A historical reading of language demotion as a settler-colonial mechanism: the case of demoting Arabic in Israel

This paper examines the demotion of Arabic under Israel’s 2018 Nation State Law (NSL) as a historical–legal mechanism through which settler-colonial linguistic hierarchies are constituted and stabilized. Article 4 of the NSL, which revoked Arabic’s status as an official language and demoted it to a language of “special status,” marks not merely a symbolic or declarative shift but an intensification of long-standing structures that regulate Palestinian presence, visibility, and belonging within the state. Existing analyses of the NSL tend either to interpret language demotion through liberal, rights-based frameworks focused on symbolic inclusion and judicial remedy, or to situate it within a broader structural genealogy of Jewish ethnonational supremacy. I argue that what differentiates these approaches is not only their normative conclusions but the temporal logics through which they narrate the law’s emergence and effects. Moving beyond crisis-centered readings of the NSL as an episodic rupture, this article adopts a historical-thinking approach that situates the demotion of Arabic within the longue durée of colonial governance in Israel. Drawing on Supreme Court decisions concerning the NSL, earlier judicial proceedings, and Knesset debates before and after 2018, I conceptualize language demotion as a historically layered technology that governs political subjectivity and the conditions of claim-making. Bringing Christopher Stroud’s notion of linguistic citizenship into dialogue with Baruch Kimmerling’s critique of futile periodization, the paper shifts attention from formal rights to the cumulative processes through which linguistic and political hierarchies are reproduced.