Israeli Landscape Research Articles

The waste of nations: Household trash and the affective politics of recycling in Israel

Solid waste treatment is an acute concern for countries facing waning landfilling capacity, increasingly strict controls on waste transport and treatment, and the persistent threat of climate change. These challenges are typically met by neoliberal and technocratic solutions that privatize public services while encouraging curbside recycling. I examine such an effort to promote curbside recycling in Israel. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in the Israeli recycling world, and on anthropology, geography, science and technology studies and critical waste studies literatures, I interrogate the affective politics of household waste recycling in Israel over the past decade and attempts to configure a Europeanized and moral national space through recycling. I describe the cultural and ethnonational repertoires through which curbside recycling was naturalized in the Israeli landscape, how recycling was mutually animated with a range of sociopolitical concerns that far exceeded its financial or environmental significance, and how these mutually shaped waste as a social–environmental problem. I argue that social and material conditions gave rise to a dual process, in which both the problem of waste, and its necessary solutions, were actively and mutually constructed. This paper contributes to comparative literatures on national cultures of waste recycling, shedding light on how a project of Western ecological modernization was translated and became locally meaningful in Israel's settler-colonial context, how household waste was ontologically coproduced in this process, and how its stakes were experienced, voiced, and materialized.

Holy green: silwan, design knowledge, and the 1967 making of Jerusalem's Old City Walls National Park

ABSTRACT One of the most volatile sites in Jerusalem is the Palestinian neighbourhood of Silwan, at the heart of which lies the City of David archeological site. Much scholarship focuses on the contemporary tensions that arise from its two contradictory identities: an East Jerusalem Palestinian residential community and a Jewish symbol of a mythical past. This article, by contrast, explores a largely overlooked historical moment that has been key to the shaping of these dynamics: the declaration within merely six weeks after the 1967 war of an Israeli national park around the Old City Walls. The article explores how an unrealized British colonial plan for a green belt around the historic walls of Jerusalem was updated in 1967 by Israeli landscape architects using cutting-edge North American environmentalist ideas. Their blueprint, we argue, was crucial to the shaping of the ‘holy basin’s’ spatial logic, landscape imaginaries, and legal structures, necessary to understand the current turn of events. In this process, we highlight the centrality of incorporating longer-term perspectives in the study of contemporary urban realities, bringing into closer dialogue scholarship on present-day urbanism with historical studies of planning and cities.

Between knowing and understanding: Israeli Jews and the memory of the Palestinian Nakba

ABSTRACT The village of Miska is one of the 530 Palestinian localities destroyed during the Palestinian Nakba (Arabic for great calamity, catastrophe, or devastation). Although the ruins of these places are part of the Israeli landscape, and most Israeli Jews have some knowledge about the Nakba, they do not understand its meaning. In this paper, I deploy Hannah Arendt’s distinction between knowing and understanding to answer the question of how the Nakba can at once be known but not understood by Israeli Jews. Drawing on the tours conducted by the activist organization Zochrot (Hebrew for ‘we remember’) to the ruins of Miska, I argue that the embodied and symbolic practices conducted during the tours to Miska can work to challenge the gap between knowing and understanding by creating a different perspective on the Nakba. From this perspective, the Nakba is not only understood as the memory of the ‘other’—that is, the Palestinian memory of the place—but is understood as a complex memory that embodies a dialectical relationship between Jewish and Palestinian remembrances: a potentially common memory of the place and the basis for the imagining of a common future.

Jewish state, Muslim cemeteries: the fate of Muslim graveyards in the State of Israel, 1948–1967

Between 1948 and1967, Muslim cemeteries in the State of Israel saw many changes. The present article examines how the state elected to treat the many deserted Muslim cemeteries within its limits: should these cemeteries be protected by the Jewish state? Or should they be demolished, their remains removed from the evolving Israeli landscape? Israeli archival sources facilitate the study of this phenomenon, highlighting the duplicitous nature of the Israeli bureaucratic approach toward Muslim cemeteries. Charged with safeguarding the sites, the Ministry of Religious Affairs’ Muslim and Druze Department attempted to confront the state’s propensity to evacuate the cemeteries and use the vacant space for different needs. Yet, at the same time, other Israeli actors – various governmental offices, municipalities, and even the army – played a part in the process of neglect, damage, and appropriation that these cemeteries suffered.

