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When America Said No!

Waterboarding, sensory deprivation, confessions extorted under torture… We have been here before. Eighty years ago Zechariah Chafee’s investigation of “Lawlessness in Law Enforcement” spelled the beginning of the end for routine police torture in America. In our new CounterPunch newletter Peter Lee sets Chafee’s findings against the documented tortures of the Bush-Cheney years, whose executors are now protected by Obama. Every word of Chafee’s repudiation of extra-legal detention and coercive interrogation is valid today and should be read by all, starting with the 44th president. Also in this newsletter Marcus Rediker describes what happened when he lectured on the history of pirates to inmates at Auburn Prison. Get your new edition today by subscribing online or calling 1-800-840-3683 Contributions to CounterPunch are tax-deductible. Click here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now! CounterPunch books and t-shirts make great presents.

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Today's Stories

July 17-19, 2009

Nikolas Kozloff
Chiquita in Latin America: From Arbenz to Zelaya

July 16, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
What Economy?

Afshin Rattansi Iranian Planes and the Hidden Toll of Economic Sanctions

Gregory V. Button
The Search for Environmental Justice in Perry County, Alabama

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Profile of a Deserter

Michelle Bollinger
Why is Leonard Peltier Still in Prison?

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White House to ABC News: No Obama Single-Payer Doc

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Iranian Penetration, Oh My!

Alice Walker
What is Torture Like? A Letter to Obama

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Paying the Climate Debt: the G-8's Troubling Model

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Sotomayor and the Identity Mountain

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Sotomayor for the Prosecution

 


July 15, 2009

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A Political Recession

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Cheney Sweating Bullets

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Jenin's Model of "Economic Peace"

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Shouts From the Gallery: the Sotomayor Hearings and the Culture Wars

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Uighurs vs. Afghans: a Study in Contrast

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Three Dimensions of a Complete Stimulus Plan

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The Story of My Arrest

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11 Days in Saudi Gitmo

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The Emperors of Bombast: Bono, U2 and the Crisis of World Capitalism

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Obama's New Euphemism

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Steve Heilig
Walking Mount Tam: an Interview with Gary Snyder

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Hamas' Choice

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The End of "Nice" Health Care Reform

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The Politics of Destabilization: McCain and Honduras

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From Golden State to Subprime State

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How US Missile Defense Plans Sabotaged Nuclear Disarmament Talks With Russia

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Mel Brooks Does the French Revolution

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A US / Iraq Conflict on Iran

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Andy Worthington Former Insider Shatters Credibility of Military Commissions

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Spring in the Time of Obama

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July 10-12, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
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José Pertierra
The Cuban Five: a Cold War Case in a Post-Cold War World

John Ross
After the Honduran Coup

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The Settlements and the Quartet

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Michael Neumann
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Gilad Atzmon
The Left and Islam: Thinking Outside of the Secular Box

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Parable of the Golden Parachute

Ellen Hodgson Brown
California Dreamin': How the State Can Beat Its Budget Woes

Jim Goodman
Rural America Needs More Than Listening Sessions

Christopher Bickerton
Europe's New Politics of Hard Times

Wendell Potter
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Dave Lindorff
CIA Lies: Why Isn't Congress in Open Revolt?

David Ker Thomson
Switchbacking Toward Bastille Day

Anthony DiMaggio
The Michael Jackson Feeding Frenzy

Raymond Lawrence
Michael Jackson as Sexual Pervert: the Calumnies of Peter King

Walid El Houri
Neda and Marwa: a Tale of Two Murdered Women

Stephanie Westbrook
Yes, We Camp

Roger Gaess
The Shades of Highgate Cemetery

David Yearsley
Tara, America's Dream House

Kim Nicolini
Caution: Men at Work, Robbing Banks

Poets' Basement
Five Poems From the Japanese

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Free Tiga and Hugh!

