Contra: Palestine and Israel

This issue has almost nothing to do with language. Hebrew is taught to many Arab children, as it is required in all schools in Israel, and there are more than a million Arabs in Israel. Hebrew and Arabic are very similar languages, with similar scripts and grammars.

The two communities are not particularly close, though.

"No cross-fertilization whatsoever" between Israeli and Arab scholarship today.. James Reston, June 14th, 2001, Washington DC, Politics and Prose

It is all too easy to imagine a cop and a civilian, both using Hebrew as their second language, one Russian, one Arabic, and potentially fatal problems with a miscommunication.

There are certainly also power politics involved in the choice of languages in communications between the cops and civilians.