The Persistence of Silenced Toponymic Landscapes in Disputed Territories: The Case of Arabic in West-Jerusalem

1 Introduction

Toponyms are often thought of as innocuous features of landscapes, maps, and daily conversations. Yet the literature has long demonstrated that they have another subtle facet: that of conveying specific messages. Scholars in the field of critical place-names studies have revealed how toponyms, throughout history, have been a useful tool for political regimes or colonial rulers to impose their ideologies and power onto landscapes and subsequently onto populations.¹ In this way, the production of political space through toponyms and maps plays a major yet subtle role in the formation of collective identities, ideologies, and narratives. Consequently, in contested territories maps are often located at the heart of power games between conflict parties. Regarding the Israel/Palestine conflict, various scholars have analysed the Hebraization process of the map which has been undergoing implementation since 1948 as a supporting pillar of the Zionist ideology.² The Israeli administration has indeed endeavoured to (re)name most features of the landscape, in an attempt to (re)create an exclusively Jewish territory consistent with a collective narrative emphasizing the link between Ancient Israelites and Zionists. It thus seems obvious that Jerusalem, as the proclaimed eternal capital city of the State of Israel, would not be spared in this (re)naming spree, particularly in areas that constitute what is commonly called ‘West Jerusalem’.³

Nevertheless, it is perplexing that the pre-1948 Arabic names of major neighbourhoods of the city have survived, while their meanings are clearly not Jewish nor Zionist and none of the neighbourhoods’ Palestinian inhabitants have been allowed to return since their escape or expulsion in 1948. This research delves into this toponymic paradox and intends to answer the following question: how and why have these particular place-names resisted the ongoing elimination of the Palestinian toponymic landscape? This paper will first provide an overview of the toponymic Hebraization conducted by the Israeli administration since 1948, and then explore various potential reasons for the ‘resistance’ of these neighbourhoods’ Arabic names.

2 Methodology

This article is part of a broader research project on toponymy, violence, and the conflict in Israel/Palestine. Because toponymy stands at the crossroads between various disciplines, this research relied on a combination of data collection techniques. First, a literature review of secondary sources comprised within the broad body of research known as critical place-names studies was carried out. Relevant literature comes from various fields (geography, political science, history, anthropology, among others) and highlights issues related to toponyms in contested territories such as place-making, identity, nationalism, collective memory, and toponymic attachment. Further sources like media reports, archives, as well as maps from the Jerusalem municipality were also used. Lastly, extracts of semi-structured interviews organised during field research in Israel and Palestine within the framework of the broader project mentioned above provide some local perspective on the phenomenon as well as a first-hand understanding of possible explanations for the survival of Arabic place-names in Jerusalem. These face-to-face and zoom interviews were conducted between August 2019 and July 2020. The respondents included place-names experts and university professors, political ‘alternative’ tourist guides, as well as representatives from NGOs located in Israel and in the Palestinian territories that aim to challenge exclusive perceptions and narratives of the contested land.

3 Clashing Toponymies in Israel/Palestine

3.1 The Production of Exclusive Landscapes

In contexts of disputed territories, as is the case in Israel/Palestine, mapping and toponymy significantly participate in the claiming of rights to space in order to form exclusive national territory.⁴ Taking into consideration Neocleous’ statement that “space has come to assume absolute priority in the statist political imaginary,”⁵ maps are logically a preeminent tool to produce the desired territory and assert sovereignty over the latter. Indeed, their ‘pseudo-accuracy’ reflects that space for all citizens of the state to perceive and internalise. Maps therefore contribute to the construction and organisation of mental and physical territory at both the individual and collective levels. As crucial elements in maps, toponyms support this foundation of spatial understandings within the collective mind, because they not only give orientation but also teach stories about specific places and their significance within the collective historical consciousness. As a matter of fact, the fabric of toponyms on a landscape represents and promotes specific beliefs, perspectives, and memories about places and often displays interests and an ideology about the land. Thanks to the evocative power of place-names, maps have the ability to conjure national territories and can project or secure political power onto space.

Toponyms also reinforce attachment to perceived national land because they support the production of a collective sense of place, which is essential for the formation and maintaining of national identities. While Billig did not mention them in his study, toponyms are an ideal example of what he calls ‘flags’ of banal nationalism.⁶ According to that scholar, the ideology of established nations is a constant project sustained through national indications that are inconspicuously ’flagged’ in the everyday life of citizens: “banal nationalism is not a flag which is being consciously waved with fervent passion; it is the flag hanging unnoticed on the public building. National identity embraces all these forgotten reminders.”⁷ Place-names, under their informative disguise, constitute a simple yet efficient tool to bolster and maintain exclusive national identities through the banal use of space. Consequently, when one group’s imagined ‘authentic’ and ‘own’ space is jeopardized by a different perception of or another claim to the same space, exclusive toponymies and maps emerge as proofs and protections of one group’s rightful allegations to the land.

