DANIEL ESTRIN
What’s In A Name? After ultra-nationalists painted over Arabic lettering on this Jerusalem street sign, a new group of vigilantes restored it.
13/07/2009
The Israeli transport ministry said on Monday that it will get rid of Arabic and English names for cities and towns on road signs, keeping only the Hebrew terms. "Minister Yisrael Katz took this decision that will be progressively applied," a ministry spokeswoman told AFP.
Currently Israeli road signs are written in Hebrew, Arabic and English, with the city names in each language. So occupied Jerusalem is identified as Yerushalaim in Hebrew, Jerusalem in English and Al-Quds in Arabic (along with Yerushalaim written in Arabic script).
Under the new policy the Holy City will only be identified as Yerushalaim in all three languages. Nazareth (Al-Nasra in Arabic) will be identified as Natzrat and Jaffa (Jaffa in Arabic) will only be written as Yafo.
Katz told Yediot Aharonot that the move was a response to the Palestinian refusal to use Hebrew names for some “Israeli towns.”
The Transportation Ministry has been working on the project for over a year and says its main purpose is to create uniform roadside spelling for more than 2,000 names of cities, towns and villages. Current road signs, says the ministry, reflect the vast changes and development in Israel's highways, and as such there are many variations of places' names. Caesarea, for instance, appears as Caesarea, Qesarya, Qesariyya and Ceysaria.
"The lack of uniform spelling on signs has been a problem for those speaking foreign languages, citizens and tourists alike," explains Yeshaayahu Ronen, head of the ministry's Transportation Planning Department. "It impairs drivers' ability to find their way and we have decided to follow many other countries around the world and make the transliteration of all names correspond directly with Hebrew."
Katz authorized Ronen's department to decide which signs would be replaced. "Almost all Israeli communities' names have previous names. Some Palestinian maps still refer to the Israeli cities by their pre-1948 names, since they see them as settlements," said Katz. "I will not allow that on our signs. This government, and certainly this minister, will not allow anyone to turn Jewish Jerusalem to Palestinian al-Quds."
Katz is convinced the new style will not infringe on Arab drivers' ability to find their way. "We will continue to serve the Arab public and have signs in Arabic. I have no problem with an Area B (defined by the Oslo Accords as areas under the Palestinian Authority's civil control and Israel's security control) sign reading 'Nablus' in Arabic. "The names on the signs should reflect the reality of the local population, which is exactly why Israeli signs must have Hebrew transliteration."
AL-QUDS WILL REMAIN AL-QUDS
Arab Knesset members were infuriated by the proposal: "Al-Quds will remain al-Quds and Shfaram will remain Shefa-'Amr," said MK Ahmad Tibi (United Arab List-Ta'al).
"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. This is a blatant attempt at harming the Arabic language and everything it represents."
Hadash Chairman Mohammad Barakeh added that the decision was too far-reaching: "Yisrael Katz is merely the transportation minister and it appears that the power went to his head… I hereby inform him that he cannot change the nature of a place. Yisrael Katz will come and go but Shefa-'Amr is here to stay."
Minister of Minority Affairs Avishay Braverman criticized the decision as well: "Road signs are not a political issue. Arabic is an official language in the State of Israel," he said. "I would suggest the Minister Katz place much needed street signs in Arab communities before he changes road signs."
NEW ‘WAR’ ERUPTS IN ISRAEL….. OVER ARABIC LETTERS ON STREET SIGNS
July 13, 2009 at 3:40 pm (Activism, Extremism, Israel, Racism)
Racism has no limits. But, as long as it exists there will be those that oppose it….. even in Israel.
By Daniel Estrin
Jerusalem — On a recent night in this ethnically divided city, an Israeli and two American Jews patrolled the streets, armed with a ladder, adhesive spray and a pile of handwritten placards. Every few minutes, they hopped out of the car, slapped a sticker onto a road sign and snapped a picture.
Their operation, which has taken place four times since May, is aimed at countering ultra-nationalist vandals who had defaced the Arabic lettering on Jerusalem’s street signs. Over that vandalism, the new vigilantes, with a more pluralist vision of Israel, have put up stickers with large, flowing Arabic calligraphy spelling out the street’s name.
“It’s a public service,” said Romy Achituv, the Israeli behind the wheel, before speeding off to the next sign on the checklist.
So far, the “maintenance group,” as they call themselves, has gone out four times at night and attended to around 50 signs. The $100 or so that this has cost has come from their own pockets.
It’s the latest move in an ongoing graffiti war that has transformed Israel’s road signs into ideological battlefields. The conflict began in 1999, when an Israeli court ordered Arab-Jewish cities to include Arabic translations on street signs in addition to Hebrew and English. In the years since that order, anti-Arabic vandalism has appeared in mixed cities, such as Akko, as well as on highway signs throughout the country — but it is said to be most prominent in Jerusalem. There, residents have grown used to the Arabic translations of “Jehosaphat Street” or “Slow” being blotted out by black spray paint or covered up in ultra-nationalist bumper stickers.
DANIEL ESTRIN
Signs of Conflict: A group has placed stickers with florid Arabic calligraphy on Israeli street signs that had been vandalized.
“In Jerusalem, you have a lot of nationalists who do not accept the very existence of Arabs,” said Sammy Smooha, an Israeli political sociologist at the University of Haifa. “Arabic signs give them the feeling of binationalism, that the Jews have no exclusive monopoly on the town.” Achituv and others on his team contend that Israeli authorities have been uninterested in dealing with the defacing of the Arabic signs.
