PALESTINE

sign on an empty building in the West Bank city of Hebron declares, ‘this land was stolen by Arabs’. The notice was hung there by the Jewish residents of a nearby settlement, but similar signs proliferate across the region – Hebrew designations supplanting Arabic place names along the freeway to Jerusalem or maps that give illegal settlements equal prominence to historic Palestinian towns. It is against such efforts to abrogate the existence of a place called Palestine – and of Palestinians themselves – that the fragmented entity now known