Hebrew is the language of the Jewish people, whose origins can be traced to the ancient Israelites of the southern Levant more than 3,000 years ago.
Today, Hebrew is spoken by around 9 million people, primarily in Israel and in Jewish communities around the world.
There may be no other modern language whose survival history is so difficult to separate from the history of its speakers. The survival of language, as a major language, is directly related to the survival of a community of its speakers in close contact, maintaining their language and culture. This, in turn, is tied to centuries of fighting over the Holy Land, including the most recent events.
Looking back, soberly, through its history, the fight over the “homeland” is a two-sided story. Marked by centuries of instability through religious differences and equally long violence, cultural exchanges, changing relationships around these differences, and competing national movements, especially in the last century, with the latest rooted in decades-long epic failures in diplomatic negotiations.
This is not a political piece, and not meant to be turned into one. It’s partly about the language, but mostly about its survival through its speakers who continued to teach it despite displacement, and the recorded history of the Holy Land and the many peoples who have occupied it over the centuries.
So, regardless of where your opinion on current events rests, set it aside for now, keep an open mind and join me on a historical tour of the Hebrew language, its speakers and a land that Jews, Christians and Muslims have all regarded as sacred, and over which people fought for centuries.
It’s a longish one…lots has happened here! So, grab a coffee…
A Long History
The Hebrew people originated in the ancient Levant, in an area broadly corresponding to modern Israel, the Palestinian territories, Jordan, Lebanon and parts of Syria. The biblical account traces their ancestry through Abraham, migration into Egypt, the Exodus under Moses and eventual settlement in Canaan. This takes us back about 10 thousand years.
Most scholars believe that the ancient Israelites emerged largely from populations already living in Canaan, possibly joined by smaller groups arriving from elsewhere.
The earliest known reference to a people called Israel outside the Bible appears on the Egyptian Merneptah Stele (an upright slab of stone carved with hieroglyphic writing during the reign of Pharaoh Merneptah, son of Ramesses II), usually dated to around 1208 BCE.
By the early 1st millennium BCE, two Hebrew-speaking kingdoms had developed: Israel in the north with Samaria as its capital, and Judah in the south, with Jerusalem as its capital.
Both kingdoms spoke varieties of ancient Hebrew, with regional dialect differences. The people of Judah spoke a southern variety sometimes referred to in ancient sources as Yehudit (Judahite), while the northern Kingdom of Israel had its own northern Hebrew features. Ancient Hebrew was closely related to the languages spoken by neighbouring peoples, including the Phoenicians and Moabites.
The First Exoduses
The first major disruption came from the Assyrian Empire. In approximately 722 BCE, Assyria conquered the northern Kingdom of Israel and deported part of its population. Deportation and mass transfers were standard Assyrian methods of controlling conquered territories and were applied to many peoples across the empire. The event later gave rise to the story of the “Ten Lost Tribes of Israel,” except that the population did not actually disappear.
Judah survived for another century and a half.
Then came Babylon.
Babylonian forces conquered Judah in stages beginning in 597 BCE. In 586 BCE, they captured Jerusalem, destroyed the First Temple and deported part of the Judean population to Babylonia. Many people remained in Judah, while the deportees established communities hundreds of kilometres away in Mesopotamia.
Back then, Mesopotamia stretched roughly across the eastern corridor of modern-day Iraq. Its southern region became known as Babylonia, named after its capital city Babylon (modern-day Baghdad).
When the Persian king Cyrus the Great conquered Babylon in 539 BCE, he permitted displaced populations to return to their homelands. Some Judeans returned and rebuilt Jerusalem and the Temple. It became known as the Second Temple.
Others chose to stay and established a Jewish community in Mesopotamia that would exist there for roughly 2,500 years. It eventually became one of the world’s most important centres of Jewish scholarship.
It also put Hebrew in regular contact with another Semitic language: Aramaic.
The Diaspora
Jewish communities continued to spread through migration, commerce and earlier displacement. By the Hellenistic period, substantial populations lived in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Syria, Asia Minor and elsewhere around the Mediterranean.
Alexandria in Egypt became a particularly important centre. Many Jews there spoke Greek, and it was in this context that the Hebrew scriptures known as the Septuagint were translated into Greek. Produced at around the beginning of the 3rd century BCE, mainly in Alexandria, the Septuagint is the earliest known major translation of what Christians later came to call the Old Testament.
