Media, Culture & Society http://mcs.sagepub.com/ Signifying passages: the signs of change in Israeli street names Amit Pinchevski and Efraim Torgovnik Media Culture Society 2002 24: 365 DOI: 10.1177/016344370202400305 The online version of this article can be found at: /content/24/3/365 Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com Additional services and information for Media, Culture & Society can be found at: Email Alerts: /cgi/alerts Subscriptions: /subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav Citations: /content/24/3/365.refs.html >> Version of Record - May 1, 2002 What is This? Downloaded from pdf.highwire.org by guest on May 10, 2013 Signifying passages: the signs of change in Israeli street names Amit Pinchevski MCGILLUNIVERSITY, CANADA Efraim Torgovnik TELAVIVUNIVERSITY, ISRAEL Introduction Collective memory, argues Maurice Halbwachs (1992), is dependent upon time, place and historic circumstance, and always selective. The past, or the way it is perceived, is always instrumental to the present political and social goals and needs. Collective memory is therefore a social product reconstructed in adherence to political, historical and social changes. Thus the shaping of elements molding the collective memory is a fundamental component in the construction of a national narrative (Anderson, 1991), as succinctly phrased by Orwell: ‘Who controls the past, controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.’ Being dynamic, the collective memory requires means through which it can be channeled into mundane walks of life. Among such means are national symbols, commemoration days, national ceremonies and memorial sites like museums, monuments and cemeteries. The latter were called by Pierre Nora (1986) ‘realms of memory’ (lieux de mémoire), segments of space or time, possibly space and time, transcending the concrete, invoking sacredness in the everyday and presenting symbols of unity within social heterogeneity. Recently, several attempts have been made to conceptualize the exploration of street names as a commemorative realm, most notably those of Palonen (1997), Azaryahu (1996) and Ferguson (1988). While acknowledging the importance of these attempts, we believe that the semiotic element of street names and the methodological employment Media, Culture & Society © 2002 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi), Vol. 24: 365–388 [0163-4437(200205)24:3;365–388;022448] Downloaded from pdf.highwire.org by guest on May 10, 2013 366 Media, Culture & Society 24(3) of a hermeneutic reading did not guide previous research. In the analysis to follow we emphasize two aspects. The first concerns the political struggle and decision-making processes involved in street-naming. These will be linked to political ideology and the socialization processes of symbolic elements reshaping the Israeli collective memory. The second research emphasis will be given to the textual quality of street maps, that is, viewing street maps as elaborate spatial-texts encapsulating meanings pertaining to specific periods, places and political administrations. By examining street maps as spatial-texts, a latent potential for a hermeneutic reading may be unraveled. The following questions guide our study: c Is there a linkage between street names and the period during which they were given? c To what extent does political affinity of the name-givers influence the character of the names? c Do time and the physical place of the town in geopolitical space play a role? c And finally, does the demographic, sociological and political make-up of the inhabitants affect the nature of names? Data for our study are drawn from Israel, taking into account its cultural diversity. The four towns analyzed here – Ramle, Sderot, Ariel and Qatzrin – exhibit the scope of this diversity in their distinct demographic, social, political and geopolitical characteristics. As such, this analysis may supply an insight into the changes occurring in some elements of the Israeli collective memory and into the symbolic nature of social and political processes. Background The political process involved in naming streets is still, with some exceptions, very much absent from studies relating to political and cultural inquiry. Kari Palonen notes this deficiency and claims that ‘Despite the obvious political significance this research is hardly ever conducted at all in political science, while traditional onomastics has been afraid of politics’ (1993: 103). The very act of naming something is indeed a political act, for a name is always given to something or someone by an external force having the legitimacy to do so. Moreover, naming, as H.G. Duncan contends, is an important part of the negotiation process of the social reality striving to achieve ‘symbolic integration’ (1968: 21–2). Naming streets in particular is a threefold political act. Firstly, being the result of a political struggle in which one option defeated several others, naming Downloaded from pdf.highwire.org by