For 19-year-old Salma, a Palestinian citizen of Israel working at a retail shop, a routine workplace message from her manager upended her sense of safety and belonging. The instruction was clear: all staff were banned from speaking Arabic while on the job. Salma and her predominantly Palestinian colleagues first dismissed the order as absurd, but a rapid, hostile escalation quickly changed their minds.
When one coworker briefly spoke Arabic to announce she was moving a box to the storeroom – even inserting the Hebrew word for storeroom to clarify the work-related conversation – the manager exploded in anger. “She started shouting, kicking boxes and telling us we were forbidden to speak Arabic,” Salma recalled. The manager’s final rebuke encapsulated the prejudice driving the ban: “This is a Jewish state. Here we speak only Hebrew. Arabic stays at home.”
Salma’s experience is far from an isolated incident. Over recent months, Palestinian workers across Israel have reported a growing wave of workplace Arabic-speaking bans, with complaints spanning retail outlets, pharmacies, and public hospitals. One of the highest-profile recent cases unfolded at a Good Pharm branch in the coastal city of Jaffa, where local media obtained WhatsApp messages showing a manager threatening workers caught speaking any language other than Hebrew. The manager justified the ban by claiming Arabic could upset customers traumatized by the October 7 attacks. In a statement, Good Pharm said it is committed to equality, employs people from all communities, and would address the manager’s behavior internally. But Palestinian workers say no meaningful changes have followed the public disclosure.
In Salma’s case, the ban extended even beyond customer interactions: it remained in place when the shop was closed and no customers were present, with only Palestinian staff on site. When Salma and her colleagues protested the policy, the company responded by removing them from the work schedule for nearly two months, then offering transfers to distant branches that were practically unreachable. “Instead of removing the manager or holding her accountable, the company preferred to ask us to change our workplace,” Salma said. While the retail chain has publicly condemned racism and discrimination, the experience has left a lasting mark on Salma, who is preparing to begin university this year. She says she now feels deep anxiety about entering another majority-Jewish work or academic environment. “I had heard about racism before this, but I never understood the feeling until now,” she said. “It was the first time I understood what it means for someone to treat you badly simply because of your identity.”
Palestinian citizens of Israel are the descendants of the native population of historic Palestine who remained in their lands after the 1948 Nakba, when Zionist militias displaced an estimated 750,000 Palestinians to establish the state of Israel. Today, the community makes up roughly 20 percent of Israel’s total population, numbering around two million people. Since the October 2023 outbreak of the Israel-Gaza war, Palestinian citizens have faced a sharp rise in arrests, professional disciplinary action, and job losses linked to their political expression regarding the conflict in Gaza.
Legal advocates who represent Palestinian workers warn that the public cases that have emerged are only a small fraction of the total number of discriminatory incidents taking place across the country. What has shifted, they argue, is not the existence of anti-Palestinian discrimination in workplaces, but the open confidence with which employers now impose discriminatory policies. Alya Zoabi, an employment lawyer who specializes in representing Palestinian workers, told Middle East Eye that her office has seen a dramatic jump in racism-related workplace claims. “Most of the cases now reaching my office from Jewish workplaces involve racism,” she said. “There has been a significant increase.”
Zoabi shared details of two extreme cases her office has handled recently: one involved a young Palestinian employee who suffered a full panic attack after months of ongoing discrimination from her manager. When an ambulance was called to the workplace, the employer forced the worker to go to the hospital alone. In a second case, a pregnant Palestinian employee was fired without obtaining the legally required authorization for dismissing a pregnant worker.
The growing push to ban Arabic in workplaces builds on a 2018 controversial piece of Israeli legislation: the Nation-State Law, which enshrined Hebrew as the country’s only official language, downgrading Arabic from an official language to one with “special status.” While the law preserved the practical use of Arabic in government services, public signage, and education, Palestinian communities report that pressure to suppress public expressions of their cultural and linguistic identity has intensified steadily in the years since the law passed.
From a legal perspective, the biggest barrier to holding discriminatory employers accountable is not the absence of rules against bias, but the difficulty of proving an employer’s discriminatory motive to meet Israel’s court standards. Israel’s Equal Employment Opportunities Law prohibits discrimination on the basis of nationality, race, and religion, but it does not explicitly guarantee the right to use any language in all workplace settings. Legal experts note that a full, blanket ban on Arabic – particularly for private conversations or in roles where Hebrew is not required for job duties – can qualify as unlawful discrimination, but enforcement of this standard remains deeply uneven.
“But formal legal protection means little when enforcement is slow, costly and uncertain,” Zoabi explained. She added that since October 7, there has been a clear leniency toward employers in discrimination cases that cannot be ignored. Claims that would normally be worth tens of thousands of shekels in compensation often end in settlements that award workers only a small fraction of that amount. The high cost and low odds of success discourage both workers and their legal representatives from pursuing claims, even when discrimination is obvious. Both Salma and the Good Pharm employee ultimately abandoned their plans to file lawsuits after being advised the cases would drag on for years, cost more than they could afford, and have little chance of a ruling in their favor. As a Palestinian woman working within Israel’s legal system, Zoabi says she experiences the impact of this discrimination firsthand. “When I stand in court, I feel I am both the lawyer and the client,” she said. “As a Palestinian woman in Israel, I experience this racism too.”
(Note: The source’s name has been changed to protect their identity, per the original reporting)