New York Times:Muhammed Number One Baby Name In "Israel"..

[CidanSultan]

JERUSALEM — Muhammad was by far the most popular name for babies born in Israel last year: 1,986 boys shared the name of the Islamic prophet, nearly twice the number of the top girls’ name, Tamar, at 1,092.

 

That fact alone was worthy of note, a reminder that the Arab minority is 21 percent of what the Israeli government likes to call the Jewish State (and that Muslims hew to ancient, traditional names far more than Israeli Jews — more on that later).

 

But even more striking was that Israel’s population authority left Muhammad off the annual Top 10 list of baby names it issued last week before Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. Haaretz, the left-leaning Israeli daily that first reported the omission, called this in an editorial “another form of racism, which in Israel has become institutionalized and self-evident.”

 

Sabine Haddad, spokeswoman for the agency that published the list, described the missing Muhammads as something between a mistake and a misunderstanding. The list, she said, was simply a response to requests “for Hebrew names” in conjunction with the start of “the Hebrew New Year.” It would have been better, she acknowledged, to put an asterisk noting that what she called “obviously Arabic names” were left off. “There was no intention, no political intention,” Ms. Haddad insisted in an interview. “When journalists called me and asked for the whole list, they received the whole list. It’s not that we hide that.”

 

Intent aside, Hassan Jabareen, director of Adalah, a legal advocacy center for Arab minority rights, said the episode revealed a deeper issue of invisibility for Israel’s 1.4 million Palestinian citizens and more than 300,000 Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem.

 

Arabs have served in Israel’s Parliament since its opening in 1949, but only one has been a government minister. A 2011 Adalah report found that 6 percent of the state’s civil service jobs and 1.2 percent of tenure-track positions in universities were filled by Arabs.

 

“On TV, if we open Channel 1, Channel 2, Channel 10, in prime time, we don’t see Arabs as producers, as anchors — we don’t see them, they do not exist,” Mr. Jabareen complained. Each channel has an analyst of Arab affairs, but they are Jews, he added, “sending a message that in fact the Arabs are foreigners, this is why we need a mediator between us and them.”

 

Oz Almog, a sociologist at the University of Haifa, said the list of baby names showed not racism but “our pluralism and flexibility,” with Israelis experimenting with more than 3,200 names. Some come from the Bible (970 Adams and 654 Sarahs last year), some from nature (Tamar is both: It means date palm, and she was the daughter of King David). Adele, No. 4 on last year’s girls’ list with 908, is inspired by both the British singer, Professor Almog said, and, for some religious Jews, the grandmother of the beloved 19th-century Rabbi Nachman of Breslov.

 

But among Muslims in Israel, and elsewhere, there seems to be a Muhammad in most families. The name was given to 11 or 12 percent of Israel’s Arab boys in 2011, 2012 and 2013, according to the Central Bureau of Statistics.

 

Isbeitan Abu Isbeitan, whose son, Muhammad, was born Aug. 30, told my colleague Said Ghazali that he once saw a television program in which the moderator asked the audience to guess the most popular name in the world and “they were shocked” to learn it was that of the Islamic prophet. “I named my son Muhammad after the greatest man on earth,” said Mr. Isbeitan, 38, a driver in Jerusalem’s Mount of Olives who also has three daughters. “I hope my son will be imitating him in his life, in his behavior, in his morals.”

 

The list the population authority published last week had Yosef in the top spot with 1,173, edging out Daniel, at 1,088, and Uri, which means “my light,” at 1,071. It is also worthy of note that the list’s “Yosef” also includes “Yusef.” Both are translations of Joseph — the biblical patriarch considered an Islamic prophet — and they are spelled the same in the Hebrew used to register babies.