A few months ago, I received a call from a young Arabic teacher who worked at a high school in the suburbs of Haifa in northern Israel. He told me his name and explained why he called me. “My students refuse to learn Arabic,” he said. “They are very antagonistic toward the language itself.”
The truth is that I wasn’t quite as surprised about what he was describing as by the very fact that he contacted me about it. “Is it really that bad?” I asked.