Qashash has invoked the ghosts the Jews of Israel have been trying to banish, unsuccessfully, for decades.

Which is why this act, which would seem logical in any other city with a historical quarter – so logical, the town would place the signs itself – raised so much anger. Of course, Israel is emphatically not a normal country. It is based on a huge act of theft, which it insists on whitewashing. This is why streets in Jaffa and Acre and Jerusalem are now named after unimportant generals and less worthy Zionist apparatchiks. The entire non-Jewish history of this tortured land – Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Muslim, Crusader, Mamluk, Turkish – had to vanish, to be erased, to be scraped away. The fact that during most of the recorded history of this place, only a small minority wrote or spoke Hebrew, had to pass away. The names of former Palestinian towns and villages had to become a fading memory. Majdl stands no more; Call it Ashkelon (and try to forget its last original residents were deported in 1950, a long time after the war of 1947-1948 ended).