3.2 Hebraization of the Land

The power of mapping, both rhetorical and performative, materializes through practices of showing, silencing, emphasizing or minimizing the constitutive elements of maps, especially toponyms.⁸ Enhancing One’s place-names while alienating the Other’s from the map is a useful tool for convincing One’s citizens of their natural right to the land and of the falsehood of the Other’s sovereignty claims over the same space. Indeed, how could something that does not appear on the (‘scientific’) map actually exist? The need to erase the Other via place-naming policies and practices has been clearly exposed in the Israel/Palestine conflict, notably with the well-documented use of maps and counter-maps.⁹

As one of the priorities of Israel as a newly born state,¹⁰ the revival of Biblical names and the Hebraization of toponyms after 1948 has served not only to assert the ownership of places but also to familiarize a mostly immigrant Jewish population with foreign landscapes, in a process of mutual ‘nativization’ between the land and its new inhabitants. Restoring, celebrating, and inscribing the past onto the landscape therefore amounts to a solid nationalisation and legitimization strategy. The Israel Exploration Society (IES), founded in 1949, officially aimed at demonstrating an anterior and uninterrupted Jewish link to the land since Biblical times and thus justified the Jewish return to the region by correlating the production of a Hebrew map with the development and promotion of “the study of the land, its history, pre-history, accentuating the settlement aspect and the socio-historical connection between the people of Israel and Eretz Israel.”¹¹

Israeli place-names committees (national and municipal) have been dedicated to changing (or restoring) the landscape and the Hebraization process has been ongoing until now, either through the revival of ancient Jewish names or the assignation of completely new names. Apposing Hebrew names onto the land clearly symbolised the successful return of the Jews to the Land of Israel and invited them to take physical and mental possession of it. This appropriation process implied the deletion of the Other’s culture, planned by and approved at the highest levels of the Israeli government. In her study of the suppression of Arabic in the Israeli landscape, Kadman quotes then Prime Minister Ben Gurion: “[w]e are obliged to remove the Arabic names for reasons of state. Just as we do not recognize the Arabs’ political proprietorship of the land, so also do we not recognize their spiritual proprietorship and their names.”¹² Tasking the IES (which then became the Committee for the Designation of Place-Names in the Negev Region) with re-naming all places in the Negev as early as 1949, Ben Gurion shows he understood the strategic significance of (re)naming the landscape in order to produce a nation and collective identity, as well as to establish visible ownership of the land.

Place-naming has thus created actual and visible facts on the ground and has served to infuse the map with Hebrew and to bathe the Israeli consciousnesses in their ancestral language, one of the keys for enabling the perception of a new Jewish identity in the region. It is, however, important to note that after years of debating, the National Naming Committee decided in 1952 that Arab places inhabited solely by Arabs in Israel would keep their Arabic name, with a few exceptions. For instance, if a place should have a Jewish historical significance, its Arabic name would have to be appended in parentheses to the Hebrew name; additionally, if the Arabic name started with el/al ال (in Arabic) or אל (in Hebrew), that prefix would be eliminated. For example, al-Taybeh became Taybeh or al-Tira became Tira.¹³ These decisions applied only to places where Palestinian inhabitants had been allowed to stay during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war or where they were permitted to return after 1948.

3.3 Jerusalem – A Divided City

Before delving into Jerusalem-related toponymic clashes and contradictions, it is necessary to provide a brief description of the status of Jerusalem in order to facilitate readers’ understanding of different geographical terms associated with the city. Following the end of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, the Green Line¹⁴ served to distinguish the armistice boundaries in the region. A united city under British Mandate, Jerusalem was divided into two sections by this line: ‘West Jerusalem’ and ‘East Jerusalem’. West Jerusalem consisted in the areas that came under Israeli control after the 1948 war. It included various major Palestinian neighbourhoods as well as forty-one Palestinian villages,¹⁵ whose inhabitants either fled or were expelled during or after the war.¹⁶ Some of these neighbourhoods or villages were destroyed, while others were looted and then resettled with Jewish immigrants.¹⁷ The eastern part of the city, known as East Jerusalem, was captured by Jordan and its few Jewish localities suffered the same fate as the Palestinian ones in West Jerusalem. From 1948 to 1967, these two sections of Jerusalem existed as two separate cities: al-Quds (the Arabic name of Jerusalem) in the East, and Yerushalayim (the Hebrew name of the city) in the West. Yerushalayim became the capital city of Israel, which set up its government offices as well as its Parliament (the Knesset) in these areas. In 1967, Israel captured and annexed East Jerusalem, thereby blurring the Green Line and shifting perceptions of boundaries between East and West with the claim of a united capital city. Nevertheless, to date the majority of the population in the eastern part of the city is Palestinian (despite the increased building and establishment of Jewish Israeli settlements), while the western areas’ inhabitants are mostly Jewish Israelis. In the same way, both Israelis and Palestinians continue to aspire to and claim the whole city as their respective capital city as described by Rosen and Shlay:

the two Jerusalems of memory, one Palestinian, and one Jewish, are political tools in the fight for recognition as the side that can claim the most correct and legitimate right to its Jerusalem. Each group works at making its memory more compelling and true. Each group works at getting followers who believe in its memory narrative. Inevitably, this also means that one group works to discredit the memory of the other.¹⁸

Challenging the Other’s memory and narrative of Jerusalem and denying her connection to the city through place-naming or renaming and subsequently through the potential invention of traditions related to different sites has been a broadly employed strategy, particularly by Israel, as mentioned above. However, many of the new place-names have triggered either tension or resistance. This matter is examined in the following sub-sections.

