Israeli-Arab towns are enshrining Palestinian history, one street name at a time
Mahmoud Darwish Street in Baka Al-Garbiyeh
Michael Milshtein writes in Haaretz on 10 November 2022:
Twenty years ago, when MK Ayman Odeh (Hadash) was a member of the Haifa city council, he lobbied vigorously to have the name of Hatzionut (Zionism) Avenue changed to Street of the Mountain (Al-Jabal), which had been its name prior to Israel’s establishment in 1948. He also talked about his dream: that anybody who came to Haifa in the future, and who ask where a particular place was situated, could very well receive a response along the lines of: “It’s on Gamal Abdel Nasser Street, between Edward Said and Land Day streets.”
In large measure, Odeh’s dream has come true: The public space of Arab society in Israel, and especially in locales with Arab majorities, is today rife with streets, squares, institutions and monuments whose names commemorate personalities, events, concepts and places that reference Palestinian history, and specifically those that have an association with Israel’s Arab community.
Pass through an Arab town or city today and you’ll find yourself on streets that truly are named for Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser; Land Day (an annual commemoration of the killings of six Arab citizens in 1976 during protests against the state’s appropriation of Arab-owned land), or the late Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said; and public squares containing monuments that commemorate the Nakba, the “Catastrophe,” as Arabs refer to the events surrounding Israel’s establishment; the 1956 Kafr Qasem massacre; or the events of October 2000. This development casts a different light on the old claim that Israel’s Arab citizens have no way to express their national identity or to enshrine their collective memory in the public domain.
It’s a process that’s been underway for the past 20 years or so. Before the year 2000, at the beginning of what became the second intifada, when Arab demonstrations in response to the clashes in Jerusalem led to deaths of 13 Arabs (12 of them Israeli citizens, one a Palestinian from Gaza) at the hands of police, there was limited representation of Palestinian national symbols in public spaces. That restraint corresponded with the fear and caution that characterized the Arab public’s attitude toward the national authorities. The single exception to this state of affairs was the monument to those who were killed on the first Land Day, which was erected two years later in the Galilee city of Sakhnin by artists Abed Abadi and Gershon Knispel.
The “events” of October 2000 created an acute crisis in relations between the Arab community and the state, leading to the rise of two contradictory phenomena among the Arab public in the intervening two decades. On the one hand, Palestinian self-identity has been strengthened, something frequently expressed by way of defiance of the state; on the other hand, there is a longing to deepen integration into both Israeli society and state, a trend especially discernible among the younger generation.
Driven by these two opposing trends, the Arab public space in Israel has undergone a process of Palestinization. This is notably manifest in the monuments that have been erected in Arab locales since 2000, representing seminal events from recent Palestinian history. The Nakba is a major theme of the monuments, such as the column in Tira commemorating Palestinian casualties in 1948, which is adorned with small sculptures representing the sabra – the fruit of the prickly pear cactus (a symbol of Sumud, Arabic for “steadfastness,” referring to Palestinian determination to remain on the land).
Another memorial, in the form of a billboard that stands permanently at the entrance to the city of Umm al-Fahm, commemorates the village of Lajjun, many of whose refugees settled in the city in 1949. And large sculptures of a map of historic Palestine have been installed in recent years in central squares in Kafr Manda and in the town of Baana, east of Acre.
Sites have been established in many Arab locales in memory of citizens who were killed in confrontations with Israeli security forces, notably on Land Day, in October 2000 and in the Kafr Qasem massacre of 1956, in which 49 local Arabs were killed by Border Police for returning late from their fields after a pop curfew was declared. They can be found in Umm al-Fahm, Kafr Qasem, Jatt and Kafr Kana. On the respective commemoration days, the families of those who were killed, as well as leaders of the Arab public, visit these sites as well as the graves of the dead.
Another major site is a large metal monument in Taibeh commemorating Land Day, and which also has engraved on it the names of villages destroyed in 1948. In addition, graves of individuals who were killed prior to 1948 and who subsequently acquired the status of national symbols, are now places of pilgrimage. These include, above all, the Islamic leader Izz a-Din al-Qassam, who is buried in Nesher, near Haifa, and three of the participants in the 1929 riots who were executed by the British for killing Jews, and who are buried in Acre.