Female Landscape Architects in Israel: An Emerging Professional Community

This article offers a feminist perspective on the intersection of gender and landscape architecture in Israel, focusing on the life experiences, achievements, and changing status of female practitioners. It addresses the specificity of the field’s local history while offering considerations for exploring modes of practice in other social, cultural, and geographical contexts neglected by canonical accounts. Although Israeli landscape architecture is dominated by Western paradigms, it has also been shaped by a significant number of unique characteristics. In addition, the particular social and cultural conditions that affect the lives of Israeli women make this local example worth examining. The discussion focuses on the experience of female landscape architects (FLAs) in Israel from the late 1970s to the present. The author examines the local shift in landscape architecture from a male-dominated field to one dominated by women, who now form the majority of academically trained students and lead professional firms. The article includes a qualitative study of 14 FLAs. The interviewees were divided in their positions on gender-related issues. Some rejected the existence of a gender-based style of design or mode of practice. Others found that their “feminine” or “soft” skills were of great value and that their ability to pay attention to the place and its inhabitants, and negotiate solutions, enabled them to succeed where more typically male practitioners failed.

Casting off the Shackles: Re-narrativizing Discrepant Terrains of Memories with Lived Experiences in A. B. Yehoshua’s Facing the Forests

The ever-increasing human migration with fast-eroding bonds often leads to development of social clusters which tend to produce stereotypes about other groups of people. One among the many factors responsible for such ghettoization is not ignorance but a version of knowledge that does not take us beyond ourselves. Speaking about the role of writer as “the conscience of the nation,” S. Yizhar, an Israeli writer and politician, says that a writer is a mutation. Literature is one such powerful tool to transcend cultural boundaries which takes us beyond ourselves and reaches to the other side. Holding the case of Israeli–Palestinian contestation as one such manifestation of cultural ghettoization, the article argues for the need to render open the mental borders to move beyond prejudices. Taking A. B. Yehoshua’s Facing the Forests as a point of departure, it highlights the potential of dialog as a powerful antidote to social violence between the two communities of Arabs and Israelis and lays bare its importance in the direction of peaceful coexistence. The article is divided into three sections; the first section introduces the cultural location of Yehoshua and his narrative set in the Israeli landscape of the 1960s. The second section explores the use of symbolism in the narrative to cull out the dormant meanings and analyzes the multiple layers of the text. The third and last section projects the idea of re-narrativization as an important tool of re-inscribing history with alternative versions. It draws strength from those Arab–Jewish encounters that are not necessarily troubling. The conclusion sums up the essential findings of the study, elucidating the role of literature and intellectuals in difficult times.

Re-romanticizing Commons and Community in Israeli Discourse: Social, Economic, and Political Motives

Abstract Public discourse in Israel is taking a somewhat surprising turn in its vacillation between individualism and collectivism. While mainstream public opinion in the 1980s and 1990s pointed to the failures of common- and public-property regimes, elected officials, entrepreneurs, and consumers are nowadays singing the praises of commons and communities. The re-romanticizing of commons and community is driven by a number of explicit and implicit motives, which also underscore, however, the limits of a full-fledged return to common-property regimes. This article highlights three instances of the reemergence of the commons- and community-discourse across the Israeli landscape. First, while the old-style “cooperative kibbutz” suffered a substantial decline in past decades, the evolution of a new type of midlevel communitarianism in the “renewing kibbutz” has led to a growing demand to join the ranks of such kibbutzim. Second is the development of urban shared office-space compounds such as WeWork, and the next phase of urban commons: co-living buildings. Third, the emergence of “community villages” on state-owned lands, located mostly in Israel’s peripheral areas, has been praised by governmental agencies and residents alike as restoring a key role for community for middle-class families. But this advocacy may also be driven by exclusionary social and political motives, as applicants may be turned down based on open-ended criteria, such as “incompatibility with social life in the community” or incongruity with its “social-cultural texture.” These case studies serve as a basis for offering new theoretical tools for thinking about the commons, fifty years after The Tragedy of the Commons presented their apparent failures. A fresh theory of commons and community could highlight how the revived discourse attests to the need to design a new set of balances between the perils of commons and anticommons, between values of anonymity and familiarity, and between governance by hierarchy and egalitarian rules.

The Paleo-Anthropocene and the Genesis of the Current Landscape of Israel

AbstractWorldwide, human impact on natural landscapes has intensified since prehistoric times, and this is well documented in the global archaeological record. The period between the earliest hominids and the Industrial Revolution of the late 18-19thcenturies is known as the Paleo-Anthropocene. The current study reviews key geoarchaeological, floral and faunal factors of the Paleo-Anthropocene in Israel, an area that has undergone human activities in various intensities since prehistoric times. It discusses significant human imprints on these three features in the Israeli landscape, demonstrating that its current form is almost entirely anthropogenic. Moreover, some of the past physical changes still dynamically shape Israel’s zoological, archaeological and geomorphic landscape today. It is hoped that insights from this article might aid in guiding present-day management strategies of undeveloped areas through renewal of human activity guided by traditional knowledge.

<b>Landscapes in Translation: Traveling the Occupied Palestinian Territories and Israel with Raja Shehadeh and David Grossman</b> // Paisajes en traducción: Viajando por los territorios ocupados palestinos e Israel con Raja Shehadeh y David Grossman

This paper investigates the translation of raw terrain and territory—rocks, streams, canyons, packs of wild dog and clusters of cyclamen—into two parallel, contrapuntal, and mutually referential forms of textualized landscapes: Israeli nature, landscape, and travel in Grossman's To the End of the Land and Palestinian landscape as figured in Raja Shehadeh’s renderings in Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Landscape. By examining Shehadeh's and Grossman’s translations of the same topoi—olive groves, paths in woods, wildlife, wildflowers, wild dogs and their behaviors, streams, footpaths, memorials, walls, and checkpoints—this paper investigates how topographical facts on the map and on the ground— geomorphological, biological, and cultural features of terrain—are differentially translated, transformed and moved into distinctive national natures—the multiple ways in which natural landscapes and national identities are conflated. The paper argues that the cultural and psychological scars of Israeli and Palestinian historical relations over land, boundaries, and political control are saturate landscape descriptions and narratives of “walking the land.” A second question animates this analysis: How are Shehadeh’s and Grossman’s personal histories of “the situation” carried over and translated into these landscapes and travel narratives? Slavoj Zizek asserts “already inscribed into the perceived object itself, in the guise of its [the subject’s] 'blind spot,' …is the point from which the object itself returns the gaze. Sure the picture is in my eye, but I am also in the picture.” Might Zizek’s claim assist us in understanding how the poetics and politics of the Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories are translated into topography and moved, from one place to another, as we see and walk these lands in tropes painted by Grossman’s and Shehadeh’s hands? Resumen Este ensayo investiga la traducción del terreno y el territorio crudos—las rocas, los arroyos, los cañones, las hordas de perros salvajes y los ramilletes de ciclamen—a dos formas paralelas, contrapuntuales y mutuamente referenciales de paisajes textualizados: la naturaleza, el paisaje, y el viajar israelitas en Al Final de la Tierra de Grossman, y el paisaje palestino tal y como está figurado en las representaciones de Raja Shehadeh en Excursiones Palestinas: una incursión en un paisaje en vías de desaparecer. Al examinar las traducciones de Shehadeh y Grossman de los mismos topoi—los bosquecillos de oliva, los senderos en los bosques, la fauna, las flores silvestres, los perros salvajes y sus comportamientos, los arroyos, los senderos, los memoriales, las paredes y los lugares de inspección—este ensayo investiga cómo los hechos topográficos en el mapa y sobre la tierra—los aspectos geomorfológicos, biológicos y culturales del terreno—son traducidos diferencialmente, tranformados y movidos a las naturalezas nacionales distintivas y a los paisajes móviles. El ensayo argumenta que las cicatrices culturales y psicológicas de las relaciones históricas israelitas y palestinas sobre la tierra, las fronteras y el control político están saturadas en las descripciones de los paisajes y las narrativas de “caminando la tierra.” Una segunda cuestión motiva este análisis: ¿Cómo las historias personales de Shehadeh y Grossman de “la situatión” están transportadas y traducidas a estos paisajes y narrativas de viaje? Slavoj Zizek afirma que “ya inscrita dentro del objeto mismo disfrazado en el punto ciego’ del [sujeto]...es el punto del cual el objeto mismo devuele la mirada. Es cierto que la imagen está en mi ojo, pero yo tambíen estoy en la imagen.” ¿Puede que la afirmación de Zizek nos ayude a entender cómo la poética y las políticas de Israel y los territorios ocupados palestinos son traducidas a la topografia y movidos de un lugar a otro mientras vemos y caminamos por estas tierras en tropos pintados por las manos de Grossman y Shehadeh?

Halprin in Israel

Lawrence Halprin9s contributions to the Israeli landscape—though little known—were significant in the areas of planning and design. Halprin9s relationship to Israel spans his lifetime. Born into a Zionist family, he spent two years on a kibbutz in the 1930s which profoundly influenced his ethics and philosophy. He returned to Israel throughout his life. His contributions were both as advisor and designer. He advised on national landscape planning, national parks, and was an influential member of Mayor Teddy Kollek9s Jerusalem Committee. His design projects, all in Jerusalem, include: the Hadassah Medical Center, the Israel Museum, and the Ben Yehuda Mall. His most significant work is the Haas Promenade (with Shlomo Aronson) and the Rhoda Goldman Promenade (with Bruce Levin). His Israeli work exemplifies aspects of his most significant contributions as a designer. The work is derived from intense personal experience. It is passionate and idealistic, and it exemplifies continued attention to choreography and performance. The work draws from lessons learned from the thoughtful examination of other places, yet is based on a careful sensitivity to the cultural and physical conditions of the place. The work demonstrates his attention and consummate skill at all phases and scales of design, planning, and construction.

The Jewish Quarter after 1967

The article explores the reconstruction of Jerusalem’s Jewish Quarter after the 1967 war, with an emphasis on the area’s emergence as a symbolic Israeli landscape. The post-1967 Jewish Quarter became a symbol of national renewal and of Jewish control over united Jerusalem. In fact, it was the destruction during the 1948 war and the severe neglect in its aftermath that provided Israel the opportunity to recreate the area’s geography and history, to design and build it anew from both a physical and a symbolic standpoint. After 1967, primarily during the formative years of the 1970s and 1980s, various agents—politicians, planners, contractors, archeologists, clergy, cultural groups, and private people—had their impact on the revival of the Jewish Quarter. Together, they crafted a new landscape whose connection to the pre-1948 neighborhood is extremely vague. By drawing from the quarter’s past in a selective manner, these agents created new forms of historical memory, which helped forge and bolster Israeli identity and pride. At the end of this process, it is doubtful whether the symbolic values of the Jewish Quarter as one can experience them today were developed according to ideas that the government agents had in the beginning of its reconstruction.

Israeli Children in a European Theater: Amos Oz's A Tale of Love and Darkness and S. Yizhar's Preliminaries

Israeli Children in a European Theater:Amos Oz's A Tale of Love and Darkness and S. Yizhar's Preliminaries Sheila E. Jelen How can he know that he is actually sitting here inside a theater, that tiny theater in which the greatest show on earth is being performed, the spectacle of the birth of the new Jew in the new Land?1 In recent years, the premises of Israeli literary history, organized in large part around questions of authors' biographical relationships to the State of Israel (whether the author was born in the Land of Israel or elsewhere, before the establishment of the State or after), have been challenged in discussions over tension in the formation of literary canons between cosmopolitanism and native Israeli authorial identity. For example, Esther Raab, among the first "native" Israeli poets, whose parents were founding pioneers of Petach Tikvah and who was born there in 1894, was valorized for her "nativism." Her landscape poetry, evoking the dry, white-hot reality of the land of Israel was, until recently, read as a sign of her deep connection to the land and was seen as an antidote to the poetry of her European-born peers with its expressions of longing for an unattainable, imagined landscape modeled on European standards of beauty. However, even as Raab was viewed as more "indigenous" to the land, Raab's European-born peers (Avraham Shlonsky, Natan Alterman, and Leah Goldberg), by virtue of their European modernist affiliations, were considered (or considered themselves) superior stylists.2 Critics of late have worked to downplay the value of "nativisim" and to play up the inherent cosmopolitanism in the work of writers who, having [End Page 504] been born in Israel, were nevertheless born to European parents and grew up in European enclaves, both linguistically and culturally. Adriana Tatum, for example, points out that while Raab was born in Petach Tikvah, she was, in fact, surrounded by Russian, French, and German speakers throughout her childhood and even spent several years studying French at the Sorbonne in early adulthood. She lived, in Tatum's view, at a linguistic and cultural crossroads, singing, in Petach Tikvah, Psalms set to the music of the Ukranian national anthem. S. Yizhar, in Preliminaries (2007), and Amos Oz in A Tale of Love and Darkness (2004), negotiate a similar tension, between pride over their role as the first native-born representatives of an autonomous political identity in a Jewish national homeland, and consciousness of cultural forces that exceed a territorial nationalism. Narrated from the perspective of mature writers at the end of their careers, each of these autobiographical novels captures the breadth and the wonder of growing up in an overwhelming psychic world which is the special territory of gifted, sensitive children, but also in the tumultuous period of the new Yishuv on the threshold of the birth of the State of Israel. In A Tale of Love and Darkness and Preliminaries, Oz and Yizhar negotiate the countervailing powers of the self and the nation, depicting their psychological development alongside the political development of the State of Israel whose heavy mantle they were forced, as the children of Zionist idealists (to a greater or lesser degree), to bear. Implicit in each text is a profound awareness of the burdens of growing up as a first-generation Israeli with spiritual and intellectual leanings toward a kind of aesthetic and consciousness that cannot be confined to a single landscape or a single language. Each of these writers, reflecting on his position as a native-born "Eretz-Israeli" Jew to Eastern European immigrants within an imminent Israeli landscape, plays with the expectations heaped upon him—the embodiment of the Zionist ideal—against a backdrop of longing (as in Yizhar's case) or ambivalence (as in Oz's case) for broader, richer, and more culturally resonant European homelands left behind. As Eran Kaplan argues of Oz: "He emerges from [A] Tale of Love and Darkness as a native-born Israeli whose environment and cultural background were shaped as much by Jerusalem of the 1930s and 1940s as by Europe of the previous century."3 Yet, as I hope to argue, while Yizhar seeks to embrace...

Bridge over the Wadi: A Festival of Coexistence in Israel

The ‘Holiday of Holidays’ is a unique event of coexistence in the Israeli landscape as well as in the entire Middle East. The festival unites the three religions: the Christian Christmas, the Jewish Hanukkah and the Muslim Ramadan. It has been taking place for the past 15 years in November–December in the Wadi Nisnas neighbourhood of Haifa, Israel. This is a colourful celebration of art, music, fragrances, tastes and magnificent holiday lighting that creates syncretism between old and new, languages and religious symbols. The organizers choose universal elements: food, commerce and art, which are disengaged from conflictual contexts. Beyond the commercial-tourist aspect, this festival creates ‘another place’ with encounters between hostile groups.

The Experienced Soul: Studies in Amichai (review)

Book Reviews 143 plays, and biblical narrative, is radically "nontraditional," because anti-mythic and antisacrificial in the commentary it is and offers. To expel it as a scapegoat, as something guilty, is to silence the witness of conscience. Ann W. Astell Department of English Purdue University The Experienced Soul: Studies in Amichai, edited by Glenda Abramson. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997. 136 pp. $59.00. Few Israeli writers have received as much attention from the English speaking world as Yehuda Amichai. Considering how well-known he is in translation, considering his frequent and well attended speaking engagements outside of Israel, and considering all the public speculation that he may someday win a Nobel prize, remarkably little serious analysis and commentary on his work is available in English. Glenda Abramson's The Writing of Yehuda Amichai: A Thematic Approach appeared in 1989 and remains the only book-length study of Amichai for English-reading audiences. Abramson has followed up on that effort with an edited collection, The Experienced Soul, which presents a number of essays on various aspects of Amichai's work. The collection emerged from a conference held in Oxford in 1994 on the occasion of Amichai's seventieth birthday, and it includes contributors from Britain, Israel, the U.S. and Italy. Among the virtues of this volume is the diversity of its offerings. Though mostly concerned with Amichai's poetry, it contains pieces on his fiction (by Risa Domb and Leon Yudkin) and on his drama (by Gabriella Moscati Steindler). Also included is an essay (by Menucha Gilboa) on the literature Arnichai has written for children, an aspect of his creativity rarely recognized in English. Within these diverse discussions, several patterns of interest recur. One is a preoccupation with the balance of personal and collective emphasis in Amichai's writing. His poetry, renowned for its attention to the individual, values the world of everyday experience over ideological abstractions and decries the indifference of history to the private concerns of ordinary people. At the same time, Amichai has been celebrated for speaking on behalf of a whole generation and expressing its communal aspirations and disillusionments. (This, after all, is the poet who wrote: "When I was young, the whole country was young. . .. when I fought, she fought, when I arose/ she arose too and when I sank/she began to sink with me.") Critics have gravitated toward the questions, to what extent is his writing confmed to private affairs?; how much is it of this time and this place, related to the particulars of the Israeli landscape?; or is it, finally, concerned more with mythic dimensions of life than with current political 144 SHOFAR Spring 1998 Vol. 16, No.3 debate? The conclusions reached have been varied (see, for instance, the essays by Glenda Abramson and Ziva Feldman). The most unusual assessment and the one most tied to a particular political moment is by an Egyptian scholar, Abd EI-Khalik Gobah, who has authored a book on Amichai that appeared in Arabic in 1986. His piece here, called "A Tribute to Yehuda Amichai," reports that Egyptian intellectuals see Amichai as a spokesperson for peace, one who was ahead of his time in developing an ideology not fully enough appreciated till the peace movements of the 1990s. In "The Political Significance of Amichai's Poetry," Boaz Arpali argues persuasively that Amichai's ideas have had widespread impact and helped change the political climate in Israel, precisely because they are not narrowly politicized. Neither closely allied with a protest movement nor tied to a party platform, seen by some Israelis as politically noncommittal , his restrained and empathetic poetry has been widely read and admired and so has had the (sometimes subversive) effect of promoting anti-war sentiments throughout Israeli society. Nili Scharf Gold brings a distinctly different perspective to the issue of the individual and the collective. She sees the valorization of private nurturance over grand historical schemes as an expression of "The 'Feminine' in Amichai's Poetics." Her take on Amichai's treatment ofparents and children leads to insightful readings informed by feminist criticism. (See, for example, her comments on the poem, "A Lettter of Recommendation.") A second area of interest...

Mayor Teddy Kollek and the Jerusalem Foundation: Governing the Holy City

The Jerusalem Foundation is Mayor Teddy Kollek's device for coping with an official budget that is too small, and official procedures that are too cumbersome. Jerusalem's special features, and the personal traits of Mayor and Foundation Chairman Kollek go a long way in explaining the foundation's accomplishments. At the same time, the foundation warrants general attention. Practicing politicians and administrators have focused attention on the combined problems of resource shortages, and government bodies that commit themselves to more than they can deliver.' Among the remedies offered are non-governmental providers of public services, and private philanthropy.2 The Jerusalem Foundation is a successful case at the interface of private and public bodies. It is also distinctive in its intimate relationship with the municipality, and illustrates some problems in the use of private resources by public officials. If other executives would seek to emulate Kollek, they had best consider the risks as well as the rewards. While the positions of Teddy Kollek as head of both the Jerusalem Foundation and the municipality makes this a special case, the Jerusalem Foundation also resembles many other bodies on the Israeli landscape. The Histadrut (Labor Federation) and the Jewish Agency provide important social services from outside the governmental framework and countless other bodies send their representatives abroad, or maintain offices overseas to solicit contributions. The financial dependence on voluntary contributions from the diaspora reflects both the tenuous financial position of modern Israel, and the long tradition of charity among Jews. For centuries before there was a state, Jews in the diaspora sent money to Jewish institutions in Jerusalem and elsewhere in Israel. It is difficult to remain for long in Jerusalem without coming to recognize the emblem that signifies contributions of the foundation. There have been over 600 projects since 1966. The foundation emphasizes its support for social and cultural programs, for both Arabs and Jews, and for poor neighborhoods. It has developed playgrounds and flower gardens in virtually every neighborhood. There are theatres of tasteful design with active programs, that offer subsidized productions for school children. Community centers have gymnasiums, sports fields, rooms for youth and adult education, dance, art workshops, and theatre. Parks, walkways, and amphitheatres appear at ancient landmarks, grace-

Israel's Place-Names as Reflection of Continuity and Change in Nation-Building

SYMBOLIC PLACE-NAMES This sub-group of names has a specific commendatory meaning. Examples are Orim (Lights), Haruzim (the Industrious Ones), and' Alumim (Youth). Attributes of this group are names that suggest positive properties, high quality, happiness and stability. Altogether, 65 settlements are included in this sub-group. ARABIC ORIGIN PLACE-NAMES A total of 59 settlements or 6.6% of the settlements have an Arabic origin. Some settlements were located on former Arab villages sites or in a close proximity to Arab villages from which they borrowed their name. Arab names were transformed to the Hebrew by translating the name as in the case of Bania which is the translation of the Arab word Shajara. It means A place 14Cohen, Erik, The City in Zionist Ideology (Jerusalem: The Hebrew University [Institute of Urban and Regional Studies,] No. 12, 1970). Israel's Place-Names 237 where there are trees in both languages. But more often the Hebrew name was chosen just because its sound was similar to the Arab one. Lavi (Lion) in Hebrew was Lubia (Beans) in Arabic and the two names do not have a common meaning. Nor is Neviot (Fountain Heads) a translation of the Arabic Nuweiba. Arabic names in Israel, as well as the Roman, Persian, Assyrian and Greek assist the researcher in understanding the cultural history of the country by tracing the impact of different cultures on the Israeli landscape. In a similar way, the British landscape manifests in its place-names the various people who invaded the British Islands such as the Celts, Romans, Angles, Saxons or Norsemen. MILITARY-HEROISM PLACE-NAMES This category is very similar in proportion to the Arabic-origin one. Eighty-five settlements in Israel carry names which symbolize important events in the establishment of the State, such as the Holocaust, the illegal immigration to Israel during the British Mandate period, the War of Independence and other wars. Thus, Yad Mordechai (Mordechai's Memorial) commemorates Mordechai Anielewicz, the last commander of the Warsaw Ghetto. 'En Sarid (Spring of the Survivors) was established by survivors of the concentration camps. Ben 'Ammi is a village named after a young commander who was killed in the War of Independence, and Givat Yo' av (Yoav' sHill) is a moshav in the Golan named after a commander who was killed in the 1967 campaign. These settlements and others are expressions of a national ideology which cherishes the people who sacrificed their lives for the country. Specific memorial, monuments, cultural and social halls and libraries (dedicated to those who were killed) are frequent in the Israeli landscape, and their significance is strengthened by special ceremonies in which the dead are memorialized. The post-statehood period, especially, when security and etatism became overriding ideological pillars, is one in which there has been considerable emphasis upon the military-heroism category. INTERNATIONAL PLACE-NAMES Many societies adopt place-names that originate in foreign countries. Immigrants as conquerors bring with them their cultural heritage to their new countries. The United States and Canada reflect their immigrant cultural diversity through French, German, Russian, Italian and Scandinavian placenames. In Israel, the village Bazra is named after Basra, Iraq, from where its settlers came. Also, Hodiyya is an adaptation of Hodu the Hebrew word for India, which has the settlers' place of origin.