3.4 The Contested Right to Naming the Urban Fabric

The highly political aspect of place-names is reflected in the formulation and implementation of toponymic policies throughout the years. Some of these decisions have been visible on road signs, whose changes have sometimes aroused considerable controversy. A striking example can be found on the roads to Jerusalem, where trilingual signs inform drivers that they are headed to Yerushalayim (in Hebrew), al-Quds (in Arabic), and Jerusalem (in Latin spelling). The al-Quds name has progressively been replaced on newer signs by Urshalim in Arabic script, while on others it still appears (parenthetically) next to Urshalim, a name mainly known to Christian Palestinians since it appears in Arabic Bibles as the Arabic name for Jerusalem.¹⁹ This toponymic move occurred after some Israeli politicians denounced the use or visibility of al-Quds as an Islamization of the city.²⁰ Many have condemned the move as an attempt to erase Palestinian history in and attachment to the city, and some Palestinian voices have encouraged a counter-use of the name al-Quds at the international level instead of the name Jerusalem (considered to be directly linked to the Hebrew name Yerushalayim).²¹ Others have underlined the irony of the toponymic move, since Arabic al-Quds (the Holy) is said to derive from Hebrew haQodesh (the sanctuary) or Bayt ha-Miqdash (House of the Temple), exposing a connection with the Jewish history of the city.²² Contrarily, Urshalim (or Ursalim) referred to the city in a letter dated from the 14th century BC, a time when the city was neither Jewish or Muslim, but Canaanite.²³

Controversies involving place-names around Jerusalem can also be found in the naming of streets. For instance, a few years ago the Jerusalem Municipality decided to name and rename streets in various areas of East Jerusalem, predominantly inhabited by Palestinians and considered by the latter to be the capital city of Palestine. While residents of the area were invited to suggest potential names for their streets, their ideas were often restricted to apolitical topics (names of flowers or birds, among other things).²⁴ This highlights the unequal right to the city afforded to Jews and Palestinians respectively. Indeed, numerous streets in the Jewish areas are named after Zionist personalities and even armed forces, while references to Palestinian leaders, historical events, or armed groups are not allowed to appear in the official text of Palestinian areas. Furthermore, the municipal actions triggered tensions when the naming committee chose to place Hebrew names referring to Jewish history on some streets of East-Jerusalem. Inhabitants of the area claimed the decision aimed at eliminating their presence as well as their historical and cultural connection to the city.²⁵

Palestinians have attempted to resist the elimination of their toponymic nomenclature and the Hebraization of the region especially through the transmission and teaching of (counter-)maps containing the Arabic toponyms in use before 1948. Those maps include the space located to the west of the Green Line and commemorate the names of Palestinian towns and villages destroyed or abandoned since 1948.²⁶ However, some toponyms have not needed Palestinian (counter-)maps to endure through time, not only in the collective narrative regarding the land but also onto the physical landscape: the names of former Palestinian neighbourhoods in West Jerusalem. Clashing with Israeli place-naming politics and practices since 1948, these names have survived despite the fact that their Palestinian residents have not remained in place. The following section investigates this paradox and highlights the difference between maps and realities.

4 The West-Jerusalem Paradox

4.1 Former Palestinian Neighbourhoods in West-Jerusalem

In the contest for the ‘right’ and ‘authentic’ toponymic landscape, it seems logical that place-names within Jerusalem, the self-proclaimed eternal capital city of Israel, would have concentrated Hebraization efforts with the aim to render its ‘true’ narrative to the city. In line with the national authorities’ goal of imprinting an exclusive identity onto the landscape described in the above sub-sections, establishing a completely Jewish urban space has served as a nationalistic emblem demonstrating to whom the city belongs. The metamorphosis of the Jerusalemite linguistic landscape into an ideological arsenal was detailed in a Tel Aviv newspaper article from 1949, which emphasized the renaming strategy of the Jerusalem municipality in the city and recalled the objectives of the latter’s naming committee:

In Jerusalem there are about 500 streets, most of them having no name at all or having a name whose sources cannot be trusted, or a name which was given in order to side with specific interests. Bringing order to this chaos – not only for the benefit of foreign tourists but also for the local mailmen – is the main goal of the committee. The second objective consists in establishing a system of name-giving, which will not only fit with the general Jewish character of the city, but will also reflect the latter’s destiny and role as the historical and religious center of the people of Israel.²⁷

The alignment of Jerusalem’s toponymic nomenclature with Jewish or Zionist meaning was therefore clearly and officially expressed, and despite the various tensions mentioned in the above sections, the city’s Hebraization process has been implemented in full force. Yet, once the city starts revealing some of its secrets, one cannot but be confused by the daily use of former Arabic names of major neighbourhoods and the neglect, or even ignorance, of many Jerusalemites and tourists about the latter’s Hebrew names. A representative of a local NGO, for instance, explained in an interview that even though he had lived for many decades in the city, he could never remember the exact Hebrew names of those neighbourhoods.

Qatamon (or Katamon), Baka (or Baq’a), Talbiyeh, Musrara, and Abu Tor are former Palestinian neighbourhoods that were all given Hebrew names at some point after 1948. The new names, respectively Gonen (protector), Geulim (redemption), Komemiyut (sovereignty/rise up), Morasha (legacy), and Givat Hanania (hill of God’s mercy/hill of Hanania),²⁸ correspond with the ideological planning aimed at strengthening the formation of a national-religious urban landscape. While these official names are sometimes used to refer to neighbourhood institutions such as community centers, they have not managed to adhere to the inhabitants’ minds as their neighbourhoods’ names. In fact, while they also appear on city road signs, they all need the support of the former Arabic name in brackets for the population to grasp which neighbourhood they represent. Mamilla is the only neighbourhood whose name was not changed.