A mosaic in Baka Al-Garbiyeh depicting local involvement in the 1936-39 Arab Revolt against the British. Women and child were among the participants.
Street names are another prominent way for strengthening the collective memory in Arab society. Many Arab cities and towns have streets named for villages, usually close by, that were destroyed in 1948 and whose uprooted residents found shelter in locales that survived. Other streets are named for Palestinian national heroes, especially those who were active during the British Mandate period and operated against both the British and the Jewish communities, in particular Izz a-Din al-Qassam (in the center of the city of Baka al-Garbiyeh is a huge mosaic devoted to the Arab revolt of 1936-1939). Palestinian creative artists and performers also are honored by having streets named for them, among them the poets Mahmoud Darwish and Fadwa Tuqan, the cartoonist Naji al-Ali, creator of the famed character Handala, the singers Umm Kulthum and Fairuz, and the poets Kahlil Gibran and Nizar Qabbani.
Other streets are named to memorialize seminal events in Palestinian history (the Deir Yassin massacre and the Israeli reprisal raid in Qibya in 1953), or to commemorate Arab leaders, such as Nasser and Abd al-Karim Qasim, ruler of Iraq from 1958 to 1963, who in 1948 fought in the Triangle, a cluster of Arab locales in north-central Israel, for whom the main street in Kafr Qasem is named.
The new names intermix with old ones that are “neutral” in their essence – that were common in Arab locales in Israel for decades and represented an Arab or Islamic identity that is not based on defiance of the state. Prominent in this context are military leaders, philosophers and poets from the early days of Islam and from the Middle Ages (including Saladin and Baibars); the names of cities from other parts of the Arab world, or cities in Spain that were lost to the Christians (Granada and Cordova, to name two); and local fruits and plants. At the same time, many streets in Arab towns are still named by only a number, while many others don’t even have that, a problem that is particularly prevalent in the Bedouin communities of the Negev.
The commemoration process often reflects a difference of viewpoint between the local governments and the Interior Ministry. An odd situation has arisen in which the ministry claims it has not approved certain names, such as that of Nasser, even though the names will appear on street signs and even in the ministry’s database of street names, as well as on maps on the Bezeq, Waze and Google websites. There are also cases of the opposite, in which the new name appears on maps, but may not be in actual daily use. For example, the map of Shfaram shows three streets named for the three people executed for their part in the 1929 disturbances, but there is no evidence of the name being employed in the city itself. In some cases, serious friction develops between the two authorities, such as occurred a few years ago, when the Jatt Municipality decided to name a street for Yasser Arafat, but the state objected vehemently and the city dropped the idea.
National parks and nature reserves are also an arena of battle over memory. For some years a fierce debate has raged over whether the signposts marking the country’s rivers and streams should contain, in addition to the current Hebrew name, the original Arabic one, or possibly a Hebrew transliteration of it. In some places the Arabic name is noted in the original Arabic, in others there is only a transliteration. There are also cases in which the original Arabic name was later replaced by its transliteration to Hebrew, an example being the Alexander Stream, known in Arabic as Al-Askander or Askandrona; and there are places where a name is written in both versions – the Soreq River (Hebrew) and Wadi Rubin (Arabic), for example. Similar disputes sometimes accompany road signs and the signage on public transporation vehicles and facilities.
A memorial in the city Jatt depicts an unpartitioned Palestine
For the most part, the two societies perpetuate their contradictory narratives about Israel’s founding in separate spaces and different languages.
Alongside commemoration instituted by Arab local governments there is also commemoration emanating “from below,” by local initiative. A widespread phenomenon is the naming of stores after the locales from which their proprietors or their descendants came prior to 1948; thus, stores named Saffuriya – today’s Tzippori (both a Jewish village and a national park) – can be found in Nazareth. There are also monuments created by private citizens, among them a sculpture in the shape of a key (symbolizing the key to a pre-1948 home, another expression of “Sumud”), which was erected by residents of Nazareth’s al-Safafra neighborhood – home to Saffuriya descendants – in 2014 (and demolished by unknown persons a few weeks later). Palestinian national symbols have also been painted on exterior walls in Jaffa. In some locales, this development bears an Islamic character, such as in Kafr Qasem, which named a square for Hassan al-Banna, a founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, in Egypt, and where a sign bearing his portrait was installed in the city center.
