Contested Land, Contested Memory

by Jo Roberts

  Naftali Kadmon, the young meteorologist at RAF Lydda we met in Chapter 1, is now a professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, specializing in toponymy, the study of place names. He’s been a member of the Commission since 1965. As ruins from the Crusader period, and from ancient Jewish history, are marked on the map, I wanted to ask him about the decision to exclude the remains of Arab villages. We talked in the study of his apartment in Jerusalem, a small, tidy room, surrounded by atlases and books on mapping.[9]

  Every war-torn area, after a war, gets new borders. Take Germany after the Second World War; new borders, and the same happened here.

  One can of course ask: what is an Arab village? Very many of the Arabic villages and towns here in this country were in the past Jewish towns or villages, and are recorded in the Bible or the Talmud. Now what happened in the seventh century, between 635 and 639 more or less? There was the Muslim invasion of Palestine. (Palestine and the Arabic Falastin is of course a Roman name, taken from the biblical Philistines.) During the Muslim invasion of Palestine practically all of those previously Jewish villages were taken over by the Arabs and the names slightly changed, or given some prefix or suffix, or given new Arabized names, such as Adorayim and Eshtemoa, which became the Arabic a-Dura and e-Samu, and many more. And, of course, there were new Arab villages which had not been in existence before.

  I’ve been representing Israel at the U.N. on the conferences on geographical names for thirty-two years. And among others there was the case where the Arab representatives said, “Here is what the Israelis do, they take the ever-existing Arabic names and change them to Hebrew names.” And they gave as an example the city of Nablus, you know, in Samaria.* But either they didn’t know or they forgot that Nablus is from the Greek Neapolis, new city, which when the Greeks invaded this country in the third century B.C. they founded more or less on the site of the Biblical city of Shechem of some 3,500 years ago. So the Greeks founded the city of Neapolis and when the Arabs came in the seventh century A.D. they changed this name to Nablus, since Arabic does not have a “p” sound and they couldn’t pronounce Neapolis. So Nablus is a new name, relatively speaking, certainly not an Arabic name, because it was Arabized in the seventh century, but to use this as an example of an everlasting Arabic name is of course nonsense.

  Since after the war of 1948–49, the official Israeli maps have been showing all existing Arab villages and towns.

  For destroyed places, there were three different cases:

  In certain cases there were new villages founded on old Arabic sites.

  Then, there is the case of places that had been completely razed. If anything was left, and if they were on old Jewish, or Israeli, sites then these places were given their original Hebrew names as ruins, Horbat in Hebrew. Many places were given these prefixes.

  In other cases, where there had been an old village or town with a Hebrew name, then after the Arabs had taken over in the seventh century, this name was given to the new Arabic village (mostly in an Arabized form), and after the 1948 War when there were no Arabs left — they left their homes, ran away, or were driven away — some of these places were resettled by Israelis, and in all cases reverted to their former Israeli or Biblical names. Take Ashkelon, for instance, which is mentioned in the Bible. It became Arabic ‘Askalan, and after the war reverted to the Biblical name Ashkelon. Biblical Be’er Sheva became Arabic Bir es-Saba and is now again Be’er Sheva.

  But all existing Arab villages still carry their Arabic names in our maps.

  Meron Benvenisti says in his book Sacred Landscape that if a place had no Jewish history but had an Arabic name with some connection to the land, that name would be changed by the Government Names Commission, I commented.

  The Government Names Commission doesn’t change names. It decides on names, but it doesn’t change them. No.

  My understanding is that if there was a village or geographical formation that had an Arabic name, that would be translated into Hebrew, I said. I was a little confused.

  Certainly there is Arabic on the map. I can show you, there are official Israeli Arabic maps that carry the Arabic names of geographical formations, rivers and wadis for instance, which on Hebrew maps have Hebrew names.

  So if there was a name of a hill in Arabic, it would be left as an Arabic name?

  In Arabic maps, yes; in Hebrew maps, no. In Hebrew maps, if it has a Hebrew name, the Hebrew name will appear.

  So an existing Arab village is given its Arabic name.

  Yes, definitely. Any Arab village appears also on our Hebrew maps, with its Arabic name in Hebrew letters.

  Geographical features, though, will be given a Hebrew name on the Hebrew map — all of them.

  Yes.

  So a hill or a spring that was not referenced in the Bible and had an Arabic name, how would you come up with a new Hebrew name for it?

  There were many cases like this like this after 1948 — in such a case the Government Names Commission decides what Hebrew name to give it. Which does not obliterate the Arabic name — the Arabs will still go on using the Arabic name; the Jews will use the Hebrew name for it.

  I asked him what he thought of Meron Benvenisti’s book. “Ah, it was a long time ago that I came across it…” He sighed. “I certainly didn’t exactly agree with everything, but, well, every person to his own views, or memory. So, this goes into the collective memory... No, but changing names except as I’ve explained, as far as my memory goes, no.”

