Israel erased the Arab landscape by renaming Palestinian places with Old Testament Hebrew names

Evidence

Over the past half-century, then, Israel has managed to evaporate the Arab landscape by renaming, in Hebrew, places removed of Palestinian people though still haunted by the ghosts of those fled. Very often the names are those from the Old Testament. This evaporative renaming thus fabricates Israeli jurisdiction as an ancient biblical claim, reducing Palestinian insistence to return to a delusional, manic vision, to political propaganda, as former Jerusalem deputy mayor Meron Benvenisti characterizes it in his bitingly incisive study of this history of renomination. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 626

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to my prior reading on settler-colonial place-renaming and to Abu El-Haj’s archaeology argument in the next paragraph; also echoes the silencing/land theme running through my soundscape library. — connects to: Colonial renaming erased Innu place-names like Patshetshunau — Winona LaDuke, All Our Relations: Native Struggles for…, 331
• SEED: A possible essay angle: place-renaming as a technology of erasure across colonial contexts — Israel’s Old Testament renaming versus English renaming of Indigenous Australian sites, etc.