[News] Wiping Arabic Names Off the Map

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://www.counterpunch.org/cook07172009.html

July 17-19, 2009


Wiping Arabic Names Off the Map

Israeli Road Signs

By JONATHAN COOK

Thousands of road signs are the latest front in 
Israel’s battle to erase Arab heritage from much of the Holy Land.

Israel Katz, the transport minister, announced 
this week that signs on all major roads in 
Israel, East Jerusalem and possibly parts of the 
West Bank would be “standardised”, converting 
English and Arabic place names into straight 
transliterations of the Hebrew name.

Currently, road signs include the place name as 
it is traditionally rendered in all three languages.

Under the new scheme, the Arab identity of 
important Palestinian communities will be 
obscured: Jerusalem, or “al Quds” in Arabic, will 
be Hebraised to “Yerushalayim”; Nazareth, or “al 
Nasra” in Arabic, the city of Jesus’s childhood, 
will become “Natzrat”; and Jaffa, the port city 
after which Palestine’s oranges were named, will be “Yafo”.

Arab leaders are concerned that Mr Katz’s plan 
offers a foretaste of the demand by Benjamin 
Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, that the 
Palestinians recognise Israel as a Jewish state.

On Wednesday, Mohammed Sabih, a senior official 
at the Arab League, called the initiative “racist and dangerous”.

“This decision comes in the framework of a series 
of steps in Israel aimed at implementing the 
‘Jewish State’ slogan on the ground.”

Palestinians in Israel and Jerusalem, meanwhile, 
have responded with alarm to a policy they 
believe is designed to make them ever less visible.

Ahmed Tibi, an Arab legislator in the Israeli 
parliament, said: “Minister Katz is mistaken if 
he thinks that changing a few words can erase the 
existence of the Arab people or their connection to Israel.”

The transport ministry has made little effort to 
conceal the political motivation behind its policy of Hebraising road signs.

In announcing the move on Monday, Mr Katz, a 
hawkish member of Likud, Mr Netanyahu’s 
right-wing party, said he objected to 
Palestinians using the names of communities that 
existed before Israel’s establishment in 1948.

“I will not allow that on our signs,” he said. 
“This government, and certainly this minister, 
will not allow anyone to turn Jewish Jerusalem into Palestinian al Quds.”

Other Israeli officials have played down the 
political significance of Mr Katz’s decision. A 
transport department spokesman, Yeshaayahu Ronen, 
said: “The lack of uniform spelling on signs has 
been a problem for those speaking foreign 
languages, citizens and tourists alike.”

“That’s ridiculous,” responded Tareq Shehadeh, 
head of the Nazareth Cultural and Tourism 
Association. “Does the ministry really think it’s 
helping tourists by renaming Nazareth, one of the 
most famous places in the world, ‘Natzrat’, a 
Hebrew name only Israeli Jews recognise?”

Meron Benvenisti, a former deputy mayor of 
Jerusalem, said Israel had begun interfering with 
the Arabic on the signs for East Jerusalem as 
soon as it occupied the city in 1967. It invented 
a new word, “Urshalim”, that was supposed to be 
the Arabic form of the Hebrew word for Jerusalem, “Yerushalayim”.

“I was among those who intervened at the time to 
get the word ‘al Quds’ placed on signs, too, 
after ‘Urshalim’ and separated by a hyphen. But 
over the years ‘al Quds’ was demoted to brackets 
and nowadays it’s not included on new signs at all.”

He said Mr Katz’s scheme would push this process 
even further by requiring not only the Arabic 
equivalent of the Hebrew word for Jerusalem, but 
the replication of the Hebrew spelling as well. 
“It’s completely chauvinistic and an insult,” he said.

Meir Margalit, a former Jerusalem councillor, 
said official policy was to make the Palestinian 
population in East Jerusalem as invisible as 
possible, including by ignoring their neighbourhoods on many signs.

The transport ministry’s plans for the West Bank 
are less clear. In his announcement Mr Katz said 
Palestinian-controlled areas of the territory 
would still be free to use proper Arabic place 
names. But he hinted that signs in the 60 per 
cent of the West Bank under Israeli military rule would be Hebraised, too.

That could mean Palestinians driving across parts 
of the West Bank to the Palestinian city of 
Nablus, for example, will have to look for the 
Hebrew name “Shechem” spelt out in Arabic.

Mr Benvenisti said that, after Israel’s 
establishment in 1948, a naming committee was 
given the task of erasing thousands of Arab place 
names, including those of hills, valleys and 
springs, and creating Hebrew names. The country’s 
first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, told the 
committee: “We are obliged to remove the Arabic names for reasons of state.”

In addition, the Arabic names of more than 400 
Palestinian villages destroyed by Israel during 
and after the 1948 war were lost as Jewish communities took their place.

Israel’s surviving Palestinian minority, today 
one-fifth of the population, have had to battle 
in the courts for the inclusion of Arabic on road 
signs, despite Arabic being an official language.

Many signs on national highways were provided 
only in Hebrew and English until the courts in 
1999 insisted Arabic be included. Three years 
later the courts ruled that Arabic must also be 
included on signs in cities where a significant number of Arabs live.

However, as the political climate has shifted 
rightward in Israel, there has been a backlash, 
including an unsuccessful bid by legislators to 
end Arabic’s status as an official language last year.

Recently the Israeli media revealed that 
nationalist groups have been spraying over Arabic 
names on road signs, especially in the Jerusalem area.

Israel has also antagonised Palestinians in both 
Israel and the West Bank by naming roads after right-wing figures.

The main highway in the Jordan Valley, which runs 
through Palestinian territory but is used by 
Israelis to drive between northern Israel and 
Jerusalem, is named “Gandhi’s Road” – not for the 
Indian spiritual leader but after the nickname of 
an Israeli general, Rehavam Zeevi, who called for 
the expulsion of Palestinians from Greater Israel.

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in 
Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are 
“<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0745327540/counterpunchmaga>Israel 
and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and 
the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) 
and 
“<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1848130317/counterpunchmaga>Disappearing 
Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair” 
(Zed Books). His website is <http://www.jkcook.net>www.jkcook.net.

A version of this article originally appeared in 
The National 
(<http://www.thenational.ae>www.thenational.ae), published in Abu Dhabi.




Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110

415 863-9977

www.Freedomarchives.org  
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20090717/ce2fa28a/attachment.htm>