  The work of the Government Names Commission made me think about the ways time and space intersect in nationalism. The Hebraicized map of Israel rendered invisible the traces of the land’s Arab heritage either by recasting it as Hebrew or by leaving it out altogether. Here, the deepest history of the land is its Jewish history, which trumps what is seen as the tenancy of the Arabs, despite the long historical reach of Arab life and culture in Palestine. That presence was seen as essentially a temporal aberration, partially rectified by the population adjustments of the 1948 War.

  While Naftali Kadmon’s insistence that Arabic names are to be found on Arab maps suggests a cartographical equality, this does not exist in practice. Palestinian Israelis may see an Atlas of Israel in Arabic in their high-school geography class, but not all the names are Arabic names; many are transliterated Hebrew. Otherwise, the official map of their country is the Hebrew map, and those names saturate the society they live in, from tourist guides to news reports to everyday conversation. Meanwhile, the vast majority of Jewish Israelis will never see an Arabic map. For them, political debates over toponymy evaporate, leaving them to read unquestioningly the one true, scientific map of their country.

  Although early Zionism was essentially secular in nature, it was the connection to the Biblical and historical land of Israel that rooted moral claims to Jewish settlement in Palestine. The land played an active role in the Zionist imagination. For A.D. Gordon, Yishuv pioneer and philosopher, “Our country, which had been a land of milk and honey, and at any rate carries the potential for high culture, has remained desolate, poorer than other civilized countries and empty — this is sort of confirmation of our right to the land, a sort of hint that the country has been awaiting us.”[10] “The country awaits the people, its people, to come back and renew and reconstruct its old home, cure its wounds with its sons’ love,”[11] wrote David Ben-Gurion in 1918.

  This was “a land without a people for a people without a land”:[12] it, too, was in exile. Settlement, or possession of the land, thus became a mutual and long-desired consummation.

  Land acquisition and settlement were at the heart of the Zionist project, and served a dual purpose: not only were the new, small agricultural colonies (re)establishing a Jewish presence in the land, but they were also extending its territory. Donations from the diaspora funded both the purchase of agricultural land at enticingly high prices from Arab notables, and the displacement of tenant farmers that inevitably followed. During the Arab Revolt of the late 1930s, “watchtower and stock
ade” outposts were constructed in unsettled land in a single night of back-breaking work by truckloads of volunteers, both firming up Jewish security and extending the fluid boundaries of the Yishuv further into Eretz Israel.

  Physical engagement with the land was central to Zionist self-understanding, and to the ideological construction of the Sabra, the new Jew. To settle land means to live on it, to begin to put down roots. For the Yishuv, the gruelling manual work involved — draining swamps, planting trees, tilling the soil — while necessary for survival, was also the medium through which they and the land would be redeemed. A.D. Gordon’s Tolstoyan belief in the organic, even spiritual, unity of land and labourer was profoundly influential. For Gordon, such work also established a moral proprietary claim: “the land, in fact, always remains in the possession of those who live on it and work it…. Land is acquired by living on it, by work and productivity.”[13] It was a dilemma for the founders of the early farming communities that they had neither the numbers nor the finances to hire only Jewish labour. Unlike the highly politicized Jewish immigrants, often trained in a profession or trade, Arab workers were experienced labourers, and they didn’t challenge a low hourly wage. Their extended family structures allowed them to live more cheaply than the recent arrivals from Europe were accustomed to.

  By the 1920s, immigration levels and land purchase had reached sufficient levels for agricultural settlement to shift from the plantation economy of the early decades. Farming ventures, spearheaded by the kibbutz movement, could now be exclusively Jewish. “The social basis of the kibbutz,” wrote David Ben-Gurion, “is the complete partnership of all workers, without distinction between experts and ordinary labourers, between bachelors and fathers of large families, according to the principle [of Karl Marx]: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs. There are neither wages nor private wealth, the farm being the common property of the whole settlement. Each member, whether he has been in the kibbutz for decades or has just been accepted that day, has equal rights.”[14] ,†

  The kibbutzes embodied the Zionist ideal. Within a radical socialist framework, the pioneers were living the redemption of the land through their labour.

  Jewish immigrants were familiar with and had adopted the Arab place names of the lands they settled. From a purist Zionist perspective, Arabic names needed to be purged from the landscape. But in the complicated dynamics of the construction of identity, for the Sabras these names were linguistic status symbols. They were markers of the yearned-for familiarity with the land, a growing into being native. It was only after the Hebrew names were pinned down on the map that their use became uniform.

  It is striking that Israelis named themselves for the sabra, or prickly pear cactus — thorny on the outside but sweet and soft within. These cacti dot the landscape, a ubiquitous symbol of modern Israel. The plants are also symbols of a different nature. Arab villagers used them to mark the boundaries of their settlements, and there they remain, decades after those villages were destroyed.

  For the pioneer generation of Jewish immigrants to Palestine, it was crucial that their children be born and raised as native. By the 1920s, botany, geography, agriculture, archaeology, the “history of the Israeli nation,”[15] and Hebrew literature were key elements of the school curriculum, giving the second generation a solid grounding in the study of “knowledge of the land.”

