- August 30, 2026
- 11:44 pm
- World News
Israel is once again attempting to establish a unified spelling of geographical names in Latin script. On August 30, 2026, the Prime Minister’s Office published the procedure “Regulation of Names and Transliterations of the Country’s Map”. This is an official notice of intent to conclude a contract, not an already completed contract: the amount is 250,000 shekels, the supplier is the Academy of the Hebrew Language, the expected work period is from October 4, 2026, to October 3, 2027, objections are accepted until September 17, 23:30. The basis is the procedure for checking the availability of suppliers under rule 3א(א).
Several principles collide over the Latin line on the sign: accurate transmission of Hebrew letters, modern pronunciation, convenience for foreigners, historical English name, and, for Arab settlements, the question of which language to consider as the original.
Examples — Sderot/Sederot, Caesarea/Kesariya, Elat/Eilat, Akko/Acre, Yafo/Jaffa, Yerushalayim/Jerusalem or several Latin forms of Tzfat. I, R.Verter, compared for this article the current procurement, documents of the Government Commission on Naming, UN materials, decisions of the Ministry of Transport, and the Knesset transcript: the problem has been considered almost solved many times, but then it returned in a new form.
NANews — News of Israel | Nikk.Agency
From the British list of 1930 to the Israeli “solution”
The first official trilingual list of geographical names was published by the British administration in 1930; Jewish, Arab, and British specialists worked on it.
After the creation of Israel, in 1949, a commission was established on the initiative of David Ben-Gurion, initially engaged in the Hebraization of the names of geographical objects and historical sites of the Negev. About two years later, it became the nationwide Government Commission on Naming — a body that approves the names of settlements and other objects.
The official directory sets the principle: Jewish settlements in Latin script are based on the Hebrew form, Arab ones — on the Arabic name. Historical European forms are allowed to be preserved: Jerusalem, Jaffa, Acre, Nablus, and Caesarea are directly named. The commission states that it has approved more than four thousand geographical and historical Hebrew names; the published list is only part of the work.
The first paradox: the existing state directory was intended for the Ministry of Transport, the Cartographic Center of Israel, and other departments. However, years later, the government again orders “regulation of names and transliterations.” So, the matter has long been not only in the absence of a language rule.
Why Petah Tiqwa became Petah Tikva — and why 220 tourists were surveyed
Transliteration — the transmission of the writing of one language with the letters of another, not translation. Hebrew is usually written without ניקוד — nikud, or diacritics, showing many vowels. The scientific system is important to distinguish letters; a road sign — so that a foreigner quickly reads the word.
The Academy approved the official version of romanization in 1956; the rules were published in 1957, and in 1977 they were recommended by the UN Conference on the Standardization of Geographical Names. In 1995, Minister of Education Amnon Rubinstein already asked to review the system: forms like Petah Tiqwa and Qesariyya worked poorly as road names.
Israel even tested the system with an experiment: 220 tourists, who did not read Hebrew, pronounced Latinized toponyms; researchers analyzed about 5,500 recordings. Israel’s national report to the UN explained the goal of the practical system simply: a map or road user should be able to read the name so that they can then ask for directions. It also noted the change in the real pronunciation of Hebrew over the previous half-century.
Negotiations on the reform were interrupted by tragedy.
The head of the Cartographic Center Aviel Ron, who participated in the work, died along with two children in 2002 in a suicide bombing; serious negotiations resumed in 2005. In 2006, the simplified system was changed, and in 2007, Israel presented it to the UN: the consonant ו began to be transmitted as V instead of W, ק — K instead of Q, צ — Ts, changed the use of apostrophes, and stopped automatically adding e where the schwa is not pronounced. The official example: Bene-Beraq turned into Bne-Brak. A five-year implementation plan was provided for maps and road signs. At the same time, UN materials recognized: despite the official standard, alternative systems continued to be used even by some public structures.
Jerusalem, Acre, Eilat, and Tzfat: why phonetics is not enough
But the new table of letters does not solve cases where there is a historical name. ירושלים in Hebrew form can be transmitted as Yerushalayim, but the international English name is Jerusalem. יפו — Yafo and at the same time Jaffa; עכו — Hebrew Akko, Arabic Akka, and historical Acre; קיסריה — Kesariya and Caesarea. These are so-called exonyms — traditional place names in another language that do not have to repeat the local pronunciation. The Israeli official directory consciously preserves a number of such forms.
Tzfat is just one example of this layer. The Central Bureau of Statistics in the published city profile uses Zefat, while the address of the state page of the Ministry of Aliyah department contains the form tzfat; in the English historical tradition, Safed is widely established. Parallel spellings exist not only in tourist texts but also within state digital resources.
A separate layer is Arab names. In 2006–2007, representatives of the Government Commission, Arabic specialists, the Cartographic Center, and representatives of the emerging Academy of the Arabic Language agreed on practical rules for transmitting Hebrew with Arabic graphics. The result was approved on May 31, 2007. The Academy of the Hebrew Language separately recorded that it does not consider the establishment of these rules its own competence. Israel’s UN report of the same period also described the romanization of Arab names and work on a three-script digital base — Hebrew, Arabic, and Latin script.