 

July 9, 2009

Ronnie Cummings
How Industry Giants are Undermining the Organic Foods Movement

Jonathan Cook
Two-State Solution, Israeli-Style

Nikolas Kozloff
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James Bovard
McNamara's Other Body Count

Norman Solomon Afghanistan: the Escalation Scam

Allan Nairn
Indonesia Gets to Pick Its Killer

Andy Worthington
Revamping the Military Commissions

Tomas Borge
The Sadsack Soldiers of Honduras

Nadia Hijab
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Paul Krassner
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July 8, 2009

Saul Landau
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Dean Baker
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Gates, Congress and the F-22

Eric Walberg
Obama in Russia

Ray McGovern
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David Rosen
When Sadism Goes Systematic: Prison Rape as Policy

Dr. Mona El Farra
Gaza From a Distance

Ron Jacobs
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Benjamin Dangl
High Stakes in Honduras

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Alexander Cockburn
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Uri Avnery
Israeli Court Rebukes Military

Brian M. Downing
Crossing the Helmand

Gary Leupp
Biden, Israel and Iran

Gregory A. Burris
My Brush With Homeland Security

David Macaray
When in Doubt, Blame a Labor Union

Laura Flanders
Obama Hushes Health Care Advocates

Alan Farago
Princple Over Principal

Greg Moses
Texas Patels Take Over Dallas Bank

Dan Bacher
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July 6, 2009

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Diana Johnstone
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Nikolas Kozloff
Honduran Coup to Venezuelan Coup: Same Old Globalizers and Torture School Grads

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Operation Khanjar Begins

Jonathan Cook
Israel Calls on Ultra-Orthodox Jews to Stop "Arab Takeover"

Tim Wise
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Charles R. Larson
Sarah Palin, Plain and Tall

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July 3-5, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
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Jeffrey St. Clair
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Mike Whitney
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The Haggling Over Iraqi Oil

Anthony DiMaggio
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John Ross
Left's Grip on Mexico City Slips

Nikolas Kozloff
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Gareth Porter
The Iran Canard

Andy Worthington
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Jane Slaughter Labor's Vague Rally for Health Care

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The Situation in Honduras

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Paul Krassner v. Larry King

July 2, 2009

Andrew Cockburn
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Nikolas Kozloff
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Wendell Potter
Obama's False Friends of Health Care Reform

Ellen Hodgson Brown
California's Empty Wallet

Christian Christensen Iran: Networked Dissent?

Patrick Irelan
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Binoy Kampmark Returning Iraq

Nicola Nasser
Ethnic Cleansing as State Policy

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July 1, 2009

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Alberto Vallente Thorensen
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Victor Figueroa-Clark / Pablo Navarrete
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June 30, 2009

Michael Hudson
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Esam Al-Amin
Iran and Washington's Hidden Hand

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Showdown in Honduras

Jonathan Cook
Israeli Doctors Collude in Torture

Franklin Lamb
Hezbollah After the Elections

George Wuerthner
Beetle Hysteria ... Again: the Truth About Bugs, Fires and Ecosystems

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Acceptable Versus Unacceptable Repression

Ron Jacobs
Mark Sanford, Sexual Liberation and LGBT Equality

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June 29, 2009

Ishmael Reed
The Persecution of Michael Jackson

Nikolas Kozloff
The Coup in Honduras: Obama's Real Message to Latin America?

Clifton Ross
Coups and Constitutions: From Bolivia to Honduras

Patrick Cockburn
Why Iraq is Now the Most Corrupt Country on the Planet

Uri Avnery
Between Tel Aviv and Tehran

Conn Hallinan
Dealing With North Korea: Why Threats and Sanctions Will Backfire

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Key Leaders of Honduran Coup Trained in the US

June 26-28, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
The Hate Crimes Bill: How Not to Remember Matthew Shepard

Jeffrey St. Clair
Meet the Retreads: Obama's Used Green Team

Doug Peacock
Elk River: History and the Yellowstone

Daniel Wolff
The Night Before: a Glimpse of the Lenape

Mike Whitney
What the Big Banks Have Won

John Ross
The New York Times and Stolen Elections

David Rosen
Cry, Hypocrite, Cry: the Tradition of Sex Scandals and American Politicians

Emily Ratner
Thoughts on Manhood From the Rafah Tunnel

Gareth Porter
Airstrike Report Belies "Blame Taliban" Line

Farid Marjai
Green, But Not Velvet

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The Rift in Iran: Memo to the "Do Something" Brigade

Paul Craig Roberts
Gun Control: What's the Agenda?