guest on May 10, 2013 Pinchevski & Torgovnik, Signifying passages 367 streets is like any other political contest in having a potential for conflict (Palonen, 1993: 114). Secondly, the decision is made by political- bureaucratic institutions having the legitimate monopoly to name, and as such, they hold what Pierre Bourdieu calls the ‘means of symbolic violence’ (1991: 239–40). It is therefore a political practice par excellence of ‘power over space’, a demonstration of the scope of control vested in the political-bureaucratic institutions having the exclusive right to classify and attach definitions to an existing social space (Celik et al., 1994: 4). And finally, decisions over street names are conducted by political actors who endeavor to engrave their ideological views in the social space, and further into the collective memory; in this respect, street names might be seen as mundane media of canonization (Azaryahu, 1996: 321). In Israel this is even more notably evident since most of the political parties in the Knesset (parliament) are represented on most of the municipal boards of Israeli towns and cities. Israeli street names have received little attention from scholars and research into them has mostly been limited in methodological approach and scope. Bar-Gal’s study of street names in 23 Israeli towns presents a statistical analysis based on name categories. Its conclusions show that Israeli street names reflect the dominance of Zionist ideology and particu- larly the Zionist labor movement; on the other hand, names relating to the ideological right-wing political parties were scarce (1989: 343). In an earlier work, Bar-Gal (1987) investigated names given in Tel Aviv between 1909 and 1933 focusing on the development of street-naming decision- making processes. Azaryahu’s study (1993) discusses the institutionalized commemoration of the 1948 war in Haifa and Tel Aviv and suggests that the war brought a greater demographic and political change to Haifa than to Tel Aviv. In a more recent work, Azaryahu (1996) raises some additional important issues concerning the commemoration elements of Israeli street names, particularly in old Tel Aviv. Analytic model The analytic model used in this study relies on the analysis of Roland Barthes (1972). Some elements of his analysis served as a theoretical foundation for investigations into areas such as photography (Barthes, 1977), architecture (Barthes, 1988), monuments (Almog, 1991) and urban culture (Singer, 1991). Pursuant to Barthes’s analysis, we regard the nature of a street name as twofold: on the first level, the denotative one, a street sign serves as a spatial sign attaching a name to a place enabling people to find their way through the urban maze. On the second level, the connotative level, the same street sign also signifies an ideological content transcending the concrete context and transforming the urban space into a Downloaded from pdf.highwire.org by guest on May 10, 2013 368 Media, Culture & Society 24(3) FIGURE 1 A semiotic model of street names signifying space in itself. In other words, in addition to indicating actual streets, street signs as spatial signs also signify ideological contents (figure, event, place, symbol, etc.) independent of the specific street, effectively appropriating urban space for commemoration,1 as seen in Figure 1. Viewed from a semiotic standpoint, street names are media through which the urban space is being canonized, making the ordinary sublime and vice versa in a dialectical manner. From a hermeneutic perspective, this duality holds as well for the street map: on the first and prosaic level it is a small-scale description of the city; however, on the second, the transcendent level, it might be regarded as an ideological spatial-text mounted onto the urban space. Furthermore, being formed over long periods of time and stratified by different periods that have left their mark upon the city’s streets, this text exhibits an ‘ossified’ state of the ever- changing production and reproduction of the collective memory. Method Studies of street names fall roughly into two main types. The first are studies in which street names have been analyzed statistically according to name categories, for example Baldwin and Grimaud’s (1989) study of American street names, Ferguson’s on Paris (1988) and Bar-Gal’s study on Israeli towns (1989). The second type is a narrative analysis of some political and historical processes and changes in terms of street names, for instance Harris on Morristown, New Jersey (1989), Azaryahu on Berlin (1997) and Palonen on Helsinki (1993). Since previous studies tended not to view street maps as textual artifacts, let alone use appropriate textual methods of analysis, our study will add a hermeneutic interpretation of street maps by means of textual analysis. Each town will be examined in two stages. First, an analysis of the local narrative in terms of street names will be presented. Second, using a textual analysis method, a hermeneutic reading