Palestine A Four Thousand Year History by Nur Masalha

The Zionist colony of Gedera, located 13 kilometres south of Rehovot, was founded by Russian settlers in 1884, and like the colonies of Rehovot, Afula and Hadera, the purchase of its lands from Palestinian landlords involved Yehoshua Hankin. The Jewish Colonial Association gave Gedera a Hebrew-sounding name (Hebrew: ‘wall’) after a site supposedly mentioned in the Hebrew Bible. The name Hadera, on the other hand, clearly originated from al-Khadra, and al-Khdeira in local Palestinian dialect, Arabic for ‘green’. Although this key Zionist colony (today a major Israeli city)

was given a Hebrew-sounding name, this Zionist name makes absolutely no sense in Hebrew (Bar On 1996: 38). The lands of the colony of Gedera had been purchased with the help of the French consul in Jaffa, Poliovierre.

Local Palestinians of Qatra had been cultivating the land as tenant farmers when the Jewish settlers arrived, and they resented the intrusion onto what they still thought of as their land. Qatra was an ancient Palestinian centre of political and economic authority that along with thirty other urban sites in regions bordering the Mediterranean Sea had entered a period of decline in the late Bronze Age (Zevit 2003: 94) but flourished throughout the Islamic period. Archaeological excavations at Tel Qatra discovered a pottery workshop for the manufacture of Gaza jars.

Etymologically the naming of Gedera by early Zionist settlers closely followed Christian scriptural geography and biblical archaeology of the 19th century which worked from the narratives of the Bible. The ‘biblical location’ was first suggested by Victor Guérin (1868‒1880, 1881–1883), a French biblical archaeologist and scriptural geographer who visited Palestine several times and whose works often referred to passages from the Hebrew Bible and Jewish sources such as the Mishna and Talmud as well as works by contemporary scriptural explorers such as Edward Robinson, who – like the medieval Crusaders and pilgrims in Maurice Halbwachs’ La Topographie légendaire des évangiles en terre sainte: étude de mémoire collective (1941) – using the biblical narratives, decided, largely through speculation, that in more than a hundred biblical place names in Palestine, these were the origins of Arabic names used by the Palestinian fallahin (Robinson et al. 1860; Davis 2004: Macalister 1925). Guérin linked the name Gedera to the Palestinian village of Qatra (Fischer et al. 2008) which was depopulated and destroyed by Jewish forces in 1948. During the British Mandate of Palestine it was referred to by local Palestinians as Qatrat Islam to distinguish it from the Jewish colony of Qatrat Yahud (Jewish Qatra) or Gedera, as it was called by the Zionist settlers themselves. In the 1950s, a neighbourhood called Oriel (light of God) was established on the lands of Arab Qatra for new Jewish immigrants with visual impairments.

Central to the construction of Zionist collective memory – and subsequently Israeli identity – based on ‘biblical memory’ was the Yishuv’s memorialising toponymy project which was established in the 1920s to ‘restore’ biblical Hebrew or to create new biblical-sounding names (Ra’ad 2010: 189). Both the JNF Naming Committee and the Israeli Governmental Names Committee of the 1950s were generally guided by the biblical geography of Victor Guérin (1868‒1880, 1881–1883) and Edward Robinson’s Biblical Researches in Palestine, Mount Sinai and Arabia Petraea (1841), in which he had argued that the place names of Palestinian villages and sites, seemingly Arab, were modern Arabic renderings of old Hebraic names.

An important part of the ‘New Hebrew’ identity was the Zionist Hebrew toponymy and the Israeli maps which gradually replaced the Palestinian Arabic names (Cohen and Kliot 1981, 1992; Kliot 1989; Azaryahu and Golan 2001; Azaryahu and Kook 2002).