So by the time Rome took control of Judea in the 1st century BCE, a Jewish diaspora was already well spread out and established.
Then, Roman rule produced another enormous disruption.
A Jewish revolt beginning in 66 CE ended with Roman forces capturing Jerusalem and destroying the Second Temple in 70 CE. A second major revolt, led by Bar Kokhba between 132 and 135 CE, resulted in further devastation, deaths, enslavement and displacement.
These events are generally thought to be the point at which the Jews were expelled from their ancient homeland. But Jewish communities actually remained in the region, particularly in Galilee, and large Jewish populations had already been living elsewhere for several centuries.
Over the following centuries, Jewish populations became further established across the Middle East, North Africa and Europe. They generally adopted the languages of the societies in which they lived while maintaining Hebrew for religious, legal, scholarly and literary purposes.
Mesopotamia became a major centre of Jewish learning. The Babylonian Talmud, a huge collection of Jewish law and administrative documents developed by generations of rabbis, was compiled there largely in Aramaic.
Under Islamic rule, Arabic became the everyday and intellectual language of many Jewish communities stretching from Iraq through North Africa to Spain. Some Jewish scholars wrote Arabic using Hebrew letters, producing what we now call Judeo-Arabic.
In medieval Spain, Jewish communities participated extensively in the intellectual and commercial life of both Muslim and Christian societies. Hebrew poetry and scholarship flourished alongside Arabic and, later, Spanish.
This changed as Christian kingdoms expanded southward. Following increasing persecution and forced conversions, the Spanish monarchy, then jointly led by Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, issued the Alhambra Decree in 1492, requiring practising Jews to convert to Christianity or leave.
Many of these Sephardic Jews settled in North Africa, the Ottoman Empire, Italy and elsewhere. They spoke varieties of Spanish, which developed into Judeo-Spanish, commonly known as Ladino.
Jewish communities in Central and Eastern Europe followed another linguistic path. Ashkenazi Jews developed Yiddish, a Germanic language containing substantial Hebrew and Aramaic vocabulary and later significant Slavic influence. Like several other Jewish languages, it was written using the Hebrew alphabet.
Meanwhile, long-established Jewish populations continued to live in Iraq, Persia, Yemen, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and elsewhere. These communities are important because Jewish history has been told to the world largely through the experience of European Jews. Some Middle Eastern Jewish communities had been established for well over a thousand years before large Ashkenazi populations even developed in Eastern Europe.
They were also not nomadic populations continually moving from one country to another. Many Jewish communities stayed rooted in the same regions across many generations. Movement usually followed conquest, trade and economic opportunity, changing political borders, persecution, expulsion or political upheaval.
Minority Social Status and Anti-Semitism
In world media, the story of the Jewish people tends to be told through the story of European Jews, especially the Holocaust. Jewish communities were not persecuted everywhere they settled, and in some places they experienced long periods of relative security and prosperity and were uprooted again through political events that had nothing to do with their presence there.
But for the less fortunate ones, a part of their history is marked by repeated cycles of discrimination, persecution and expulsion. Part of the reason was that Jews remained a recognizably different religious group with their own customs wherever they lived. They adopted local languages and customs but generally would not convert to another religion, and maintained their community institutions, dietary practices and connection to Hebrew. This sealed their minority social and cultural status.
In Christian Europe, religious hostility was persistent, and laws often restricted where Jews could live, own land or work. Ironically, restrictions that pushed Jews into specific occupations, including trade and moneylending, then helped create economic resentment and stereotypes that were used against them.
Rulers found them economically useful and politically expendable. During wars, epidemics and economic crises, Jews were accused of everything from causing the Black Death to ritual murder and secret financial control. Rulers sometimes protected Jewish communities when their commercial networks, skills or taxes were useful, then confiscated their property or expelled them when political circumstances changed.
By the 19th century, older religious prejudice increasingly mixed with nationalism and racial antisemitism, so even highly assimilated or secular Jews became unwelcome outsiders. Paradoxically, maintaining their traditions and the Hebrew language played an important part in retaining Jewish identity and surviving centuries of dispersion.
Prejudice is as old as humanity. It exists in every society; just wears different faces and tells different stories.
The Road to Israel
The 20th century brought another major disruption.