Fred Gardner
FDR's Real Defining Moment: Ending Prohibition

Carl Ginsburg
Obama's Father's Day

Paul Watson
Fear and Loathing in Madeira

David Ker Thomson
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The Man in the Mirror: Michael Jackson as Tramp

Geoff Berne
Obama and Charter Schools: The Showdown at Schottenstein

Todd Alan Price
Ohio: Birthplace of Charter Education ... and Opposition to It

Ramzy Baroud
People for Sale in a Hungry World

Jeff Sher
Health Care Showdown

Dr. Carol Paris Despite My Arrest by Max Baucus, I Will Continue to Advocate for Quality Health Care for All

Walter Brasch Adultery as Family Value?

Glen Johnson
The Village and the Wall

Charlotte Laws
Hold the MSG!

Charles R. Larson
Dickens in Morocco, Sort Of

Kim Nicolini
The Erasure of Art

David Yearsley
Yankee Prof Takes on Dallas

Lorenzo Wolff
When the Songs Remain the Same

Poets' Basement
Larson, Davies, McLellan and Gardner

Website of the Weekend
Kayakers vs. Shell Oil

June 25, 2009

Kathy Kelly
Now We See You, Now We Don't

Jack Bratich
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Wendell Potter
The Health Insurance Industry v. Health Care Reform: a Former Insurance Industry Insider Tells All

Charles R. Larson
Don't Cry for Him, Argentina! GOP Sex Scandal of the Week

Alan Farago
The Tears of Mark Sanford

Jonathan Cook
Israeli Firms Accused of Profiting Off Holocaust

Gareth Porter
Khobar Bombings: Telltale Signs of Saudi Fraud

Bitta Mostofi /
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"You Will Not Get Past Us"

David Macaray
Six Ways to Reinvigorate Labor

Mark Schuller
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June 24, 2009

Andrew Cockburn
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Dean Baker
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Andy Worthington
The Story of Abdul Rahim al-Ginco

James Bovard
Obama and the Torturers

Diana Gibson /
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Torture Eats the Soul

P. Sainath
The Age of the Everyday Billionaire

Gareth Porter
Investigating the Khobar Tower Bombing: Why Was Al Qaeda Excluded From the Suspects List?

Robert Alvarez
The Department of Energy's Nuclear Albatross

Dave Lindorff
Medicare for All

Steven Colatrella Remembering Giovanni Arrighi

Website of the Day
Protest as Terrorism

 

June 23, 2009

David Price
Obama's Classroom Spies

Patrick Cockburn
Iraq Reels Toward a New Era

James Ridgeway /
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Bi-Partisan Bull on Health Care: Three Ex-Senators Get It Up for the Health Care Industry

Dave Lindorff
Using the Economic Crisis to Attack Workers

Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero
Puerto Rico: Biotech Island

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Dennis Ross Moves to the White House

Brian M. Downing
The Erosion of the Mullahs' Monolith

Robert Bryce
Are Theocracies Doomed?