Developed at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, some of these neighbourhoods were mainly built by Christian Palestinians (Qatamon and Mamilla for example) and others mainly by Muslim Palestinians (Baka, Talbiyeh). Yet it seems that after the 1920s the population of most of these neighbourhoods was mixed to different extents. Abowd contends that Jewish families also lived in these areas, mainly as renters.²⁹ The names of these neighbourhoods before 1948, however, were solely Arab. The name Qatamon comes from the Greek Kata To Monasterioi³⁰ or Kato Monastiri, meaning ‘under the monastery’, or ‘by the monastery,’³¹ revealing the history of this neighbourhood built around the Greek Orthodox monastery of San Simon (which has remained intact to date) at a time when the Greek Orthodox Church sold its land in the area to wealthy Christian Palestinians.³² The name Baka (‘valley’ in Arabic) attests to the topographic location of the neighbourhood. The meaning of some of the neighbourhoods’ names is not clearly defined. For instance, Borvick explains that the term Talbiyeh might refer to a family of the area named abu-Taleb, or it might have originated from the eponymous prayer that pilgrims recited on their way to Mecca.³³ The meaning of the name Musrara is also unsettled, with some arguing that it stems from the Arabic word for stones (potentially in reference to the sophisticated stone houses built there).³⁴ Reiter contends that the name Mamilla comes from ma’Allah, which would have meant either water from Allah, the gate of Allah, or the olives of al-Milla.³⁵ Klein claims that the name derives from ma’man Allah, meaning God’s refuge.³⁶ Lastly, Abu Tor (‘father of the bull or ox’ in Arabic) supposedly refers to one of Saladin’s generals who allegedly rode a bull in the battles against the Crusaders.³⁷ The surviving Arabic names of West-Jerusalem neighbourhoods clearly resonate with identities (religious, linguistic, historical, sociological) that do not fit with the Israeli Jewish/Zionist narrative of the city.

4.2 ‘Toponymic Resistance’: Coincidence or Planning?

Despite the intense Hebraization efforts of the authorities and the disappearance of their former Palestinian and Arabic speaking inhabitants, the Arabic names of West Jerusalem neighbourhoods which clash with the Israeli ideology survived, as confirmed by their presence, parenthetically or not, on road signs in the city as well as on municipal maps or documents and in general everyday interactions. The following sub-section examines various reasons which could explain the persistence of these toponyms in a hostile environment.

Political decisions and the lack of policy consistency prove to be an interesting direction in which to start this exploration. Archives from the Jerusalem municipality revealed the local authorities’ reluctance to abide by the national policies related to the Hebraization of place names after 1948. The acknowledgment of the city’s historical diversity by the municipal authorities may have generated the latter’s hesitancy to rename all of Jerusalem’s toponymy.³⁸ Aderet quotes an original letter sent in 1956 by the then secretary of the National Naming Committee disclosing the struggle between the municipal and national authorities as well as the latter’s impatience regarding the neighbourhoods’ enduring “foreign” names: “in your file there are many letters we sent you during the past five years on establishing Hebrew names for the neighbourhoods in our capital, and in our files there are many letters of promises from you, (…) The time has come to remove Abu Tor, Baka, Hamoshava Hagermanit (!!) and Katamon.”³⁹ The Jerusalem municipality continually formulated excuses explaining the delay in changing the neighbourhoods’ names. As a result, the Jerusalem naming committee was able to obstruct the renaming of these areas until 1958, when the latter were finally given their Hebrew names. A year before the renaming, in 1957, the then Deputy Mayor of the city replied to the insistent demands of the National Naming Committee with the following message:

(…) you will understand that I am not enthusiastic about proposals to give neighbourhoods new names instead of their historical names, which mirror the fine history of new Jerusalem. (…) Every generation should know that Jerusalem had a non-Jewish period (…). And if, due to practical considerations (difficulty in pronunciation and so on), there is no alternative but to change certain streets, I do not see as inevitable the need to replace neighbourhood names.⁴⁰

In line with the political decisions taken by the Jerusalem municipality mentioned above, timing and toponymic attachment or toponymic identity merit consideration when attempting to explain the oral survival of these neighbourhoods’ Arabic toponyms. Indeed, the ten-year lapse between the end of the 1948 war, which saw these neighbourhoods emptied of their Palestinian inhabitants, and the Hebraizing of the neighbourhoods’ toponyms in 1958 may explain the lack of adherence of the new Hebrew names. The secretary of the National Naming Committee feared the consequences of such a delay in one of his letters to the Jerusalem municipality: “if the names of the Arab neighbourhoods are not immediately changed to Hebrew names … the foreign names will become entrenched and it will be impossible to uproot them.”⁴¹ Thus, the ten year interval could have been enough time for the Arabic names to take a hold in the mental and physical Jerusalem maps of new immigrants that were set to reside in Jerusalem.

Toponymic attachment, which refers to associations made with a place-name,⁴² could be related to the timing assumption connected to names as well. Kostanski links this concept to toponymic identity, which she defines as “a construct through which people link to history, allocate their memories, assert cultural ideologies, assist in expressing personal and community emotions and determine what is culturally important.”⁴³ Both toponymic attachment and toponymic identity enable individuals and groups to emotionally perceive a place, construct the latter’s identity, and define themselves in relation to that place. As a result, populations may depend on the names of these same places to express and transmit not only the identity of the place they live, but also, indirectly, their own collective identity. In parallel with this argument, an interviewee suggested that long-established Jewish Jerusalemites might have had a strong connection to the toponyms, Arabic or not, that they had heard and used for decades before the establishment of the state of Israel. In this case, the Arabic names would have been an essential element of these neighbourhoods’, and subsequently of their inhabitants’, identities.

