"When Palestinians insist on naming their country, their cities, and their villages with their original names, they are not only resisting the vulgar names that Zionism has bestowed on the land, they are also insisting on a geographic memory that Israel has all but succeeded to erase physically. Zionist cruelty has been such that Israel insisted for 50 years after its creation in denying that the Palestinians even exist as a people, or as a name; that the very name "Palestinians" should not even be uttered. For Zionists, the very name "Palestinian" functions as some magical incantation that could obliterate them at the existential level. They are not necessarily wrong in their impression, for the name Palestinian is itself the strongest form of resistance against their official memory. The name "Palestinian" has also been generative of continuities in Palestinian culture and life, in Palestinian identity and nationality, things that Israel had hoped it obliterated completely and whose survival will always threaten its mnemonic operation of inventing a fictional memory of non-Palestine, of non- Palestinians...Hard as it tried to legitimise itself, the Palestinian Authority could not but be seen for what it is: the creation of the Israeli occupation, an authority which in its structure and logic is not unlike all colonial puppet regimes in Asia and Africa serving their masters, not excluding the Judenröte (Jewish councils) that the Nazis set up in occupied Poland's ghettos to run Jewish life, collect taxes, and run the post offices, inter alia; or the Bantustans that apartheid South Africa set up as alternative homelands. The Palestinian Authority's attempt to acquire the power of naming the Palestinian and Jewish peoples failed as much as Israel's attempts before it. Palestinians continue to insist on their name and on their inclusion in a Palestinian nation, while non-Israeli Jews insist on not joining Israeli nationality, no matter how much they may support Israel. The politics of naming is the politics of power and resistance. The power to name creates fictional histories against material realities. While Israel has succeeded in imposing physical and geographic realties, its attempt to obliterate historical memory has failed. Palestinians are always standing in the way of its falsification of their history and its own."