The political side was especially evident in 2009. Minister of Transport Yisrael Katz promoted forms Jerusalem → Yerushalayim, Nazareth → Natsrat, Caesarea → Kesariya. The Ministry of Transport spoke about the unification of more than two thousand names and navigation problems; Katz linked the issue with national identity. Arab deputies and Minister for Minority Affairs Avishay Braverman objected to the displacement of the Arab linguistic and historical tradition. The department planned to gradually change old signs — when installing new ones or replacing worn ones.
The 2012 decision also did not put an end to it
After this, the state tried to draw a clearer line. The decision of the ministerial commission from December 13, 2011 gained the force of a government decision on January 12, 2012: the names of “Jewish settlements” should be transmitted into Arabic and Latin script from the Hebrew form, and “Arab settlements” — into Hebrew and Latin script from the Arabic form. In the same set of decisions, an exception was separately fixed: Eilat should be written in Latin script as EILAT.
The dispute was never reduced to one table: the state was already building a system of “basic rule plus exceptions”, because Jerusalem, Eilat, or Caesarea cannot be processed the same way as a new moshav without an established international name.
Queries “how Israeli cities are correctly written in English”, “why Israeli road signs have different names”, or “transliteration of Hebrew into Latin script” lead to this fork. It is necessary to decide not only which Latin letter to use for ק or צ, but also which language to consider as the original, whether to preserve the historical exonym, and who gets the final say in the conflict of linguistics, history, and navigation.
The Knesset found out: the problem is not only in the rules but in who is obliged to follow them
In 2021, Deputy Eitan Ginzburg proposed to establish a unified mechanism by law: the Academy should determine the spelling of public place names, and the state should maintain a publicly accessible internet database. In the preliminary reading, the proposal was supported by 33 deputies, no one voted against. In the explanations, the Knesset cited real symptoms: Queysaria / Caesarea / Ceysariya, Sea of Galilay / Yam Kineret, train station / rakevet, Ebn Gabirol / Ebn Gvirol, Hertzel / Herzel and similar discrepancies in Arabic.
Hearings on June 13, 2022 revealed the system of responsibility: the Government Commission approves part of the names, municipalities — streets, the Ministry of Interior and the Ministry of Transport maintain their arrays, the Cartographic Center — maps, the railway is responsible for its objects.
Even a unified mechanism for correcting an error was not fixed: where to apply, who corrects, and in what time frame.
President of the Academy Moshe Bar-Asher said that state institutions have ignored the Academy’s decisions for years and that it concerns tens of thousands of names.
The transcript gives an almost grotesque example.
Member of the Government Commission Yoel Elitzur recalled how the name of the kibbutz Masada once appeared on an Arabic sign written as the word “restaurant”. Representative of the Cartographic Center Nurit Rochel reported that databases of rivers, ruins, and streets already partially exist. That is, there is no zero point: the problem is in reconciling data arrays, their verification, and the obligation of one result for all.
Why road workers argue with linguists and what the 2026 project will change
The Ministry of Transport has another reason not to mechanically copy the academic form — traffic safety.
At the hearings, the department explained that excessively long spellings can distract the driver and that sometimes a shortened form is required for road navigation. The Knesset lawyer confirmed: transport legislation indeed leaves the department with professional powers. Therefore, “linguistically accurate” and “best for a road sign” do not always coincide.
There, Deputy Simon Davidson told about an American acquaintance who, on the way to the Kinneret, first saw Sea of Galilee, then Sea of Kinnereth, and called to clarify if he was going in the right direction. The scientific secretary of the Academy Ronit Gadish replied that the Ministry of Transport is aware of the problem and has not been able to completely eliminate it in 15 years. Her wording was principled: this is a “problem of implementation”, not the absence of Academy rules. Representatives of the transport system added that many signs were installed 10–15 years ago; they considered it unrealistic to replace the huge array in the five years provided by the bill and proposed no less than ten years.
Today, the interdepartmental commission of the Ministry of Transport coordinates the names of settlements, traffic goals, intersections, interchanges, and their transliterations; the signs themselves are installed by local road authorities. There are also state digital sets, but one unified set on data.gov.il directly warns that the National Digital Directorate is not responsible for the accuracy of the data. There are many bases, a single mandatory standard is still not visible.
250,000 shekels — continuation, not the beginning of this story.
On February 26, 2026, the Prime Minister’s Office published a separate intention to conclude a contract with the same Academy for the services of a “transliteration consultant” for 26,000 shekels, with a work period from March 19 to the end of 2026. Now the financial scale of the separate procedure has grown almost tenfold.
Checking the documents for NANews – News of Israel, I do not see in the official card of the current procedure a promise to immediately replace road signs throughout the country. The subject of work, the amount, the Academy as a supplier, and the terms are fixed there. Therefore, the conclusion should be more cautious: if the current project is indeed supposed to close the problem that survived the rules of the 1950s, the 2006–2007 reform, the 2012 decisions, and the 2021–2022 law attempt, the result should be not another table of letters. A single authoritative set of names in Hebrew, Arabic, and Latin script, understandable historical exceptions, a common identifier for digital systems, and a mandatory mechanism for correcting errors are needed. Otherwise, the new norm will again be correct on paper — next to the old sign, another departmental base, and a third option on the map.