‘I’m Interviewing a Sheep’

Abstract

In this article, I summarize the state of Arabic (as a medium and a message) in Israeli state media and compare attitudes towards the Arabic language with content from the popular bilingual (Arabic-Hebrew) sitcom written and created by a Palestinian-Israeli writer, Sayed Kashua. I argue that Kashua’s work in his show, Arab Labor, reiterates poor attitudes towards Arabic and foreshadows the ethnolinguistic erasure of Israel’s Nation-State Law of 2018. Using humor and satire within its content, context and dialogue, the show draws attention to growing disparities and impossibilities in Palestinian life throughout Israel and emerges as an intertextual resource for commentary and recreating conditions of Palestinian existence.