Nicholas Dearden
The G8 is Dead

Yousef Munayyer
Seeing Through Israeli Delay Tactics

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The Great White Father of America

June 22, 2009

Michael Hudson
Obama's (Latest) Surrender to Wall Street

Esam Al-Amin
What Actually Happened in the Iranian Presidential Election? A Hard Look at the Numbers

Chris Floyd
Dexter's Legions in Afghanistan

Jack Z. Bratich
The Fog Machine: Iran, Social Networks and Genetically Modified Grassroots Organizations

Atash Yaghmaian
We Children of the Revolution

Laura Carlsen
Victory in the Amazon

Paul Craig Roberts
The U.S. Regime-Change Recipe for Iran

Vijay Prashad
Gun v. Butter: Now You are Only Poor

Fred Gardner
Charles Lynch Gets a Year and a Day (No Thanks to Eric Holder)

Andy Thayer
The Blank Check: How We Got the Obama-DOMA Debacle

David Macaray
Unions and the Newspaper Crisis

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June 19 - 21, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
I Become an American

Jeffrey St. Clair
Firebrand: Rod Coronado's Flame War

Patrick Cockburn
Who Will Control Iraq's Oil?

Al Giordano
What the Left Should be Learning From Iran

Henry A. Giroux
The Iranian Uprisings and the Challenge of the New Media

Anthony DiMaggio
The Electoral Façade

Paul Craig Roberts
Are the Iranian Protests Another US Orchestrated "Color Revolution?"

John Ross
46 Dead Mexican Toddlers: Sacrificed on the Altar of Neoliberalism

Gareth Porter
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Carl Ginsburg
Obama's Bix Fix: Placating the Bankers, Again

Tommi Avicolli Mecca
40 Years After Stonewall: From Smash the Church to Going to the Chapel

Joe Bageant
Workers' Rights: No Balls, No Gains

Serge Halimi
Protectionism: We've Been Here Before

P. Sainath
Price of Rice, Price of Power in India

Jim Goodman
The Claim Deniers: Why the Health Insurance Industry Doesn't Deserve Our Trust

Dave Lindorff
Obama's Health Care Waterloo

Rannie Amiri
Bush Jumps Over Maine, Carter Lands in Gaza

Robert Fantina
Iran, Obama and McCain

Harvey Wasserman
Big Nuke's Radioactive Hoax in Impoverished Ohio

Walter Brasch
They Got Away With Murder: 12 Angry White People

David Ker Thomson
This Moment's Bill of Rights

Charles R. Larson
No Voice: Telling Her Mother's Story

David Yearsley
Escape From the Torture Chamber

Kim Nicolini
When the Closet is the Culprit

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Rossellini and the Art of Ambiguity

Poets' Basement
Beatty and Kowitt

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Grown in Yellowstone, Slaughtered in Montana

 

 

 

 

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Weekend Edition
July 17-19, 2009

Wiping Arabic Names Off the Map

Israeli Road Signs

By JONATHAN COOK

Thousands of road signs are the latest front in Israel’s battle to erase Arab heritage from much of the Holy Land.

Israel Katz, the transport minister, announced this week that signs on all major roads in Israel, East Jerusalem and possibly parts of the West Bank would be “standardised”, converting English and Arabic place names into straight transliterations of the Hebrew name.

Currently, road signs include the place name as it is traditionally rendered in all three languages.

Under the new scheme, the Arab identity of important Palestinian communities will be obscured: Jerusalem, or “al Quds” in Arabic, will be Hebraised to “Yerushalayim”; Nazareth, or “al Nasra” in Arabic, the city of Jesus’s childhood, will become “Natzrat”; and Jaffa, the port city after which Palestine’s oranges were named, will be “Yafo”.

Arab leaders are concerned that Mr Katz’s plan offers a foretaste of the demand by Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, that the Palestinians recognise Israel as a Jewish state.

On Wednesday, Mohammed Sabih, a senior official at the Arab League, called the initiative “racist and dangerous”.

“This decision comes in the framework of a series of steps in Israel aimed at implementing the ‘Jewish State’ slogan on the ground.”

Palestinians in Israel and Jerusalem, meanwhile, have responded with alarm to a policy they believe is designed to make them ever less visible.

Ahmed Tibi, an Arab legislator in the Israeli parliament, said: “Minister Katz is mistaken if he thinks that changing a few words can erase the existence of the Arab people or their connection to Israel.”

