http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/israeli-arab-towns-get-new-street-names-but-west-bank-wall-still-divides-city-1.360947
Baka al-Garbiyeh finally gets street names; now it wants answers to bigger problems - like the potholes in those streets.
For many years the Israeli Arab town of Baka al-Garbiyeh defied all GPS and map-reading capabilities. Most of the streets in the town, to the east of Hadera, never had names - except for the main road, which for some reason was called Weizmann Street.
But about a month ago a committee changed all that and gave names to the streets. That's how the main street became known as Al-Quds Street, which crosses Palestine Street (the street that leads to the West Bank ). Palestine Street does not, however, reach Baka al-Sharkiyeh, the adjacent community on the other side of the Green Line; it is cut off by the ugly separation wall.
The residents might be expected to embrace the new names after years of walking down anonymous streets. But the signs, painted a tired pink, have become a major subject of contention. Some of the signs have even been spray-painted over in protest.
Ibrahim Majadele, part-owner of Azrak Felafel on Al-Quds Street, looks up as he flips felafel balls into boiling oil. "What are street names worth? Let them fix the road first, than give them names. There's no infrastructure here."
His brother and partner in the felafel shop, Mohammed Majadele, says the exact opposite: "It's good to give names to the streets. We should at least have an address."
One street is named after Naji al-Ali, a Palestinian caricaturist who created Handala the refugee child, an icon for Palestinians. al-Ali was shot to death in 1987, some say by the Shin Bet security service or the Palestinian Liberation Organization.
The Palestinian national poet Mahmoud Darwish now has two streets named after him, which does not make the local postal carriers happy.
In either a Palestinian or Israeli irony, the Arabization of the streets in Baka has come at the precise moment when the mayor, Yitzhak Waller (an Interior Ministry appointee ), is Jewish. But the placement of the names is at best like giving a bandage to a man who has had both legs cut off.
The situation in Baka is terrible. At one time a main traffic thoroughfare went through the town. Now, Road 6 closes it off on one side and the separation wall prevents people from the West Bank coming in from the other, effectively dissecting Baka in two.
Next to the post office I meet Sa'ad, a plasterer who lived in Tel Aviv until about a month ago, when he became a father. "What difference do names make?" he asks. "There are no sewage lines, no parks. It's more the territories than Israel."
We walk to Gassan Yahidi's coffee shop. Everybody there has a different opinion about the street names. Gassan seems pleased with the new names, although he points out that "there are some strange names, like Abu Kabir - like the place where they put the bodies in Tel Aviv," refering to the Abu Kabir Forensic Institute. "If they change Abu Kabir, that's enough for me."
One of the initiators of the project, Baka's city manager Khayam Ka'adan, rejects the criticism: "I've gotten hundreds of good responses," he says. When asked about the spray-painted signs, he says, "No matter what you do, there will always be opposition. Two Mahmoud Darwish streets? That's just the contractor's mistake. No big deal," he shrugs.
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