By the late 19th century, Jewish communities around the world spoke dozens of languages. Hebrew remained widely read and studied, and a growing Hebrew literary and journalistic movement began to expand.
At the same time, Zionism – a Jewish nationalist movement that developed in 19th-century Europe, advocating the establishment of a Jewish national home in the Jews’ historical homeland that was then known as Syria Palaestina, or Palestine – encouraged increasing Jewish migration to Ottoman and later British-controlled Palestine. The people did not share a common everyday language. They spoke Yiddish, Russian, Polish, German, Arabic, Ladino and many others.
The Holocaust then destroyed much of European Jewish life. Six million Jews were murdered, and surviving communities were profoundly displaced.
The establishment of Israel in 1948 was followed by another major redistribution of the Jewish population, this time involving the Middle East and North Africa. Over the following decades, large Jewish communities left Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Iran and other countries. The reasons differed considerably from one country to another and included persecution and violence, discriminatory laws, property seizures, decolonization, growing nationalism, the Arab-Israeli conflict, Zionist migration and economic opportunity.
Within a relatively short time, communities that had developed separately for hundreds or even thousands of years were suddenly living together, in a relatively small, undeveloped and arid region, and surrounded by angry enemies. Unity, through community cohesion, meant existential survival.
For this reason, it’s important to understand how modern-day Israel came into existence, which also explains today’s ongoing political conflict between Israel and Palestine.
Historically, they are the same region, but its mix of inhabitants and territorial control has changed over the centuries.
Israel is Palestine, But Palestine Is Not Israel
It’s complicated.
You can skip this section if you already know the bilateral history of this dispute. I found it useful to help me understand the cultural and religious dynamics and the chronology of the conflict itself.
The ancient Israelites emerged in Canaan, in the southern Levant, where the kingdoms of Israel and Judah later developed. Jerusalem became the capital of Judah and a central city of ancient Judaism.
The name of the region changed repeatedly as different empires controlled it. Under Rome, much of the area was known as Judaea. After the Bar Kokhba revolt in the 2nd century CE, the Roman province was renamed Syria Palaestina. Later, under early Islamic rule, Filastin was used for an administrative district in the region.
The word Palestine comes to English most directly from the Latin term Palaestina, but ultimately from Hebrew Peleshet, for the philistines. They were ancient people who lived primarily along the southern Mediterranean Levant coast, especially around cities like Gaza, Ashkelon and Ashdod. They are commonly associated with the broader Iron Age migrant communities known as the “Sea Peoples.”
Why was it so passionately important to the Jewish people to return to this specific part of the Levant, and no other?
Why do Jews, Christians and Muslims alike regard this area as the Holy Land?
The Promised Land
Thousands of years ago, and even to this day, different cultural groups around the world worshiped their own respective Gods. Throughout human history, religious groups attempted to impose one God, their God, on everyone else. Here, both Jews and Muslims agree on one thing: they believe in the same God. In Islam, God is called Allah, which means God in Arabic. Arabic-speaking Christians also call God Allah. Jews refer to God as either Yahweh, though only in writing, or Adonai and Elohim.
Like many ancient conflicts, this one also has roots in a religious story. A story from the Book of Genesis of the Jewish Torah, the Old Testament in the Christian Bible, and retold in various passages throughout the Qur’an, the Islamic Bible.
Judaism, Christianity and Islam all trace their traditions to Abraham. According to the Jewish Torah, Abraham lived in Mesopotamia. God asked Abraham to leave his motherland and follow him to a land that God would show him. Abraham travelled to Canaan, and once there, God rewarded his trust and obedience by choosing him to be the founder of a new covenantal people. God promised Abraham numerous descendants who would become a great nation and inherit the land of Canaan.
Abraham had two sons: Ishmael and Isaac. Both sons were promised great nations, but God specified that his covenant concerning Abraham and the land of Canaan would continue only through Isaac. Then it would continue through his son Jacob, later called Israel. Jacob’s descendants became the Israelites. Hence, the Torah considers Isaac as the ancestor of the Jewish people.
Islam emerged more than a thousand years later after the Jewish tradition was written, and incorporated the same Abrahamic family into its own religious tradition. The Qur’an recognizes Abraham, as Ibrahim, and both sons and Jacob as prophets, but traditionally considers Ishmael (Isma’il) as the ancestor of the Arab people and, ultimately, the Prophet Muhammad.
This is the underlying religious layer of the modern dispute. It is sometimes reduced to Jews descending from Isaac and Arabs from Ishmael and fighting over Abraham’s promised land. But that is a lazy reduction of the modern Israeli-Palestinian conflict, especially since it arose thousands of years later.
But it does help explain why this relatively small piece of land has such a deep meaning to Jews, Muslims and also to Christians.
The Mandate for Palestine
By the 19th century, the area, by now commonly called Palestine, was part of the Ottoman Empire and was populated predominantly by Arabic-speaking Muslims and Christians, alongside longstanding Jewish and other communities.
Modern political Zionism was already organized by the late 1890s, when the movement sought a legally recognized Jewish homeland in Palestine. Antisemitism, particularly in Europe, was a major safety factor.
When we refer to the ancient Jewish homeland and later to Palestine, we are talking about the same broad geographic region that on today’s map corresponds broadly to present-day Israel and the Palestinian territories, with parts of ancient Israelite territory extending into present-day Jordan. All inhabitants of Mandatory Palestine, including both Arabs and Jews, were collectively Palestinians with a formal Palestinian citizenship, if eligible.
After World War I, the Ottoman Empire fell, and Palestine, then the area west of the River Jordan, came under interim British administration as the Mandate for Palestine. A temporary administration acting as an interim government until a permanent government, or governments, could be established. But the region was not a British colony.
So, what we now know as the West Bank (the west bank of the River Jordan) was already geographically inside Palestine during the British Mandate.
Britain had two objectives: to develop self-governing institutions while safeguarding the civil and religious rights of all inhabitants, and to create conditions for the establishment of a Jewish national homeland, citing the Jewish people’s historical connection with Palestine.
Jewish history in this region extends back to antiquity, and so does a much more complicated history of peoples and empires that later migrated, lived and ruled there.
The Partition Dispute
Almost immediately after World War II, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, which dramatically strengthened the urgency for Jewish statehood in the international forum, the newly created United Nations proposed dividing Mandatory Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state, with Jerusalem under a special international regime. At around this time, Britain acknowledged that it could not resolve the ongoing regional dispute and handed the problem to the UN.
Much of what is now the West Bank was allocated to the proposed Arab state. Jewish leadership accepted the partition proposal, but Palestinian Arab leadership and surrounding Arab states vehemently rejected it. Namely because they regarded the partition as an injustice. They did not want Palestine to be divided to create a separate Jewish state, because roughly two-thirds of the population were Arabs versus one-third Jews. Palestinian Arab leaders argued that the normal application of national self-determination should produce one independent Palestinian state with the Arab majority and protections for its Jewish minority. Hence, the partition was regarded as overriding the wishes of the majority population.
There was also a major dispute about immigration and land. The Jewish population had grown substantially during the Mandate as they migrated into the region from other parts of the world. The Arab leadership argued that Britain and the international community had no right to allow it nor to partition the land to support it.
Jewish leaders saw it differently. Still raw from the events of the Holocaust, they no longer wished to exist as a fragmented minority population. They emphasized the Jewish historical connection to the land, legally acquired communities and land, commitments contained in the Mandate, and the urgent need for a secure Jewish homeland, especially after the Holocaust.
According to the 1947 UN Special Committee on Palestine report, despite decades of Zionist land purchases, Arabs remained in possession of approximately 85% of the land. Ottoman land law also left some complicated forms of title and long-standing cultivation and inheritable rights. Under the partition proposal, roughly 56% of Mandatory Palestine would be within the boundaries of the Jewish state, even though Jews privately owned only a relatively small fraction of Palestine’s total land area.
It also proposed that if an Arab farmer owned land in the proposed Jewish state, he would continue to own it but would become a resident or citizen of the Jewish state. The plan included constitutional protections against confiscation without public purpose and compensation.
The conflict was never settled with Arab leaders, and the proposed Arab state never came into existence under the proposed partition plan. The partition was approved by the UN community on behalf of the Jewish state only.
Israel became a sovereign state, and Jews became Israelis. Palestine had no formally established government over the territories assigned to it by the UN, and its people continued to be Palestinians.
The Fight Over the West Bank
After the end of the British Mandate and Israel’s declaration of independence, war ensued. The very next day after the end of the British Mandate, armies from Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq invaded then-Israel-controlled territories. It is known as the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.