The transport ministry has made little effort to conceal the political motivation behind its policy of Hebraising road signs.

In announcing the move on Monday, Mr Katz, a hawkish member of Likud, Mr Netanyahu’s right-wing party, said he objected to Palestinians using the names of communities that existed before Israel’s establishment in 1948.

“I will not allow that on our signs,” he said. “This government, and certainly this minister, will not allow anyone to turn Jewish Jerusalem into Palestinian al Quds.”

Other Israeli officials have played down the political significance of Mr Katz’s decision. A transport department spokesman, Yeshaayahu Ronen, said: “The lack of uniform spelling on signs has been a problem for those speaking foreign languages, citizens and tourists alike.”

“That’s ridiculous,” responded Tareq Shehadeh, head of the Nazareth Cultural and Tourism Association. “Does the ministry really think it’s helping tourists by renaming Nazareth, one of the most famous places in the world, ‘Natzrat’, a Hebrew name only Israeli Jews recognise?”

Meron Benvenisti, a former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, said Israel had begun interfering with the Arabic on the signs for East Jerusalem as soon as it occupied the city in 1967. It invented a new word, “Urshalim”, that was supposed to be the Arabic form of the Hebrew word for Jerusalem, “Yerushalayim”.

“I was among those who intervened at the time to get the word ‘al Quds’ placed on signs, too, after ‘Urshalim’ and separated by a hyphen. But over the years ‘al Quds’ was demoted to brackets and nowadays it’s not included on new signs at all.”

He said Mr Katz’s scheme would push this process even further by requiring not only the Arabic equivalent of the Hebrew word for Jerusalem, but the replication of the Hebrew spelling as well. “It’s completely chauvinistic and an insult,” he said.

Meir Margalit, a former Jerusalem councillor, said official policy was to make the Palestinian population in East Jerusalem as invisible as possible, including by ignoring their neighbourhoods on many signs.

The transport ministry’s plans for the West Bank are less clear. In his announcement Mr Katz said Palestinian-controlled areas of the territory would still be free to use proper Arabic place names. But he hinted that signs in the 60 per cent of the West Bank under Israeli military rule would be Hebraised, too.

That could mean Palestinians driving across parts of the West Bank to the Palestinian city of Nablus, for example, will have to look for the Hebrew name “Shechem” spelt out in Arabic.

Mr Benvenisti said that, after Israel’s establishment in 1948, a naming committee was given the task of erasing thousands of Arab place names, including those of hills, valleys and springs, and creating Hebrew names. The country’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, told the committee: “We are obliged to remove the Arabic names for reasons of state.”

In addition, the Arabic names of more than 400 Palestinian villages destroyed by Israel during and after the 1948 war were lost as Jewish communities took their place.

Israel’s surviving Palestinian minority, today one-fifth of the population, have had to battle in the courts for the inclusion of Arabic on road signs, despite Arabic being an official language.

Many signs on national highways were provided only in Hebrew and English until the courts in 1999 insisted Arabic be included. Three years later the courts ruled that Arabic must also be included on signs in cities where a significant number of Arabs live.

However, as the political climate has shifted rightward in Israel, there has been a backlash, including an unsuccessful bid by legislators to end Arabic’s status as an official language last year.

Recently the Israeli media revealed that nationalist groups have been spraying over Arabic names on road signs, especially in the Jerusalem area.

Israel has also antagonised Palestinians in both Israel and the West Bank by naming roads after right-wing figures.

The main highway in the Jordan Valley, which runs through Palestinian territory but is used by Israelis to drive between northern Israel and Jerusalem, is named “Gandhi’s Road” – not for the Indian spiritual leader but after the nickname of an Israeli general, Rehavam Zeevi, who called for the expulsion of Palestinians from Greater Israel.

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.

A version of this article originally appeared in The National (www.thenational.ae), published in Abu Dhabi.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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