How Do You Say Kneecap in Hebrew?

The glaring contradictions at the heart of the Irish band's linguistic revivalism

Amidst the furor surrounding the political stances and declarations of the Irish rap group Kneecap, one huge irony has been missed; namely that Zionism achieved everything with Hebrew that the band aspires to for Irish. They frequently invoke the slogan, “Every word of Irish spoken is a bullet fired for the cause of Irish independence,” which echoes the spirit of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the reviver of modern Hebrew, but would be meaningless to Palestinians, given there are over 400 million Arabic speakers in the world.

Indeed, Arabic became dominant throughout the Middle East through processes remarkably like those Kneecap oppose in Ireland. This contradiction reveals a fascinating blind spot in contemporary anti-colonial discourse: the selective application of historical awareness based on arbitrary temporal proximity rather than consistent principles. While Kneecap condemn the impact of English colonialism on Irish language and culture, they celebrate groups like Hamas and Hezbollah that are rooted in Arabic Islamic imperialism.

The parallels between the English colonization of Ireland and Arabic expansion throughout the Middle East are striking. English colonial authorities systematically marginalized Irish through education policies, administrative requirements, and economic incentives that favored English speakers. The Penal laws restricted Irish Catholic education, while English was promoted as the language of advancement. Economic opportunities required English fluency, creating powerful incentives for linguistic assimilation.

Similarly, the rapid expansion of Arabic following the 7^th-century Islamic conquests employed comparative strategies of linguistic dominance. Arabic became the language of administration, trade, and religious practice across vast territories. Advancement became tied to Arabic proficiency, with indigenous languages gradually falling out of use. The process may have been more gradual than the English assault on Irish, but it was no less coercive, and its ultimate impact was the same.

Consider the fate of Aramaic, once the lingua franca of the ancient Middle East and the probable language of Jesus. Having survived various empires, it succumbed to Arabic expansion. Today, Aramaic survives only in scattered communities, much like Irish before its modern revival efforts. Coptic, the descendant of ancient Egyptian, faced similar marginalization, persisting mainly in religious contexts. Berber languages across North Africa, Kurdish, and numerous other indigenous tongues experienced varying degrees of displacement. Meanwhile, local customs, legal traditions, and social structures adapted to Arab-Islamic norms. This cultural hegemony operated through the same mechanisms Kneecap identifies in Ireland: education, religion, economic incentives, and social prestige all channeled towards the dominant, imperial culture.

The effects of these processes are still felt today. Kurdish struggles for recognition, Berber activism in North Africa, Assyrian communities working to preserve ancient languages – these struggles parallel Kneecap’s own mission, while the Palestinians, despite many other problems, have never faced a genuine existential threat to their culture.

The precarious position of these linguistic minorities today reflects not only gradual cultural change, but also centuries of intermittent persecution, forced displacement, and violence. The Assyrian community, for example, faced systematic massacres in the late Ottoman period and continued persecution in modern Iraq and Syria, reducing their numbers from millions to hundreds of thousands. Kurdish populations have endured repeated campaigns of suppression, forced relocation, and violent repression across Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria – from the Anfal campaign to ongoing restriction on Kurdish language education. Berber communities in North Africa have faced policies of forced Arabization, particularly under pan-Arab governments. Coptic Christians in Egypt, while numerically significant, have experienced episodic violence and systematic discrimination that has led to emigration and cultural retreat. This is not the outcome of natural language shifts, but systematic marginalization, periodic violence, and cultural elimination all concealed behind the myth that the Arab world is some kind of anti-colonial paradise.

As last week’s essay on the Bludan Conference demonstrates, applying Kneecap’s own anti-imperial logic consistently would recognize that Palestinian nationalism emerges from this Arabized and Islamized landscape. Instead, the systematic destruction of indigenous Middle Eastern cultures is rendered invisible amidst a sea of Palestinian flags and didactic slogans.