  In geography lessons children were taught about “fields newly adorned with lush green trees,” swamp drainage, and which crops to grow in the Negev. As well as learning about mountains and rivers, they also learned “ideological facts” about the founding of settlements and the “illegal immigration” of Jews into Mandate Palestine.[16] The textbooks the children used were explicitly, proudly ideological. One of the questions given to students asks, “You want to be a settler when you grow up, correct? Which would you prefer: tree crops, field crops, or a mixed farm?”

  Much of a young Sabra’s learning took place outside. Children raised on a kibbutz roamed freely, and city children also spent a lot of time outdoors, on field trips with their class or their youth group. Hiking became a primary pedagogical tool.

  Ilan Pappé grew up in Haifa in the fifties and sixties, and has many memories of the hiking trips he went on with his schoolmates. Now one of the most prominent of the New Historians, Ilan sees those childhood expeditions from a different perspective.[17]

  Did you go on hiking trips when you were growing up? I asked him.

  Oh, yes. You have to; it’s part of the school curriculum, and it’s all fun in a way, because most of these trips were for more than one day, so it included camping and things. But I think it’s an intended part of the socialization, so, yeah, definitely I did.

  And do you remember what you learned?

  I think you get, though not always directly, indirectly most of the time, the idea that it was an empty land, a barren land, that miraculously bloomed. That’s the first message you get. The second message is that walking and knowing is part of maintaining things. The third thing, and I’m not sure it’s true about the girls, but it’s true about the boys, it was also the beginning of preparing them for military life — camping, staying outside, and so on. I think these are the three main things you take from these hiking tours. Very indoctrinated, very ideological in many ways.

  These experiences of learning the land were shared by the next generation of Israeli youth. “It was part of being Israeli here. We hiked,” says Amaya Galili, a Tel Aviv resident in her early thirties.[18] She grew up on a kibbutz in the Galilee in the 1980s, and hiking is in the foreground of her childhood memories. “A lot of my culture was hiking — trips with school, with the youth movement, with my father.”

  There were family day hikes, and longer camping trips with school and with her youth movement, Hashomer Hatza’ir,[19] one of a number of Israeli youth movements, begun in the pre-state period, that most young Israelis joined. The annual school expeditions were four or five days long. The children would go further and further afield each year. At first, Amaya and her classmates went on day trips to the nearby historic towns of Tsfat and Tiberias, returning to the kibbutz to sleep. Later trips were more adventurous, even down to Eilat at the southern end of the Negev. The children took sleeping bags and slept out under the stars. “I remember all kinds of funny stuff, like when we were in eleventh grade walking in the Judean desert, and our guide played a trick on us, putting chocolate down, and then eating it; we thought he was eating goat shit. It was very funny.”

  “When I was fifteen,” Amaya told me, “we had a camp on learning how to use a map and navigate with it. The first day, you learn how to read a map, and the second and third days you slowly learn how to use those skills, to navigate and find your way from one place to another. It was great, a very positive experience. I remember it particularly because I was a guide in that camp two years later.”

  In her high-school years, the expeditions with Hashomer Hatza’ir were organized around a particular theme. One year, the young people were taught about the overnight construction of the tower and stockade settlements of the 1930s, and built one together. “Eighth grade was the tower and stockade. It’s funny, all that stuff we learned about, and then you suddenly realize it wasn’t against the British, it was against the Arabs.” Ninth grade was learning navigation skills. Later, it was wilderness survival: “We were given a few items to bring with us, and a map, and we had to navigate from place to place, just four or five of us. That wasn’t just connecting to Zionist ideology, it was also preparing us for the army, although I couldn’t see that at the time. It was fun, challenging; frightening sometimes, but challenging.”

  “We didn’t sit in a class and get told things,” Amaya says, “Our meaningful learning was outside. I knew we were doing hikes because it was important to know where you live, but it wasn’t like brainwashing, or something like that. The main thing was learning to love your land.”

  Twenty-first-century technology, and the loss o
f more and more land to urban development, mediate the experience of hiking for contemporary schoolchildren. “It became an industry,” Meron Benvenisti told me. “The teacher, in my time, used to organize it, hike it himself and understand where he goes, have maps, and so on. Now, you call a company. Car, the guides, everything. You just buy it, three days, from that company; people specialize in this. There are others, not walking now, using jeeps. Now it’s not even fun because you have GPS. You don’t need to know anything. And there’s nowhere you can go. The land is all developed, all built up.”[20]

  One of the most popular of the textbooks used in the 1940s for teaching Knowing the Land Studies was written by Meron’s father, David Benvenisti, who later contributed to the work of the Government Names Commission. As a boy, Meron accompanied him on the walks and visits with Arab locals where his father gathered his knowledge. That childhood immersion formed Meron’s own love of the land, and his fascination with its history. His academic studies focused on mapping the Crusader period, but in later years he was drawn to study the more recent history that his father had been a part of. The West Bank Database Project he established in 1982 tracked the growth of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, illegal under international law.

  Meron, a former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, is now in his mid seventies, a physically imposing man with a tired, cragged face and white hair. I asked him about the nature of his father’s work.