“The police are not working against this phenomenon,” said Abber Baker, who is an attorney with Adalah, an Arab rights group that petitioned for the Arabic lettering on street signs. “People are not deterred, because there is no accountability. It is never reported as a big issue we need to fight as a state matter.”
Besides the anti-Arab messaging implied in the vandalism, the covered-up Arabic poses a very practical problem for taxi drivers like Muhammed Dabash.
“When I need to take a passenger somewhere, I read the Arabic on the street signs,” Dabash told the Forward.
A Jerusalem policewoman patrolling near a sign pointing to Tel Aviv on which the Arabic had been marked out said she had not noticed the vandalism and that she was not responsible for dealing with such incidents. Stephen Miller, spokesman for Jerusalem mayor Nir Barkat, said the city was working to improve its handling of graffiti and other sanitation issues.
“In a city of 800,000, there’s going to be graffiti,” Miller contended, adding that the vandalized road signs are “isolated incidents.”
The vigilante effort to fix what the municipality had not was initiated by Ilana Sichel, who became bothered by the extremist graffiti while spending the year in Jerusalem on a social justice fellowship given by the New Israel Fund and Shatil. Sichel enlisted the help of Josh Berer, a New Israel Fund fellow who previously studied traditional Arabic calligraphy in Yemen, to write the Arabic placards.
“This is fundamentally an issue of decency and neighborliness,” Sichel said.
The initiative is independent of the New Israel Fund, but Vered Nuriel-Porat, the Israeli coordinator of the New Israel Fund fellows, praised the project.
“We’re talking about equality and talking about respecting different cultures,” she said. “The strength of these fellows is just amazing, to keep on doing this.”
Sichel and her crew have made repeated trips to some signs after some of their stickers were ripped off. In one instance, they found a road sign that had been completely cleaned, with no trace of any kind of graffiti or stickers, theirs included. Sichel thought it might have been the municipality, but when she reported to a left-wing activist e-mail list what had happened, a fellow vigilante named Udi replied that he was the one who restored the street signs to their original look.
“I really think you are mistaken,” Sichel wrote in a polite but impassioned e-mail exchange in which she argued that erasing all traces of graffiti hid the real problem. Udi countered that cleaning the street signs was the ultimate goal.
On another front, the group asked the Shalom Hartman Institute, a Jewish research institution that operates a religious high school, to patrol its own vandalized road sign after Sichel reaffixed the Arabic sticker on the sign for the fourth time.
In the meantime, the vigilante maintenance crew invites visitors to Jerusalem to catch a glimpse of the Arabic calligraphy adorning the city’s street signs while they can. It is likely to be a temporary exhibit.
Israeli minister changes Arab names of Palestinian cities
[ 13/07/2009 - 03:48 PM ]
OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, (PIC)-- Israeli minister of transportation and road safety Yisrael Katz has ordered a change in all Arab names of Palestinian towns and cities that appear on signs on the streets into Hebrew names.
Hebrew daily Yediot Ahronot on Monday quoted the minister as saying that Jerusalem from now on would be called Yerushalayim and not Jerusalem and in Arabic the word Al-Quds would be erased and instead the word Yerushalayim in Hebrew would be written.
He also said that Nasera would be written Nazareth and Akka would be written Akko and so on.
The paper quoted Katz as saying that none would name Yerushalayim as Al-Quds not in this government and certainly not this minister.
The decision is another form of Israeli racism against Palestinians and an attempt to deprive them of their simplest rights mainly naming their own cities in their own language.
Agha: IOA seeking to wipe out sanctity of Aqsa Mosque
[ 12/07/2009 - 04:46 PM ]
GAZA, (PIC)-- PA minister of tourism Dr. Mohammed Al-Agha has charged the Israeli occupation authority (IOA) with attempting to wipe out the sanctity of the holy Aqsa Mosque from Muslim minds and hearts.
The minister, who was inspecting a museum in Deir Al-Balah in central Gaza, said that the IOA was also plotting to destroy internal tourism to the Aqsa Mosque and to accelerate, in the meantime, judaization of occupied Jerusalem.
He urged the Arabs and Muslims to respond accordingly to the IOA schemes and dangers engulfing the Aqsa Mosque.
Agha said that Israeli tourism offices were currently circulating Jewish projects and programs for foreign tourists that would get them (tourists) in and out of
Jerusalem without noticing any Islamic landmark in it.
IOA tears down Jerusalemite home, Sheikh Salah warns of accelerating judaization
[ 13/07/2009 - 03:15 PM ]
OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, (PIC)-- Israeli occupation authority (IOA) controlled municipality of Jerusalem on Monday sent its bulldozers to the home of Alaa Al-Shobaki in Beit Hanina north of occupied Jerusalem and tore his house down.
Local sources said that the bulldozers knocked down the 120 square meters house that used to provide accommodation for Shobaki's eight-member family.
For his part, Sheikh Ra'ed Salah, the leader of the Islamic movement in 1948 occupied Palestine, has called on all Arab and Islamic officials to give more attention to the tragedy of occupied Jerusalem that is reeling under the accelerating judaization attempts.
He told Al-Quds TV network on Monday that the IOA was expanding settlement process, flattening Jerusalemite homes, distributing demolition notifications and pestering Jerusalemites.
Sheikh Sabri warns against Israeli intents to divide Aqsa Mosque
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