This reveals another contradiction. Arabic speakers now number over 400 million globally, while there are barely 100,000 native Irish speakers (around 1.9 million people in Ireland and Northern Ireland claim to speak it as a second language). Hebrew speakers, meanwhile, total approximately nine million worldwide, representing a remarkable and historically unique linguistic achievement, with Modern Hebrew representing perhaps the only successful revival of a “dead” liturgical language into a thriving vernacular, far surpassing Irish revival efforts in scope and success.

Through deliberate cultural planning beginning in the late 19^th century, led by Ben-Yehuda and others, Hebrew was systematically revived, standardized, and eventually imposed as the primary language of the Zionist movement. Today, Hebrew functions as the native language of millions, supporting everything from cutting-edge technology to children’s playground chatter. This is a transformation that Irish language advocates like Kneecap can only dream of achieving.

This is the irony: the very entity they condemn as a colonial oppressor has accomplished the linguistic revival they champion for Ireland. Israel’s Hebrew’s revival involved many strategies that Irish language advocates have attempted – immersion education, cultural programming, economic incentives, and state support – but executed with far greater commitment and success. For any serious student of language revival, Israel’s Hebrew renaissance offers lessons worth studying.

Of course, the cases aren’t precisely the same. Jewish immigrants to Palestine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries spoke different languages and needed a common tongue, creating a practical imperative that didn’t exist in the Irish context, where English was dominant. But that didn’t make Hebrew an inevitable contender for the national language. Herzl, for example, said: “Who among us knows enough Hebrew to buy a railway ticket?” and he expected that the language of the Jewish state would be German. Hebrew was ultimately chosen for ideological reasons. Indeed, the Israeli linguist Ghil’ad Zuckermann notes than in 1916, 62% of Ashkenazi children and 28.5% of Ashkenazi adults spoke Hebrew, even though their common language was Yiddish, while for Sephardi Jews (whose common language was Ladino), the figures were only 18.3% and 8.4% respectively. In other words, they were more committed to Hebrew despite the smaller practical need.

(The Hebrew revival also carried significant costs for other Jewish languages, revealing the often-zero-sum nature of these efforts. Following statehood, Yiddish theaters were closed down, Yiddish publications faced restrictions, and Yiddish was banned from radio broadcasts until the 1970s. The government actively discouraged the use of Yiddish in schools and public life, viewing it as a symbol of diaspora weakness incompatible with the new Hebrew-speaking Israeli identity. Ladino, the Judeo-Spanish language of Sephardi Jews, faced similar marginalization, as did Judeo-Arabic dialects spoken by Jews from Arab countries. Ethiopian Jews were pressured to abandon Ge’ez and Amharic. Today, these languages exist primarily among elderly populations and in academic preservation efforts, while Yiddish is mostly spoken by Hasidim who are opposed to Israeli Hebrew culture. The irony is that Israel’s success in reviving Hebrew has contributed to the weakening of the very languages that sustained Jewish life through centuries of diaspora. This linguistic consolidation was deemed necessary for nation-building, but it also represents a profound cultural loss.)

Kneecap’s artistic mission explicitly centers on linguistic resistance. Embracing Thomas Davis’s maxim that “a country without a language is only half a nation,” they have positioned the revival of Irish as fundamental to decolonization, their choice to rap in Irish a statement of cultural reclamation.

Their hostility towards Israel, which long predates the war in Gaza, blinds them to the model of the revival of Hebrew. In didactically shouting “Fuck Israel; free Palestine,” they dismiss the very society that has successfully revived a language in the modern era. While they mostly perform to audiences who don’t understand what they’re saying, Israel is full of musicians performing to audiences in their mother tongue.

Given Kneecap’s dedication to reviving a marginalized language, they might benefit from a greater awareness of the revival of Hebrew, and the story of Arabic linguistic imperialism. In the meantime, they undermine the intellectual coherence of their political stance. To claim to speak for those who voices have been silenced while flying the Hezbollah flag is hilariously ignorant, an act no amount of sloganeering or posturing can hide.

Incidentally, ‘kneecap’ in Hebrew is פיקת הברך, pikat haberech.