Okay, so this site (http://www.acdi-cida.gc.ca/CIDAWEB/webcountry.nsf/VLUDocEn/WestBankandGaza-Factsataglance) claims an 89% literacy rate in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Cool. My question, though: Does anyone have a source on how many of these people are literate in something other than Arabic? The CIA World Factbook says that Arabic is spoken, that many Palestinians (and I’m looking at the Palestinians here) speak Hebrew, and that English is “widely understood”.
With Arabic as the primary spoken language of the Palestinians, is it safe to assume that the literacy number from the site above is referring to Arabic literacy? If so, then it becomes important to ask what else the people can read, because there simply isn’t a lot of material translated into Arabic. I don’t have a cite on hand, because I’m drawing from a lecture by my foreign affairs professor, but the number of texts that are translated into Arabic every year is dwarfed by the number of texts in French, Spanish, German, English, etc. This means that someone might be fully literate in Arabic, and still cut off from an awful lot of intellectual discourse, news, fiction, etc simply because they can’t read it.
So, any help you could offer would be appreciated. If you point me to a source, I’ll probably be using it in a couple of papers - email me at emaron212@rwu.edu to tell me how you’d like to be attributed.