of street maps as spatial-texts will be offered. The analysis will be followed by a quantitative summary of street names according to name categories. Downloaded from pdf.highwire.org by guest on May 10, 2013 Pinchevski & Torgovnik, Signifying passages 369 Local narrative An analysis of the local narrative behind a street map is possible only when regarding it as a multi-layered whole interweaving time and space. This ‘archeological’ examination endeavors to connect a name to its givers, to the period in which it was given, and to its specific surroundings. Political changes in the municipal and governmental arenas would most probably have had their effect on street names, presumably because every ideologi- cal period has its own symbols and ideas it aspires to introduce into the collective memory sphere – and from there into the political consensus. While focusing on the ‘story behind the name’, special attention will be given to cases in which new names were given to unnamed streets and also to cases in which old names were erased and replaced by new ones. The former indicates prevalent or new meanings given to a blank social space, whereas the second indicates not only the engraving of new meanings but also the abolishment of the former. Both cases are, of course, an expression of ideological intentions. However, the latter bears double the significance since it indicates a double intention: giving a new name and erasing the old. Interpretation of the spatial texts Space is one of the main elements in a cultural system. As a collection of cultural artifacts – namely: a text – it might mediate some aspects of the social system in which it was produced (Duncan, 1990: 17).2 Hence, the textual facet of space, or in this case the spatial-text arising from a street map, is readable and interpretable. As Palonen notes: ‘looking at a street map of a city may be, for the competent reader, sufficient to get a first glimpse of the history of the city in the terms of the changing political climates’ (1993: 104). Furthermore, reading the spatial-text is possible in more contexts than the historical-political one; this text may also be put in a demographic, geographical or sociological context, thus introducing additional readings of it. It is likely that there are cases in which a combined approach is also possible, for instance, a reading taking into consideration both historic and demographic contexts. It should be empha- sized that interpretation requires the extraction of the text, or parts of it, from its seemingly ‘innocent’ surroundings. Hence, the task of a herme- neutic explication is to join the textual elements in the spatial-text with distinct contexts, thereby offering a richer analysis. The method chosen for this task is re-contextualization.3 In this method, the text, or parts of it, is taken out from its given context and put in another in order to reveal some meanings that were concealed in the original context (Linell, 1998: 145; Sarangi, 1998: 306). Let us clarify the idea with a specific example. In the Downloaded from pdf.highwire.org by guest on May 10, 2013 370 Media, Culture & Society 24(3) early 1990s two new neighborhoods were built in the southern town of Sderot to accommodate Jewish newcomers, especially those from the former Soviet Union. The two neighborhoods were built north of the older town, and the road connecting them to the older part was named ‘Aliya Road’. In Hebrew the word aliya means both climbing or ascending and returning back to the land of Israel, thus suggesting the prominent place of the land in relation to other places. Examining this case without positioning it in the particular demographic context of Sderot would probably not have raised any deliberations. However, the re-contextualization of this textual element in the specific demographic-historic context reveals an additional meaning: the name ‘Aliya Road’ also indicates a symbolic separation between the older part of the town and the newly inhabited one, a separation seemingly perpetuating the alienation of the newcomers through the name of the road leading to their new homes. Therefore, when the spatial text is placed in a demographic, historical, political or geographic context it becomes much more than a street map: it bears meanings transcending the sum of its parts rendering its interpretability. Such analysis views the spatial-text as a whole capable of mediating shifts in the governing mindsets, the place of the town in relation to the country, changes in commemoration patterns, and other messages conveyed via street names, all this in specific contexts. Following this analysis a quantitative summary will be presented according to name categories.4 Ramle: between presence and absence Local narrative The former Arabic town of Ramle was conquered by the Israeli Army in July 1948; consequently, most of its Arab population fled to the east. After a short period of military administration, Ramle was declared to be an Israeli town and was opened to Jewish