The case for toponymic attachment as an answer to the question of the Arabic names’ survival is also corroborated by a few respondents who suggested in interviews that since many Jewish Jerusalemites before 1948 would have been Arabic-speakers, they would have had no problem with continuing to use the Arabic names, above all since Arabic names are close to the Hebrew language (Baka in Arabic and Bik’a in Hebrew both mean ‘valley,’ for example). Based on this hypothesis and on the above-quoted words from the Deputy Mayor in 1957, it is possible that Jewish Jerusalemites did not consider Arabic names as foreign threats, but instead as an integral part of their Jerusalemite identity. This approach is reinforced by Abowd, who highlights in his study the social mix of these neighbourhoods before 1948.⁴⁴ The Jewish residents who remained in these areas after the expelling or fleeing of their Palestinian neighbours would probably have been attached to their neighbourhoods’ names and will have transmitted them to the new Jewish immigrants who were resettled in these areas.

Another potentially valid explanation for the persistence of the Arabic names lies in the construction of national narratives and place identity (a concept related to toponymic attachment). An interview with an alternative tourist guide revealed this approach when he mentioned how these names, although Arabic, do not appear so threatening to local inhabitants, notably because the identity of the neighbourhoods is now securely Judaized. I would argue that more than simply Judaized, the linguistic landscape of these neighbourhoods has undergone a religious and nationalistic transformation. New names of streets, squares, and other features of the environment were indeed given biblical or Zionist meanings which, contrarily to the neighbourhoods’ names that had survived over time, adhered to the populations’ consciousness and became a part of their everyday lives and conversations. The formation of an attachment to these features’ new names and the forgetting of previously used Arabic names may have been caused by the fact that street names enable concrete everyday orientation (for example, with the use of personal or work addresses) and therefore have a more functional value than neighbourhoods’ names.

The new names of streets pertain to the Zionist collective memory and identity that were being created and employed to support the establishment of the state of Israel. Main roads, which until 1948 only referred to geographical directions, were assigned strong identity and ideology symbols that established political and religious meaning onto the landscape. For instance, dropping the name ‘Talbiyeh road’ for ‘Jabotinsky street’ was a way of honouring one of the early Zionist leaders and founders of the paramilitary Jewish organisation Haganah.⁴⁵ A main part of Mamilla Road was renamed Gershon Agron street in the 1960s in commemoration of the late Mayor of Jerusalem. A section of Sultan Suleiman street in the Musrara neighbourhood was renamed haTsanhanim street,⁴⁶ honouring ‘paratroopers’ (the other segment of the street was under Jordanian control and was not renamed). Biblical reminders flourished as well: segments of Katamon Road and Greek Colony Road became Rachel Imenu street; another segment of Katamon Road became Hizkyahu haMelech street;⁴⁷ a segment of al-Maliha Road became another segment of Hizkyahu haMelech street;⁴⁸ Beit Safafa Road turned into Emek Refaim street; and Efthimios Road was renamed Yehoshua Bin Nun street.⁴⁹ Based on the above assumption that the Arabic names of West-Jerusalem’s neighbourhoods do not constitute an issue because these areas’ identities have become solidly Jewish or Zionist, Arabic toponyms would therefore be a problem only for places in the region that are still openly contested and when they challenge or jeopardize the Israeli narrative or place identity.

Another reason for the easier adaptation of the new street names resides in the fact that while Palestinians have had a rich toponymic nomenclature, most of their traditional toponyms have often been orally transmitted and many have remained unofficial or informal,⁵⁰ matching the type of wayfinding described by Brocket in his study of the recent official naming of streets in Ramallah, Palestine:

In Ramallah, for example, several prominent streets have had unofficial vernacular names, such as shāriʿ al quds (Jerusalem Street), a road that connects Ramallah and Jerusalem, and shāriʿ rukab (Rukab Street), named after a famous ice cream shop on the street. However, prior to the municipality’s naming project, the majority of streets did not have formal names nor street signs. Instead, way-finding predominantly occurred less through street names, numbers, and addresses, and more through the identification of a location’s relative position to prominent landmarks or well-known social spaces. The practice of naming buildings after owners or family inhabitants has been particularly important in this wayfinding system.⁵¹

Kroyanker’s study concurs with Brocket’s, and he describes how, before 1948, the Jerusalemite postal services relied on the names of the owners of houses in these Palestinian areas.⁵² The oral aspect of most of the former informal street names in Arab neighbourhoods before 1948, as well as their link to the names of local families who were expelled or fled the areas or their association with landmark buildings that were potentially destroyed or acquired a new purpose after 1948, may therefore explain the lack of interest of new inhabitants in keeping and using them. For example, the known ‘Salameh Square’ (its name before 1948), which was related to the adjacent and famous house of the Salameh family, was renamed ‘Orde Square’. Abowd reminds us that the Salameh family had to flee their house and that the new name of the square commemorates Orde Wingate, a British Army officer who contributed to training the Haganah in “skills deployed to expel Arab Christians and Muslims from places like Talbiyeh.”⁵³

However, this traditional type of wayfinding combined with the concept of toponymic attachment and place identity mentioned above may link the persistence of these neighbourhoods’ Arabic names with a need to preserve cultural and social ways of life. This need was presented by Wallach in his study of local resistance to street names affixed on main avenues and in the Old City of Jerusalem by the British before 1948. He also briefly exposed how, after 1948, the systematic Hebraizing street-naming organised by the Israeli administration was initially perceived as a transformative process of society and of societal values by Jerusalemites, both Jewish and Arab. In the words of Wallach:

the unmarked space is a sign of a world of social proximity, while signposting is a characteristic of an alienated society retaining neither the intimate knowledge of its geography nor the civilities of neighborly relations. Jerusalemites’ decision to ignore new street names and keep with popular names or avoid street names altogether can be seen as a form of resistance against state intervention.⁵⁴

Therefore, the use of popular Arabic names of neighbourhoods instead of the state-imposed ones could represent a way to safeguard former and prevalent types of social interaction and ways of relating to and knowing, not only other individuals in the area, but also the urban landscape. These names may have been mobilized, consciously or not, by the remaining inhabitants as a resource to protect their knowledge, perception, and experience of the city, and thus potentially demonstrate in this way an authentic connection to the latter in contrast to new immigrants.

