Sign Wars
A few Jewish peace activists in Jerusalem have been engaged in low-level symbolic combat with rightists over street signs in the city.
The official street signs are trilingual, with the name in large Hebrew letters, followed by smaller Arabic script and then larger English lettering.
Some ultra-nationalists have gone around plastering Hebrew signs over or defacing the Arabic script in order to deny the Arab character of Jerusalem.
Peace activists are re-making the Arabic script by putting placards with the Arabic names over the right-wingers’ blots and political stickers. They call it “Re-Facing Jerusalem.”
The activists declared, “None of us are Arab or Muslim, but we all recognize the importance of shared existence, and are committed to the principle and reality of Jerusalem as a shared city.”
While I applaud this simple and practical activism as an assertion over the exclusionary preferences of the hardcore Zionists, it did strike me as incongruous that the street names they plastered in Arabic were sometimes tributes to the most hardcore Zionists.
For instance, they fixed the Arabic part of Jabotinsky street, which was named after Ze’ev (Vladimir) Jabotinsky, the founder of the terrorist force, the Irgun, and a Zionist revisionist who proposed building a figurative “Iron Wall” between early Zionist settlers and Palestinians — essentially laying the ideological grounds for apartheid Israel. This is perhaps to focus on the symbolic and historical too much, I admit.
If Israelis and Palestinians are to have a shared future, it is clear that cross-cutting activism of this sort is needed, particularly that which undermines the power of Israeli apartheid. While this project itself may not subvert that completely nor directly, it is one small tactic among many more that are needed; and it’s spirit is to be commended.
[tarboush tip: Carlos]
