Somebody asked on Quora whether Israelis knowing Arabic would resolve the conflict.
I answered:
It’s nice to think that — but as the other respondents have pointed out, the facts contradict that.
Besides the forced migration of Arabic-speaking Jews before and after the foundation of the State of Israel — sometimes called the ‘Jewish nakba’ — all accounts of the Hebron Massace that I have read (see Wikipedia’s one here) emphasize that the Jewish population of the time spoke Arabic and was even “assimilated” with the local population.
I don’t wish to imply that all Arabs are murderers by citing that fact. And I’m sure examples exist of far-right Jews that also learn Arabic — and yet commit deplorable hate crimes against Arabs. But it does challenge the question’s thesis that understanding another culture’s language is an effective means of improving race relations.
To answer the second question: no actually. Although Hebrew, Arabic and Semitic languages do share a somewhat common lexicon, in reality, Modern Hebrew and Arabic are quite different languages — and a Hebrew-speaker isn’t at a significant advantage when it comes to learning it. In fact, Arabic is substantially harder to learn than Modern Hebrew — as I wrote in this answer Modern Hebrew is a simplified version of the older language, while Arabic retains many nuances.