Furthermore, unlike the majority of Jerusalem’s informal street names mentioned earlier, the former Palestinian neighbourhoods’ names had been recorded on maps and did not refer to local family or traditional landmarks. Instead of invoking concrete settings, these names now evoke more abstract features such as a sense of quality or originality. In fact, an alternative tour guide described in an interview how the Arabic names go hand in hand with the prestige linked to the sophistication of these neighbourhoods’ Arab houses. The new national-religious names of these neighbourhoods do not match the exoticism sought after by Israeli Jews. This argument correlates, in a way, with toponymic attachment and identity, whereby the status of a place would be associated with and to some extent dependent on its toponym. It also prompts the idea of orientalism, where Eastern (here Arab) architecture is thought to be distinguished, yet its original builders and inhabitants are completely consigned to oblivion. Abowd’s study concurs with this assertion and links it to colonialism: “the signifier ‘Arab’ in this case retains a meaning as a desirable architectural style rather than as an explicit indicator of an uprooted people. These are, to a great number of Israelis it appears, ‘Arab homes’, but not the homes of exiled Arabs.”⁵⁵ Although the Hebraization of toponyms is in itself a strong act of colonization,⁵⁶ maintaining former names can illustrate another facet of the ongoing colonial process where some aspects of the indigenous culture may become accepted, appropriated,⁵⁷ or may take on a different meaning or value within the settler-colonial society. In fact, Abowd contends that “part of colonialism’s cultural dynamism is its ability to normalize spatial and social realities, to make them appear natural, innocent, and optionless.”⁵⁸ In the same way, Haim Yacobi, quoted in Masalha’s article on settler-colonialism and the struggle over place-names in Israel/Palestine describes the gentrification of former Palestinian villages and neighbourhoods as a feature of the ongoing colonial project:

The Palestinian landscape is a subject of mimicry through which a symbolic indigenisation of the [Zionist] settlers takes place. (…) In this process, the indigenous landscape is uprooted from its political and historical context, redefined as local and replanted through a double act of mimicry into the ‘build your home’ sites.⁵⁹

Indeed, the names of these neighbourhoods have become so integrated into the collective consciousness that they appear to genuinely belong to the areas, or vice-versa. Consequently, they (and their origins) are rarely questioned.

In connection with the related architectural assumption, another interviewee remarked that the use of Arabic names has generally been maintained for places where Arab houses remained or for villages which had not been entirely destroyed. This observation could mean that buildings support the collective memory associated with place names or contribute to forming an attachment to toponyms. This idea is validated when examining, for instance, the case of the former Palestinian village Lifta, whose abandoned ruins (among them standing buildings) are located in Jerusalem’s vicinities. Its Hebrew name Mei Nafto’ah⁶⁰ has not been adopted by the population. Lifta is also the toponym that appears on the Jerusalem Municipality’s maps to denote the village location such as, for example in the map of Jerusalem Urban Nature.⁶¹ In the same way, the Hebrew toponym Manahat, which aimed at replacing the Arabic name al-Maliha (or Malcha) of another Palestinian village that later became a neighbourhood of Jerusalem, did not take root in the mental map of Jerusalemites. Indeed, Malcha and al-Maliha are the names commonly used not only by inhabitants, but also by the Jerusalem municipality.⁶² On the contrary, the village of al-Shaykh Badr, whose houses were mostly destroyed or burnt down,⁶³ saw its name sunk into oblivion while the area became known as Givat Ram in Hebrew. However, the Valley of the Cross, a park in the Rehavia area with no buildings apart from the Monastery of the Cross, may contradict this theory. Indeed, in the 1960s its name, conflicting with the Jewish identity of the capital city, was changed to the Rehavia valley.⁶⁴ Yet it is still generally referred to as Emek haMatsleva (‘Valley of the Cross’ in Hebrew) in daily parlance and it is indicated as Emek haMatsleva or the Rehavia Park of the Valley of the Cross on the Municipality’s website.⁶⁵ Another example that my refute the argument that Arabic place-names have survived when villages’ buildings remained is Deir Yassin. This village saw a few of its houses be adjoined to the buildings of a psychiatric institution. Nevertheless, the name Deir Yassin is not used, and the area has been incorporated into the neighbourhood of Givat Shaul and has taken on that same name. The reasons why Jerusalemites have ceased to use the name Deir Yassin despite the persistence of some of the buildings could be related to the fact that the village name has become associated with the massacre of its inhabitants in the 1948 war.⁶⁶

After their change at the end of the 1950s, resistance of the West Jerusalem neighbourhoods’ Arabic toponyms could have taken on a purely oral form and could have been transmitted as a toponymic tradition. Yet, these Arabic names’ persistence has forced the Jerusalem Municipality to acknowledge them not only on road signs alongside the official Hebrew names, but also on various maps and documents available on its website.⁶⁷ Nevertheless, an examination of online municipal maps demonstrates that these also lack consistency. As a matter of fact, some of them solely mention the former Arabic name, which is still in use; others exclusively utilize the official Hebrew name; and additional maps indicate both names, with the Arabic one generally in brackets. This lack of uniformity in practice exposes an inadequate coherence with regard to official place-naming policies. Such disharmony can be found on other types of unofficial maps; examples can be found on Google maps, which display some of the studied neighbourhoods with their Arabic name only – Baq’a, for instance – and others with their Hebrew name only – like Gonen – and other sites within the Jerusalem area with both names (the Arabic one being between parentheses) – for example: Mei Naftoah (Lifta). Knowing the long-established power of maps to create and sustain spatial realities not only at the physical level but also in the realm of consciousness, the confusion that arises from examining both official and informal maps of Jerusalem could further explain why inhabitants may stick to the oral names that pertain to their lived experience and memory of the city. This last angle of exploration regarding the Arabic names’ persistence confirms the strength of practices versus policies and reveals the value of examining how they clash or influence each other in place-names studies.

