What's In a Name?

Here's something I thought was interesting. I went to an Oscar Party last weekend (and won a game to pick the winners with a whopping 12 correct!) with friends from school. One of them received a text message just after the winner of the Best Foreign Film category was announced. The text was from another friend who is Palestinian, and she was commenting on the Academy's decision to refer to the film "Paradise Now" as a movie from the Palestinian Territories, rather than Palestine. It's not something I would have noticed otherwise. People do, though, and, once again, I am surprised and enthralled by the power of language! Here's an excerpt from a Los Angeles Times article (via Boston.com):

Some Israelis were incensed that the organizers of the Golden Globes listed the film as coming from ''Palestine," because there is no state by that name.

''The Hollywood Foreign Press Association was not appointed by the international community to give out franchises for establishing sovereign nation states," columnist Sever Plotzker wrote in Yediot Aharonot, an Israeli daily newspaper. ''The organizers of the Golden Globe contest were not, therefore, given a permit to establish 'Palestine.' "

Israel quietly lobbied Oscar organizers in favor of ''Palestinian Authority," the term that applies to the formal Palestinian government structure in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. The official Oscar website lists the movie as from Palestine, though organizers may opt for a different designation on awards night.

How about that quote from Plotzker? GEEZ. It's no wonder there's no peace in the Middle East.

Along the same lines, I was reading a book by an Arab-American guy I'm profiling and he says that when his mother would write letters to her family in Jerusalem in the 1950s and '60s, she would have to write "Israel" on the envelope. If she wrote "Palestine," the letter would be returned with a stamp saying, "No Such Address." He said his mother would always write "Jerusalem, via Israel" as a quiet, but stubborn protest. I asked him about this in an interview and he said, "and it’s both sides the Arabs and the Jews do that to each other all the time." He also wrote that when his parents traveled backhome they didn't allow Israeli customs to stamp their passports, because if they did, they wouldn't be allowed to enter other Arab countries with those passports.