The Name Games are on in Israel. On the
eve of the 5775 Jewish New Year the Israeli Population, Immigration and Border
Authority announced the winning first name most commonly given to a newborn boy
in Israel in the preceding year as Youssef, which is used by both Arabs and
Jews. The spokesperson neglected to mention that what the Authority had in mind
was names among Jews only. When questioned the woman hid behind explanations of
who her regular customers demanding the statistics were. Of course, her motives
were pure and egalitarian.
You can’t really blame this one branch
of government. The Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics, an institute reputed
for its precision and comprehensiveness would have done the same. After all,
everyone knows that Israel is the state of the Jews and that the negligible
Arab minority of over 20% is only that, a minority, a mere impurity and a
blemish on the wholesomeness of the state’s exclusive ethnicity. The CBS, like
other branches of the system in the state of the Jews, has always labored hard
at actualizing the dream of ethnic purity with all the means at its disposal:
It has always kept its statistics for the miniscule minority split by religion:
Moslem, Christian and Druze. On occasion it throws in other random lines of
division such as Bedouin versus settled non-Jews. It is not long now before we
will have Aramean Christians. Anything but the ‘A’ word because that would
imply the presence within our borders, holy and inviolable even if still
undetermined, of a non-Jewish contaminant of the same ethnic substance like the
sea of undesirables surrounding us on all sides (except, of course, for our
Mediterranean escape route to our former cradle of civilized bliss for which we
have never stopped longing.)
Then one unprincipled Haaretz
correspondent (Ilan Lior, September 22) insisted on toppling the applecart,
right on the eve of the holiday when apples are so much in demand: He looked
closely at the statistics and as a misinformed non-statistician discovered that
the actual winner should have been Muhammad. Ouy-ve!! as we say in Yiddish.
What the hell!! What that means is that the 16-or-so% Muslims in Israel use the
name Muhammad more than six times as often as its Jews use Youssef. Boy! That
is fidelity all right! But I could have told you that without the bother of
statistics. My three oldest brothers, may they rest in piece, were named after
the prophet. And there are dozens of families in our village with multiple
children named after the prophet.
Back in my younger days I taught school
in the neighboring village of Sakhnin. We lacked textbooks and I spent a lot of
time writing on the blackboard. Whenever the class got too noisy I would shout
without turning around: “Muhammad and his neighbor, stop talking.” And for a
minute or two you could hear a pin drop. And in the British Mandate days,
before Israel elevated our individualistic consciousness with its numbered ID
cards, the name Muhammad and its derivatives wreaked havoc with our subsistence
farming in the fertile Battouf Valley. You see, Bedouins had the nasty habit of
letting their cattle feed on the crops in our land at the peak of its
productivity. When a farmer took a Bedouin to court the latter would produce a
verifiable alibi proving that the accused, Muhammad the son of Ahmad the son of
Mahmoud Mrisat, was in Jordan that day. There simply were ten Bedouins with the
same string of the prophet’s alternate names.
Which reminds me: The correspondent of
Haaretz also discovered that among the ten top-ranking names Ahmad actually
came in at number nine. This is the place to divulge a closely guarded secret
of our community. Endearing nicknames, derived from twisting the actual name
around to a catchy and playful-sounding shortened version, are a relatively
recent phenomenon in our community, an Israeli fad if I am not mistaken.
Anxious to maintain our lead position in the Name Game, our leaders have come
up with the trickiest of tricks. All three forms of the interrelated prophet’s
names, Muhammad, Ahmad and Mahmoud are given the cutie nickname of ‘Hammoudi.’
Now let your flaky ‘Yossi’ compete with that! Muhammad alone beat the s… out of
your lead name.
But you try, I know. I just read that
the administrators in Safad (I know, you call it Tzfat) College have appointed
a student council, the only unelected one in the country, to preempt, I
presume, the likelihood of a Mohammad being elected by the 70%-Arab student
body.
Recently, in one of his op-ed pieces, Oudeh
Bsharat related a personal incident with his son to illustrate a point. His son
wanted to know the meaning of ‘mumis,’ a high Arabic term for a sex worker. He hummed
and hawed and couldn’t come up with an appropriate explanation. A while
later the child came back shouting ‘sharmouta!’ the vulgarity of the same
meaning used colloquially as a cuss word.
Well, let me tell you: regardless who asks
for what and who supplies the statistics to whom, It is a fucking sharmouta!
Shameless apartheid, denial and exclusion of the other.