5 Conclusion

“Though the Israeli state has continually negated Palestinian rights to Jerusalem (…) traces of their past still, paradoxically, linger.”⁶⁸ These words from Abowd reflect this paper’s conclusions regarding toponyms in the city. Despite the ideological layers affixed to the landscape of West-Jerusalem through the apposition of place names that fit and serve as an emblem for the Israeli aspired Jewish Zionist nature of the city, the Palestinian connection to this area of the city has resisted, even as the latter’s original founders and inhabitants have not been allowed to return. It has survived not only through the endurance of Arabic toponyms, but also through the fusion of this Palestinian past with the daily lives and identities of the Israeli inhabitants.

This paper has argued that the ‘resistance’ of Arabic names in West Jerusalem results from a mix of official decisions and informal practices, individual and collective, political and social. The key to understanding how the latter enabled these names’ survival lies in the theory of toponymic attachment, which can be associated with different concepts such as group identity, place identity, status and colonialism.

The fact that the West Jerusalem neighbourhoods hosted many Jewish families and witnessed solid friendships between Jews and Palestinians before 1948⁶⁹ means that, unlike the National Naming Committee’s fear expressed in the 1950s, the neighbourhoods’ names would have been long-anchored in the identity and narrative of the city and its then inhabitants, including Jews, who would not only preserve the toponyms but also transmit them to newcomers. The new Jewish immigrants’ map of the city was shaped by the identities and visions in place, which the Jerusalem authorities were reluctant to erase. The Arabic names therefore appeared as natural instead of foreign, and this would explain how, paradoxically, the new (Jewish/Zionist connotated) Hebrew names that aimed at recreating a native Hebrew landscape of Jerusalem are the ones that ended up sounding alien and failed to be accepted.

This point can be further highlighted by Kostanski’s definition of toponymic attachment as “a symbolic relationship that people form which can help in transmitting meanings to a place.”⁷⁰ The meanings that toponyms convey not only create a distinct sense or identity of place for these neighbourhoods, they also bestow them with a prestigious and exotic image. The names thus intertwine with the Arab architecture of these areas and become markers of status. The paper has indeed argued that this transmission of prestige could be closely related to colonialism or orientalism.

A few interview respondents expect that Arabic names will not much longer survive the toponymic purge that has continued to sweep most of the Israeli-controlled landscape and which has been shifting Arabic names to Hebrew ones (except in places where Palestinian residents have remained). In contrast, I would argue that it seems more likely that the Arabic names will remain. Challenging the exclusive Jewish and Hebrew identity and narrative of the city that has been continually manufactured since 1948, they have imposed themselves as an inherent element of the city’s urban public space and identity, as well as of the (un)conscious urban narrative and reality of the population. In defiance of attempts to create an exclusive unified picture of the city, they protect in their own way the city’s legacy, composed of various layers of history and cultures.

Notes

1. See among other scholarly work: Alderman, “Place, Naming and the Interpretation of Cultural Landscapes”; Mac Giolla Chriost, Language, Identity and Conflict.⬑

2. See for instance: Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape; Peteet, “Words as Interventions”; Sucharov, “Regional Identity and the Sovereignty Principle.”⬑

3. The term ‘West-Jerusalem’ was not in use before 1948. It is used in this article to refer to the areas of the city of Jerusalem that came under Israeli control after 1948. In the same way, East Jerusalem juts out to the areas of the city that were under Jordanian control between 1948 and 1967, and which have been occupied by Israel since 1967. Further details about the city’s division are provided in section III.c of this paper.⬑

4. Monmonier, How to Lie With Maps.⬑

5. Neocleous, “Off the Map, On Violence and Cartography.”⬑

6. Billig, Banal Nationalism.⬑

7. Billig, Banal Nationalism.⬑

8. See for instance: Erőss, and Tátrai. “When Reality Meets Power/Rhetoric”; Harley, The New Nature of Maps.⬑

9. See for instance: Culcasi, “Images and Imaginings of Palestine”; Leuenberger and Schnell, “The Politics of Maps.”⬑

10. Azaryahu and Golan, “(Re)Naming the Landscape.”⬑

11. Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape.⬑

12. Kadman, Erased from Space and Consciousness.⬑

13. See national archives (Report 22.6.1952–19.9.1954 in Hebrew) available at https://www.archives.gov.il/archives/Archive/0b07170680020246/File/0b07170680511f30.⬑

14. This line was labelled the ‘Green Line’ because of the colour of ink used to draw it on the Armistice map during the Rhodes Agreements signed by Israel and neighbouring Arab countries (Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan) in 1949. Rosen and Shlay, “Making Place.”⬑

