Somebody on Quora asked:
How many Israelis speak Arabic?
I answered:
The truthful answer is not a lot.
I have been learning Arabic for a few years (3miyye), and many Israelis similarly take a passing interest in the language, but that’s a very different thing than speaking it fluently.
I’m aware that Arabic is mandatory in the school system — but from the pronunciation and command of the language that the general Jewish population seems to hold (‘KHA-las’ pronounced with a guttular Hebrew chet!), I would say the education must be fairly rudimentary.
There is one exception.
A substantial amount of Israel’s initial population came from Arabic-speaking countries. At this point in time, this cohort is almost all well past retirement age. Their children and grandchildren tend to know about as much Arabic as most Jewish-Israelis — the basics plus a few things they might have heard around the house.
But the grandparents —at least those that are still alive— do speak Arabic fluently. The dialect depends where they emigrated from, of course.
I have (on very rare occasion) witnessed both conversations between elderly Mizrahi Jews in Israel and between elderly Arabic-speaking Jews and Arab-Israelis. As a lover of languages, I find this very exciting! Although the dialects sounded noticeably different (Tunisian Arabic vs. Shami/Levantine Arabic, for example) there did seem to be mutual intelligibility.
If you want an example, check out the first interviewee in this video.
The lady in the video speaks Egyptian-Arabic:
