mya Guarneri in Al Jazeera on the downgrading of Arabic inside Israel. The coffee shop chain she refers to is Aroma, its site is here, and it’s all in English! “Aroma is certainly Israel’s leading coffeehouse chain. Aroma has been part of everyone’s daily lives for the past 15 years. The Aroma stores have long been part of the Tel Aviv urban scene. With 23 stores on every major corner…”

Here’s Guarneri:

Now lawmakers have introduced a bill that proposes to change the definition of Israel as “Jewish and democratic” to “the national home of the Jewish people”.

If passed, the legislation would become part of Israel’s Basic Laws, which are used as a working constitution.

Whenever a conflict between democracy and Jewish values arises, the new definition of Israel would allow courts and legislators to favour the latter. According to Haaretz, the proposed bill will also make halacha, Jewish religious law, “a source of inspiration to the legislature and the courts”. And, in the spirit of favouring the Jewish character of the state over a state for all its citizens, the legislation would also downgrade Arabic from an official language to one with “special status”.

Arabic is the mother tongue of 20 per cent of Israel’s citizens. It has been an official language of the land since 1924, when the British mandate set three: English, Hebrew, and Arabic..

When the state of Israel was established in 1948, English was struck from the books. While Arabic remained an official language, it has always gotten second class treatment- as have the citizens who speak it.

Many government forms – including those for Social Security and National Insurance – come in Hebrew only. Arabic-speakers are under-represented in the public sector. So if a Palestinian citizen has weak Hebrew, he or she may be deprived of services or benefits they are legally entitled to and desperately need.

The results are sometimes devastating.

In Lod, for example, 25 per cent of the population is Arab. But out of the city’s 50 social workers, only two speak Arabic and both are part time employees. After a rash of domestic violence left three Arab women from Lod dead, NGOs questioned the state’s commitment to protecting Palestinian citizens….

Discrimination is written into the manual of a major coffee chain, Aroma Tel Aviv, which instructs employees to “speak Hebrew only” when customers are around. On numerous occasions, Palestinian citizens of Israel have found themselves fired from jobs for speaking their mother tongue.

Such incidents reflect Jewish Israelis’ deep discomfort with hearing Arabic….

Earlier this year, the Arab Cultural Association reported that the textbooks used by Palestinian citizens of Israel have over 16,000 grammar and spelling errors. Mistakes appeared in math, history, geography books and those used to teach the Arabic language itself.

This leaves Arab students doubly disadvantaged-they learn a damaged version of their mother tongue and, because most Jewish Israelis don’t speak Arabic, they are forced to speak in a second language, Hebrew.

“International law obliges the state to respect the minority’s language,” Zaher says, adding that Israel’s 1953 public education law also requires the state to acknowledge the language and culture and religion of minorities.