When the fighting ended in 1949, Israel had gained control over most of former Mandatory Palestine, Jordan controlled the territory west of the Jordan River that only then became known to the world as the West Bank, and Egypt gained control over Gaza.
In 1950, Jordan, which already controlled the East Bank of the Jordan River, formally annexed the West Bank, and King Abdullah of Jordan sought to incorporate it into his kingdom. The annexation received little international recognition. There was some Palestinian support for union with Jordan, but there was also opposition, namely from other Arab governments. Pakistan and Britain recognized the union, with a qualification concerning Jerusalem.
During Jordan’s annexation of the West Bank, Palestinians living there were granted Jordanian citizenship and participated in Jordanian elections. Since Jordan’s sovereignty over the territory received little international recognition, Palestinian national identity and claims to Palestine had already formed before the annexation. It continued during Jordanian rule, eventually developing into an increasingly independent national movement. The West Bank remained under Jordanian control until 1967.
In 1967, during the Six-Day War, Israel fought Egypt, Jordan and Syria, and captured the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, Gaza and the Sinai from Egypt, and the Golan Heights from Syria. The West Bank then came under Israeli military administration. The UN and the prevailing international legal position regard the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, as occupied Palestinian territory.
After 1967, Israel used its own system to administer the land registry and land-status system in the West Bank through the military government and, later, the Israeli Civil Administration. It is a complicated mix of West Bank land records that contain layers of Ottoman, British Mandate and Jordanian law and registrations. Some of the land was already registered private property, but a great deal of the settlement land was classified by Israeli authorities as “state land.”
By 1974, Jordan ceased its claims to the West Bank and was represented by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) led by Yasser Arafat. In 1988, Jordan fully relinquished its claim to the territory and left the dispute between Israel and the Palestinians. At first, the UN General Assembly granted the PLO observer status – they were allowed to participate in the UN without being a full UN member.
Israel did not formally annex most of the West Bank, but Israeli civilians gradually settled there. Israel also extended its law and administration to East Jerusalem and regards Jerusalem as its capital. The UN and most of its member states do not recognize Israeli sovereignty over East Jerusalem.
The First Intifada
In 1987, a Palestinian uprising known as the First Intifada began in the Gaza Strip and quickly spread throughout the West Bank. Both assigned Palestinian territories. After 20 years of Israeli rule following the Six-Day-War, anger grew over military occupation, Israeli settlements, economic conditions and the absence of a political resolution.
The uprising erupted and continued into the early 1990s and significantly changed the political landscape. It brought greater international attention to the Palestinian situation and demonstrated that the status quo in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza territories was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain.
The Oslo Accords
A major attempt to resolve the conflict began with the Oslo Accords of the 1990s. Israel and the PLO recognized one another, and the Palestinian Authority was created in 1994 to begin formally governing parts of Gaza and the West Bank. PA was an interim Palestinian self-governing authority; a limited government without sovereignty.
In 1995, Oslo II divided the West Bank into Areas A, B and C, with different combinations of Palestinian and Israeli civil and security responsibility. This division was intended to be temporary. The agreement provided for further Israeli military redeployments and a gradual expansion of Palestinian jurisdiction, while questions around borders, Israeli settlements, Jerusalem and refugees were left for permanent negotiations. The 5-year transitional period was intended to lead to a permanent settlement for both parties.
That settlement was never reached.
The Second Intifada to the Present
Negotiations continued through the late 1990s but ultimately failed to resolve the permanent-status issues, and the Second Intifada beginning in 2000 severely damaged the peace process.
In 2006, Hamas won the Palestinian legislative elections, and fighting between Hamas and Fatah culminated in Hamas taking control of Gaza a year later. Hamas and Fatah are competing Palestinian movements with substantially different histories, ideologies and approaches toward Israel.
Fatah is the dominant faction of the PLO and PA. It is secular and supports a negotiated two-state solution, with an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel.
Hamas is an Islamist movement that does not recognize Israel and maintains that armed resistance is legitimate. Although its 2017 political document accepted a Palestinian state within the pre-1967 boundaries as a possible national consensus, it has not abandoned its broader claim to historic Palestine.
The rivalry between these two movements has divided the Palestinian government, creating a political deadlock and power struggle. Hamas governed Gaza, while the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority continued to administer parts of the West Bank.
