An Israeli café chain has banned workers at one of its branches from speaking Arabic, saying customers find it threatening.

Some employees at the branch of Café Café, on the Dado Beach promenade in Haifa, are up in arms over the policy. Dona, who has worked there for eight months, said she continues to speak Arabic at work, despite the ban – and if her employers don’t like it, they can fire her.

“Arabic is my mother tongue, and if I am with an Arab coworker it doesn’t make any sense for us to speak in another language,” she said. “I don’t think Arabic is a language that threatens anyone,” she added. Dona says many of her coworkers are Arab, and so are many of the customers.

Haifa prides itself on coexistence and tolerance between Jews and Arabs.

Some employees at the coffee shop have asked the legal rights group Adalah to intervene, prompting attorney Sawsan Zaher to ask Café Café to rescind the ban on workers speaking Arabic.

Open gallery view Dado Beach in Haifa. Credit: Hagai Frid

The prohibition, she wrote, is a “ban on using a mother tongue that is the language of the Arab population, a national minority group in Israel,” and is “patently illegal.”

Zaher added that forcing the employees to speak a language other than their mother tongue constitutes oppression of the workers. “Such a prohibition is humiliating and conveys a message that your Arab employees are inferior and unwanted, and this is without regard for your reason for instituting the ban – thus the ban constitutes an impairment of their dignity,” the attorney wrote.

Zaher informed Café Café that telling employees “that anyone who does not want to accept your decision should resign,” means its workers are being employed under conditions of a threat to end their employment. Such conditions are both illegal and insulting, she added.

Adalah said the Dado Beach branch of Café Café had yet to respond to its letter. A shift manager at the branch refused to give Haaretz the manager’s phone number, saying he said was in Eilat and would be returning in two days.

Another shift manager told Haaretz that the ban on speaking Arabic was instituted after two Arab employees, a man and woman, were speaking Arabic in front of a customer, who thought the two were laughing at her and took offense.