settlers.5 Although one would expect an Arab-Israeli mix in street names, as the analysis shows, this expectation was not realized. Arabic Ramle had, of course, many streets, but only six main streets were known by names: ‘Deir-El-Latin’ (‘Latin monastery’), ‘Moristan’ (Hospital), ‘Suliman Eben Abed-El-Malek’ (Ramle’s Muslim founder), ‘Omar Eben Abed-El-Khaytab’ (Caliph of the Islam), ‘Malek Feistal’ (the Iraqi king) and ‘Aqire’ road. These names were preserved throughout the British Mandate, and as a British map from 1947 shows, these names not only existed but were also acknowledged by the British administration.6 Soon after Ramle was taken, an administrative committee was assigned by the Israel Ministry of the Interior to run the town’s affairs. One of the first actions after assuming power was erasing all Downloaded from pdf.highwire.org by guest on May 10, 2013 Pinchevski & Torgovnik, Signifying passages 371 Arab names and putting new names in their place, including all the streets that did not previously have names. At the first stage, streets were assigned to the anonymity of alphabetical letters, for example: ‘Deir-El-Latin’ and ‘Moristan’ were labeled ‘N’ (‘Nun’ in Hebrew); ‘Suliman Eben Abed-El- Malek’ was turned to ‘TA’ (‘Tav-Alef’); ‘Abed-El-Khaytab’ to ‘T’ (‘Tav’); ‘Feistal’ to ‘GN’ (‘Gimmel-Nun’) and ‘Aqire’ to ‘KB’ (‘Koff-Bet’). In this way all previously unnamed streets were also named.7 The urgency to sort out Ramle’s urban map stemmed from the upcoming general elections held in 1949, for which a population census was conducted in preparation for the first electoral register.8 Soon after the state exercised its power over this urban space, the local administration changed street labels in old Ramle to names of figures, events and symbols from the history of the people of Israel (Vilnay, 1961: 40). This was done by the first town council elected in 1950 and led by a coalition of representatives from the Israeli Labor Party (Mapai), United Labor Party (Mapam) and the religious labor party (Ha’Poel Ha’Mizrachi); this coalition remained in power for almost two decades.9 The names given to old Ramle’s streets were mainly Zionist and nationalist in nature, such as: ‘Lord Balfour’ (pro- Zionist British statesman), ‘Eliahu Golomb’ (leader of the Zionist labor movement), ‘Hashomer’ (a group founded in 1909 to protect Jewish settlers) and ‘Exodus’ (a ship with 4500 Jewish immigrants attacked and deported back to Germany by the British). As for the Arab names that were changed to letters, the main road (previously the Jaffa–Jerusalem road) – on which Theodore Hertzl passed through on his historical visit in 1898 – was now named ‘Hertzl Street’; ‘Deir-El-Latin’ and ‘Moristan’ (both given the label ‘Nun’ in 1949) were named ‘Bialik’ after the national poet; ‘Abed-El-Malek’, or ‘Tav-Alef’, was named ‘Jan Masarik’ after the Czech benefactor; ‘Feistal’, or ‘Tav’, was now ‘Jabotinsky’; and ‘Aqire’, or ‘Gimmel-Nun’, was changed to ‘Danny Mas’, an army commander killed in a heroic action. When new neighborhoods were built, following mass immigration to Israel during the early 1960s, the names that were given to their streets clearly reflected the municipal coalition formation. The first neighborhood, built for factory workers, received street names taken from the socialist Zionist movement: ‘Ha’Poel’ (the laborer), ‘Katzanelson’, ‘Motzkin’, ‘Shprintzak’ (labor leaders) and ‘Echad Be’May’ (The First of May). The second neighborhood received names from the Jewish tradition, especially of renowned rabbis and sages such as ‘Meir Bar-Ilan’, ‘Mohaliver’, ‘Raines’, ‘Uziel’ and ‘Ha’Rambam’. In addition, some biblical names were given to streets on the southern side of old town changing some of the remaining street letters: ‘Moshe Rabenu’, ‘Eliyahu Ha’Navie’, ‘Amos’, ‘Yehezkel’ and ‘Zefania’. 1959 saw for the first time the formation of a local political party – The Independent Party of Iraqi Jews in Ramle – which succeeded in being Downloaded from pdf.highwire.org by guest on May 10, 2013 372 Media, Culture & Society 24(3) elected to the town council and receiving two seats out of a total of 13. In addition to promoting local interests of the Jewish-Iraqi community, the party worked to put its unique mark on the town’s map. Consequently, the names ‘Wachil Yehezkel’, ‘Yosef Haim’ and ‘Ovadia Somech’ (all prominent Jewish-Iraqi figures) were given to alphabetical streets, and also a street bearing the letters ‘Tav-Beit’ was changed to ‘Ades Shpik’ after a Zionist activist who was hanged in Iraq in 1948. After the Six-Day War in 1967, the foundations for the new Giora neighborhood (named after Giora Yoseftal, a prominent Labor Party leader) were laid down. Built to accommodate newcomers to Israel, the street names given in this neighborhood bore distinctive national characteristics, influenced, most probably, by the victorious endeavor of the Six-Day War. Amongst these names are: ‘Ha’Tzanhanim’ (the Paratroopers), ‘Zahal’ (Israel Defense Forces), ‘Ha’Shirion’ (tank