The temporary Oslo A-B-C arrangement also remained in place far beyond its intended term. Israeli settlements continued to expand, and repeated attempts to negotiate a permanent agreement failed.
In 2023, Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups attacked southern Israel, resulting in the killing of about 1,200 people and taking roughly 250 civilian hostages. Israel responded with a major military campaign in Gaza.
A 2025 ceasefire brought large-scale fighting to a halt, but it has not ended bilateral violence and loss of life across the disputed territories.
In nearly 3 years, the war has caused devastating destruction across the Gaza Strip. It has also further destabilized the West Bank.
It has long ceased to be a conflict centred on God’s promise to Abraham. Today’s events are still about land but in a different context, and also about national identity, displacement, security, sovereignty and shares of Jerusalem.
Back to the Language
Within a generation, after resettling in Israel, children whose parents or grandparents had arrived speaking Yiddish, Arabic, Russian, Polish, Persian, Ladino and other languages were growing up with Hebrew as their first language.
As Israel developed economically, Hebrew had to develop with it. A language once used primarily for religion, scholarship and literature now had to handle everything from life sciences and engineering to banking, agriculture, media, arts and eventually modern technology.
Some vocabulary could be recovered or adapted from Biblical and Rabbinic Hebrew. Other words were created from existing Hebrew roots, and still others were borrowed from the other imported languages.
Gradually, Hebrew was revived as an everyday spoken language, and simultaneously it was also modernized and restandardized from the 1880s through the early decades of the 20th century. Pronunciation, spelling, grammar and vocabulary that had developed across centuries and geographically separated Jewish communities were brought together within a common spoken standard.
The Hebrew Script
Modern Hebrew is written using an alphabet of 22 letters and, like Arabic, is read from right to left. There are no uppercase and lowercase forms.
Five letters have a different form when they appear at the end of a word:
כ → ך
מ → ם
נ → ן
פ → ף
צ → ץ
All 22 letters represent consonants, although a few can also help indicate vowel sounds.
For example, imagine English written only in consonants, like this (reading right to left):
stnmcd ht dtnrp
= prntd th dcmnts = (I) printed the documents
Additionally, some letters can represent more than one sound: ב (bet), for example, can be b or v; כ (kaf) can be k or kh; and פ (pe) can be p or f.
Hebrew does have a system for indicating vowels. Niqqud (nee-KOOD) uses dots and small marks placed above, below or inside the letters to indicate where vowels are supposed to be pronounced. Sometimes these marks also distinguish consonant sounds. They are commonly found in children’s books, dictionaries, religious texts and material for learners, but most everyday Hebrew assumes the reader is adequately literate and is written without them.
Reading Hebrew
Rather than learn all 22 letters, let’s learn ten and see how quickly we can start reading the words:
ב — bet — B / V
י — yod — Y
כ — kaf — K / KH
ל — lamed — L
מ — mem — M
ס — samekh — S
פ — pe — P / F
ר — resh — R
ש — shin — SH
ת — tav — T
Now remember to start on the right.
Take:
שלום
Reading right to left:
ש + ל + ו + ם* = SH + L + O + M*
The ם at the end is the final form of מ (mem).
שלום = shalom = peace / hello / goodbye
Now try:
מלך
מ + ל + ך = M-L-KH
Here ך is the final form of כ (kaf). Add the vowels that aren’t shown:
מלך = melekh = king
Three more:
ספר = S-F-R = sefer = book
בית = B-Y-T = bayit = house
מים = M-Y-M = mayim = water
But if ספר gives us S-F-R, how do we know to read it as sefer instead of another word?
The assumption is that the reader already understands the language.
Natural language development typically begins before its speaker learns to read it. They first learn to hear it and understand it; then, they begin to imitate the sounds through speech and learn its vocabulary verbally. Writing usually comes last.
Niqqud helps make that pronunciation connection while children learn to infer the missing vowel information. As their vocabulary and reading skills develop, they gradually recognize words through consonants, grammatical patterns and context, and eventually, the vowel marks are no longer necessary.
Surviving in an Arid Land
Old Palestine was not an empty desert. Palestinian and other local farmers had cultivated olives, citrus, grains, grapes and other crops for generations, but much of the country is arid or semi-arid, and water is scarce. Many relied on the yield of even a single family olive tree to make a living.
Agriculture presented a major challenge for a fast-growing population.