15. Rosen and Shlay, “Making Place.”⬑

16. Krystall, “The De-Arabization of West Jerusalem 1947-50.”⬑

17. Krystall, “The De-Arabization of West Jerusalem 1947-50.”⬑

18. Rosen and Shlay, Jerusalem.⬑

19. Al-Ghubari, “How Israel Erases Arabic from the Public Landscape”; Gilad, “Why Is Jerusalem Called Jerusalem?”⬑

20. Cook, “Israel’s Plan to Wipe Arabic Names Off the Map.”⬑

21. Hasson, “The Jerusalem Anomaly.”⬑

22. Ghanim, “La-Hafokh et el-Quds l-Urshalim”; Gil, “The Political History of Jerusalem during the Early Muslim Period.”⬑

23. Gilad, “Why Is Jerusalem Called Jerusalem?”; Kramer, A History of Palestine.⬑

24. Hasson, “East Jerusalem, Where the Streets Have No (Political) Names.”⬑

25. Staff, “30 East Jerusalem Streets Given Hebrew Names, Enraging Arab Residents.”⬑

26. See among other works: Davis, “Mapping the Past”; Culcasi, “Images and Imaginings of Palestine.”⬑

27. Archives of the newspaper ידיעות עירית תל אביב 1949 (15 Sept). “שמות לרחובות בירושלים” (p.18). Retrieved from https://www.nli.org.il/he/newspapers/ytlv/1949/09/15/01/?e=-------he-20--1--img-txIN%7ctxTI--------------1. Unofficial translation from Hebrew to English of the extract by the author of this article.⬑

28. Named after Hanania, a high priest from the period of the Second Temple whose summer house and burial place are said to be located in the neighbourhood. See: https://teperberg.com/en/abu-tor/.⬑

29. Abowd, Colonial Jerusalem.⬑

30. Benzaquen, “Back to the Future.”⬑

31. Kroyanker, שכונות ירושלים: טלביה, קטמון והמושבה היוונית.⬑

32. Bar-Am, “Katamon – Independence Day Miracle.”⬑

33. Borvick, “What’s in a Name?”⬑

34. Hercbergs, Overlooking the Border.⬑

35. Reiter, Contesting Symbolic Landscape in Jerusalem.⬑

36. Klein, Lives in Common.⬑

37. Nissenbaum, A Street Divided.⬑

38. Aderet, “A Stir Over Sign Language.”⬑

39. Aderet mentions that the exclamation marks were in the original letter.⬑

40. Aderet, “A Stir Over Sign Language.”⬑

41. Aderet, “A Stir Over Sign Language.”⬑

42. Kostanski, “What’s in a Name?”⬑

43. Kostanski, “What’s in a Name?”⬑

44. Abowd, Colonial Jerusalem.⬑

45. Abowd, Colonial Jerusalem.⬑

46. “Jerusalem’s First Tourist Map.”⬑

47. Kroyanker, שכונות ירושלים: טלביה, קטמון והמושבה היוונית.⬑

48. Survey of Palestine. 1949. Jerusalem (map).⬑

49. “Jerusalem’s First Tourist Map.”⬑

50. The British authorities endeavoured to name streets in Jerusalem during the Mandate. However, they mainly focused on streets in the Old City as well as main roads in the New City. The rest of the street system therefore continued to have unofficial names or was identified according to the traditional type of wayfinding. See for example: Azaryahu, “Naming the Streets of (Arab) Jerusalem during the British Period 1920-1948.”⬑

51. Brocket, “Governmentality, Counter-Memory and the Politics of Street Naming in Ramallah, Palestine.”⬑

52. Kroyanker, שכונות ירושלים: טלביה, קטמון והמושבה היוונית.⬑

53. Abowd, Colonial Jerusalem.⬑

54. Wallach, A City in Fragments.⬑

55. Abowd, Colonial Jerusalem.⬑

56. See among others: Stolz and Warnke, “When Places Change Their Names and When They Do Not”; Nash, “Irish Placenames”; Masalha, “Settler-Colonialism, Memoricide and Indigenous Toponymic Memory.”⬑

57. Mackey, “Becoming Indigenous.”⬑

58. Abowd, Colonial Jerusalem.⬑

59. Masalha, “Settler-Colonialism, Memoricide and Indigenous Toponymic Memory.”⬑

60. Mendel, “New Jerusalem.”⬑

61. Jerusalem Urban Nature Map אתרי טבע עירוני בירושלים. Retrieved from https://www.arcgis.com/apps/MapJournal/index.html?appid=27f1b7dfab1140ab9244cfa983c0b85d.⬑

62. Jerusalem Municipality Website. The Malcha Neighborhood (Hebrew). Retrieved from https://www.jerusalem.muni.il/he/neighborhoods/malcha/.⬑

63. Palestine Remembered Website. al Shaykh Badr page. Retrieved from https://www.palestineremembered.com/GeoPoints/al_Shaykh_Badr_3821/index.html. See also: Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited.⬑

64. Aderet, “A Stir Over Sign Language.”⬑

65. Available at https://jerusalemmuni.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=c971cb11f74e42928a8d1662005542b6; https://jergisng.jerusalem.muni.il/baseWab/?config=../gisviewerngsupport/api/InjectingConfig&locale=he.⬑

66. Zochrot Website. Dayr Yasin page. Retrieved from https://zochrot.org/village/view?id=49106.⬑

67. See for instance two Hebrew maps on the Municipality’s website on which Baka, Katamon, Mamilla, appear alone, while Abu Tor and Talbiyeh appear simultaneously with Hebrew names. Musrara was removed in favor of the Hebrew Morasha: https://jerusalemmuni.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=c971cb11f74e42928a8d1662005542b6.⬑

68. Abowd, Colonial Jerusalem.⬑

69. Abowd, Colonial Jerusalem.⬑

70. Kostanski, “‘What’s in a Name?’”⬑

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