forces) and ‘Golani’ (an infantry battalion). Up until 1961, Jabotinsky, the founder of the right-wing movement Beitar, was the only right-wing political figure to be commemorated by a street in the old town. The military success of the Six-Day War, led by a national unity government which included a right-wing party and its leader Menahem Begin, gave a new legitimacy to the right. Thus more names associated with right-wing political symbols were given, such as: ‘Beitar’, ‘Ha’Etzel’ (the underground activist group that fought against the British) and ‘David Raziel’ (Ha’Etzel’s first commander) – all given to streets previously bearing letters. The symbolic transition in street names might have been a precursor to a political shift in the municipality and in Israel as a whole. And this political shift took place first in 1971 when Ramle elected a mayor from the right-wing Gahal party for the first time. The power of right-wing factions in Ramle’s municipality increased steadily; since 1989 a mayor affiliated with the national Likud party has always held office. Accordingly, recent municipal coalitions have mostly consisted of the Likud party, Ramle’s local political list and the Mafdal religious party.10 Towards the end of the 1970s, the economic standard of living in Israel was increasing. Municipalities, including Ramle, wanted to attract well-to- do people in order to gentrify the area occupied by residents of relatively modest means. Ramle’s municipality began the construction of a new neighborhood on the western side of town, Yeffe Nof, designed to attract a more affluent population. In addition, the municipality proposed that potential inhabitants have greater autonomy in designing and constructing their new homes and surroundings. Consequently, potential buyers of homes specifically demanded to shape their symbolic environment and presented a proposal for street names for the new neighborhood. All the names presented were taken from nature and were deprived of any political Downloaded from pdf.highwire.org by guest on May 10, 2013 Pinchevski & Torgovnik, Signifying passages 373 or ideological characteristics, mostly being names of flowers, trees and other natural themes. Ramle’s three most recently-built neighborhoods represent three distinct symbolic and commemorative arrays. The new Neve David neighborhood, inhabited by economically well-to-do people, carries names related to nature, similar to those in Yeffe Nof. Here residents also insisted on having apolitical names for their streets, preferring more ‘natural’ topics like flowers and trees. In contrast, street names in the new immigrant neighbor- hood of Kiriat Menahem Begin (named after the first Likud party prime minister) – built to accommodate newcomers, especially from the former Soviet Union countries during the early 1990s – bear a notably political character. These street names reflect the political bent of the municipal committee, chaired by a Likud representative and supported by the mayor, also a Likud party member. Hence, a greater emphasis on commemorating figures from the Israeli political right is noticeable: ‘Arie Ben-Eliezer’, ‘Micha Riser’, ‘Shmuel Tamir’ and ‘Haim Landau’. Here the political right also emphasized what Labor previously undermined. For the first time, names of figures from the radical right-wing organization Lechi (a pre-state radical underground group which fought against the British) were com- memorated: ‘Aba Achimeir’ and ‘Yair Stern’. These actions represent a penetration of political right symbols into the prevalent landscape, still bearing names and topics set by the socialist political parties. The last symbolic array is of local figures. Several streets in the new neighborhoods were recently given names of local figures, former mayors and deputy mayors (such as ‘Kremer’, ‘A.S. Levi’ and ‘Buganim’). Ramle had started to weave its own local history into the street map side-by-side with the national, the ideological and the apolitical elements. Interpretation of the spatial-text The conquest of Ramle was accompanied by a purposeful act of symbolic appropriation of the urban space – erasing all previous names and quickly attaching new labels instead, later to be changed into Hebrew names. Today one third of Ramle’s population is Arabic (those who remained in Ramle or arrived after 1948), and mainly concentrated in two areas: in the old town and in the Juarish area, which was built on the town’s western outskirts to house Arabs mostly from the Juarish family. Yet modern Ramle’s spatial-text never bore – nor does it currently bear – any name or symbol of the Arab population. Furthermore: a quick look at the map shows that the older parts of Ramle, where many Arabs reside, hold the largest concentration of names signifying Zionist and national elements. These names comprise almost 23 percent out of all street names (see Table 1), and were mostly given in the first stages of Ramle’s inhabitation during Downloaded from pdf.highwire.org by guest on May 10, 2013