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Paper short abstract

The lecture explores how Arabic place names persist in Israel despite Hebraization, revealing tensions between Palestinian memory, the Zionist “empty land” narrative, and Jewish theological claims to the land.

Paper long abstract

Between Linguistic Truth and the Israeli Spatial Imaginary

Arabic Place Names in Israeli Society

Amer Dahamshe

The Zionist project worked to erase every trace of the Palestinians’ expulsion through the destruction of the remains of Arab villages, under the pretext that they marred the character of the new landscape. This destruction was accompanied by the erasure and denial of Palestinian toponymic identity (Benvenisti 2000).

Nevertheless, Israel left markers of Palestinian memory, for example, by assigning Hebrew names to Jewish localities that resemble in sound the names of depopulated Palestinian villages, as well as through the physical remnants of depopulated villages (Hever 2018). Moreover, Israeli society continues to use Palestinian (Arabic) names of depopulated Palestinian villages, displaced neighborhoods, and natural features, even though Hebrew names exist for these sites. Palestinian names even appear on Israeli signposts located in Jewish neighborhoods, local communities, kibbutzim, and natural landscapes under the control and management of Israeli authorities.

In this lecture, I will examine the persistence of Arabic place names in natural features within Israeli society, and on signposts installed in areas where naming falls under the authority of Israeli bodies inside the Green Line. The lecture will focus on the symbolic meaning of these names. My argument is that the remnants of Palestinian names that survived Hebraization reveal a tension between the linguistic-spatial truth and the Zionist-national image of Palestine as an “empty land,” as well as the Jewish theological conception of “To your seed I will give this land” (Genesis 12:7; 15:18; 17:8).