Road signs, weather reports and schoolbooks: Small acts of war and peace

Sometimes the conflict in the Middle East explodes into our consciousness: Buses torn apart by bombs; the Gaza Strip invaded; Palestinians in bulldozers on a downtown Jerusalem rampage; Israeli settlers torching Palestinian fields or uprooting olive trees in the West Bank.

Other times, however, the tensions are fomented in quieter, less palpably violent ways.

And although these seemingly innocuous events generally fail to produce the screaming headlines that warfare and terrorism do, they are just as much ‘seeds of conflict' - keeping the flames of enmity burning, filling the interstitial spaces between one spasm of major violence and the next.

Road Sign Revisionism

Two weeks ago, Israel's Minister of Transportation was responsible for one such ‘quiet' event, when he announced his plan to "Hebraize" all the country's street and road signs.

On Highway 1 from Tel Aviv for example, a road sign to Jerusalem will say "Yerushalayim" in Hebrew. But in English it currently reads "Jerusalem"; and in Arabic lettering, "El Quds" ("The Holy"), the Arabic term for the city. Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz of the Likud has now ordered that all names appearing on road signs in English and Arabic must be direct transliterations of Hebrew - in other words, "Yerushalayim" in all three languages.

Yesha'ayahu Ronen, head of the ministry's Transportation Planning Department, explained the move as one of the weapons being used by the Netanyahu government to stonewall efforts to forge compromise on Jerusalem: "This government, and certainly this minister, will not allow anyone to turn Jewish Jerusalem to Palestinian al-Quds," he told the press.

Meretz chair Haim Oron called the Transportation Minister's initiative, "an ugly, unnecessary provocation and an attempt to generate tension." Questioning the plan's legality, Oron noted that, "Arabic is an official language in the State of Israel, and the Arab citizens live here by right, not by indulgence. The Land of Israel's history is ... multi-layered. Every person and place has a name, and sometimes more than one."

And while Minister of Minority Affairs, Avishay Braverman, of Labor also criticized the decision - "Road signs are not a political issue [and] Arabic is an official language in the State of Israel," he said - his party is avidly maintaining its partnership with Netanyahu and Likud.

The rain in ... Judea and Samaria

The Transportation Minister's plan is reminiscent of a decision 32 years ago by the newly installed Begin government to change the consciousness of Israel's citizens regarding the still-freshly occupied West Bank.

At that time, the Ministry of Communications ordered the state-run Israel Broadcast Authority (IBA) - which until the 1990s operated the country's only television channel - to make a subtle but significant change in its weather report, which offered the next day's forecast by geographical region - the Coastal Plain, the Jerusalem hills, the Galilee, the Negev, and so on.

The Ministry instructed the IBA to include "Judea and Samaria" as a new region to be specified in the forecast so that, night after night, hundreds of thousands of Israelis - rapacious news-watchers at the time - would hear the phrase that made Israeli control of the West Bank seem more natural and just. If the political timing was not yet right to make "the administered territories" (as they were often called back then) a statutory part of the state of Israel, at least their "psychological annexation" could be achieved, the Likud government reasoned.

You say ‘Nakba', I say ‘Independence'

Schools are agents of socialization where a culture's youth learns its rules, norms, traditions and values.

In July of 2007, then-Education Minister Yuli Tamir, a long-time peace advocate, taught Israeli schoolchildren a small, but important, lesson in honesty and inclusiveness. She authorized the use of a history book (in Arab sector schools only) that, for the first time, used the word "Nakba" (‘catastrophe' in Arabic, referring to the 1947-48 ‘War of Independence'). The critical section read as follows:

"When the [1948] war ended, the Jews prevailed and Israel and its neighbors signed a truce... the Arabs call the war the 'Nakba', meaning the war of disaster and destruction. The Jews call it the War of Independence."

Defending her decision against politicians on the Right, Tamir argued that, "we have a complex history of two peoples engaged in a struggle, and it's time to give the story of this struggle its proper treatment. It shouldn't be that an Arab child, a citizen of Israel, won't know about and won't have the ability to discuss the Arab narrative as well."

Then-Opposition leader Binyamin Netanyahu disagreed: "Shall we inject Arab propaganda into our schools with our own hands?" he asked rhetorically, while calling for Tamir's resignation.
So it should come as no surprise that precisely two years later, Mr. Netanyahu's close ally, Education Minister Gideon Saar, has now ordered the "offending passage" removed. Only the Jewish-Israeli narrative will now be retold in Israel's classrooms.

This is not to deny the need for Palestinian Authority textbooks and curricula to undergo revision so that the Palestinian school system better prepares its students for co-existence.
In 2004, the highly reputable Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information (IPCRI), for example, reviewed Palestinian Authority textbooks for grades 4 and 9, and reported as follows: "No map of the region bears the name of ‘Israel' in its pre-1967 borders. In addition, Israeli towns with a predominantly Jewish population are not represented on these maps."

Both parties clearly must do better to recognize each other's national legitimacy and each other's humanity.

The challenge for progressive Israelis, and progressive Zionists outside of Israel, is to maintain a sense of national pride that does not come at the expense of another nation's identity or dignity.
Israeli author Yoram Kaniuk, who this week published an op-ed entitled, "I remember the Nakba", helps us to find the words:

I remember the Nakba. I saw it to a much greater extent than the education minister, who apparently only heard about it. It was a harsh, merciless campaign of young soldiers who spilled their blood while fighting a determined enemy that was eventually defeated. Yet the enemy that was defeated is not a geometrical unknown, but rather, a people that still exists...

I was wounded in battle, but I believe that the education minister must educate our young people to be heroes by teaching them that this war had losers too, and that they too have a narrative. They don't have the country that was theirs but they have a history, and no education minister can erase the defeated people from its powerful memory. The Nakba fighters fought heroically, but we fought better.

The fact that the State of Israel exists today is the victory, rather than the erasing of the circumstances of its establishment from the losing side....

I thought that maybe it is still possible, before my death, to turn this state into a Jewish State - not one populated by zealous masses called Jews, but rather, Jews like we used to be; a state where we respect those who fought against us and were defeated. When that will happen, we will see the establishment of an Arab state alongside us, and the city of Jerusalem, also known as al-Quds, will become the capital of two states, one Jewish and one Arab. And then peace will come to Israel. Amen.