The Palestinization of the public space is proceeding relatively smoothly in exclusively Arab communities, but encounters difficulties in mixed Jewish-Arab cities. Thus, initiatives to name streets for Palestinian political figures and artists, or to restore original Arabic names, have been blocked, whether by the local authority or by angry residents. In Jaffa, proposals to name streets for poet Fadwa Tuqan, writer Ghassan Kanafani, Umm Kulthum and Gamal Abdel Nasser were scuttled by the municipality. In Ramle, an attempt by Arab residents to replace street names commemorating the poet Haim Nahman Bialik and the “Ghetto Fighters” (Lohamei Hageta’ot) of the Holocaust with the names of Emile Habibi and Tawfiq Ziad, Israeli Arab writers who were also Knesset members from the Communist Party, was blocked.
In July 2020, a stormy controversy erupted in the wake of the decision by the Haifa Municipality to name a street for Umm Kulthum. The representatives of the Arab-Jewish Hadash party in the city council termed the move “an achievement for the Arabs,” but right-wing circles were furious, arguing that in her lifetime the singer had expressed deep hostility toward Israel and called for the country’s eradication. There are also other cases of monuments being erected and later removed by the authorities. That was the fate, for example, of a sculpture erected in Acre in 2018 in memory of the writer Ghassan Kanafani, who was a spokesperson for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and also of a small monument erected recently near Megiddo by the High Arab Monitoring Committee, commemorating the destroyed village of Lajjun.
Two parallel spaces of memory are thus gradually emerging in Israel, separated by a deep, inherent divide. For the Arab public, most of the symbols that represent the collective memory of Jewish society – especially those related to Israel’s wars, notably the War of Independence – constitute a permanent reminder of national traumas, as illustrated by a slogan that has been prevalent in Arab society for decades: “Your Independence Day is our day of disaster.” For many in Jewish society, however, the appearance of Palestinian national symbols in the commemoration projects being promoted by the Arab public necessarily reflects a refusal to integrate into the state and signal defiance of the governing establishment.
For the most part, the two societies perpetuate their mutually contradictory narratives about the founding of Israel in separate geographical spaces and different languages: Ninety percent of the Arabs of Israel live in homogeneous locales, and only a small minority in mixed cities. As a result, there’s been minimal friction to date between the two communities over this issue, or the kinds of conflicts one has seen in the United States in recent years over the future of commemoration sites dedicated to Confederate war heroes and other Southern leaders of the Civil War era.
The principal tensions arise, as noted above, in mixed locales in which the thrust to enshrine Palestinian memory in the public domain is perceived by the Jewish majority as a threat, and intensifies what were already profound tensions that expressed themselves in full acuity in May 2021.
Though in their essence, the Palestinian national symbols that have appeared in Israel’s Arab public space reflect alienation toward the governing regime, it’s possible that their very presence contributes to reducing tensions to some degree. They enable the country’s Arab minority to express its national identity and its narrative about the conflict to the majority group, and also to shape that same public space accordingly. Nonetheless, a more probing look gives rise to greater skepticism about the possibility of an Israeli joint identity being formulated – one that would be shared by Jews and Arabs and that could accommodate symbols, memories, narratives, heroes, values, goals and a vision that both populations would be able to adopt without erasing or blurring their distinctive identities. At least for the present, and for the foreseeable future, there appears to be little prospect of this happening.
One can put forward a (very) cautious hope, one probably made less likely by the results of the November 1 election, by which diplomatic regularization in the Palestinian context and a reshaping of the relations between the state and its Arab citizens could make it possible for the two communities to develop a more penetrating dialogue about their mutual history. Through that route, it might perhaps be possible to develop joint symbols for Jews and Arabs that could express the aspiration toward future goals more than they are rooted in memories of the past.
Dr. Michael Milshtein is head of the Palestinian Studies Forum at the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies at Tel Aviv University, and a senior analyst at the Institute for Policy and Strategy, Reichman University.
This article is reproduced in its entirety