Israel invested heavily in irrigation infrastructure and agricultural research, eventually developing ways to grow crops with very small amounts of water. The National Water Carrier began moving water from the north toward the centre and south in the 1960s, while Israeli-developed drip irrigation delivered water directly to plant roots instead of irrigating entire fields.
Over time, water scarcity became an area of technological specialization. Farmers began using treated wastewater and even brackish groundwater for some crops, while greenhouses, precision irrigation and carefully controlled fertilization allowed agriculture to expand into increasingly difficult environments, including parts of the Negev.
Large-scale desalination later transformed the country’s overall water supply. Israel developed the engineering, agricultural science and water-management systems that made productive farming possible in places where conventional agriculture would have been difficult to sustain.
A Masterclass in Modern Economic Development
Back in 1948, the then-new country faced the problem of supporting a rapidly growing population. Israel had inherited functioning agricultural, industrial, educational and financial institutions from the pre-state Jewish community, but immigration after 1948 occurred on an extraordinary scale.
More than 660,000 immigrants arrived between 1948 and 1951, roughly doubling the Jewish population in only a few years. Housing, food, employment and infrastructure could not keep pace, and the government introduced rationing and strict economic controls.
Development initially relied heavily on government investment and money from abroad. West German reparations and restitution payments, donations from Jewish communities overseas and other foreign capital helped finance housing, agriculture, roads, ports, electricity, water infrastructure and industry.
At the same time, immigration supplied human capital. Many newcomers arrived with professional, scientific, technical and entrepreneurial skills that could be incorporated into the developing economy.
The results were rapid, although frequently interrupted.
Israel industrialized and expanded agricultural production during the 1950s and 1960s, but the 1970s and early 1980s brought slower growth, high defence spending and eventually severe inflation. A major economic stabilization program in 1985 brought inflation under control and was followed by reforms that gradually opened and liberalized the economy.
Another transformation came after 1989, when hundreds of thousands of immigrants arrived from the former Soviet Union. Many had advanced scientific and technical education. Investment increased sharply, exports expanded and technology-intensive industries grew.
Between 1989 and 1995, Israeli output expanded by roughly 40 percent, while the new skilled workforce was progressively absorbed into the economy. By the late 1990s, high tech was becoming one of the country’s important export industries.
In roughly 50 years, and without an abundance of natural resources, Israel had built itself up from an economy struggling to house and feed a rapidly expanding population to a formidable industrialized, export-oriented and technology-based powerhouse.
A Wish for the Future
Peace and prosperity. If there is room for it, friendship too.
Naive? Yeah, maybe I’ve become too North American, where we hope for and celebrate good endings Hollywood-style. I’ve also been around long enough to see some incredibly unexpected things happen. People are and will always remain people. Try to predict human behaviour…
Even after so much loss, Israeli and Palestinian people continue to meet through dialogue groups, schools, community organizations and joint peace initiatives, both within the region and abroad. Some are former combatants; others have lost family members to the conflict. And they’ve connected over these commonalities and traumas.
As distant observers from across the globe, we should remind ourselves that journalistic reports are interpretations and usually not absolute, and that governments and political leaders do not necessarily speak for everyone they govern. The extremist groups committing atrocities in the name of God do not represent the views of the majority of their respective communities. Likewise, the average Israeli and Palestinian citizens are not representative of their governments’ leadership decisions. They have opinions, as we all do, but humans generally want to live peaceful lives and go about their day.
Most people outside the conflict, including Jews and Palestinians living abroad, also may not know the full history of this complicated saga. Selective accounts and interpretations can shape opinions that are neither complete nor unbiased, sometimes contributing to prejudice, hostility and even incitement of violence toward people who had nothing to do with the events in the first place.
They may never agree on the past, but there are still people on both sides willing to talk about what comes next. Perhaps that is reason enough to believe the next chapter can find a path toward peace and prosperity for two peoples who once shared the same land.
And still do.
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Monika Vance
Managing Director | SANTIUM
My work sits at the intersection of linguistics, scientific and medical translation, psychometric measurement, and multilingual operations, where terminology, usability, and regulatory context must align. I write about scientific and medical translations, psychometrics, languages, patient-centred research and the operational challenges that inevitably come with them. I also teach translators how to properly translate and validate complex psychometric instruments to hone their expertise in linguistic validation.
