Your name is the one thing they still cannot take.

Every empire tried to catalogue us. Israel’s the first to try to delete us. This episode looks at how Palestinian names carry proof when everything else is gone: houses, land, photos, documents. Hiba walks through how language, law, and paperwork are used to erase a people, and why a last name like Al-Nabulsi or Majdalawi says more than any document. She also sits with what it means to name a child after someone who was killed, and why that turns memory into something that breathes.

In This Episode:

• The fundamental difference between Arabic naming (recognition) and colonial naming (possession)
• How Palestinian geographic names directly contradict the "empty land" myth
• Why names like Saffuri and Lyddawi are evidence that Palestinians did not just appear in 1948
• The weaponization of bureaucratic systems to distort and erase Palestinian names
• The weight carried by children named after martyrs and the impossible choices families make

Remember What They Want Forgotten

• Learn the original Palestinian names of places, not their made-up Hebrew versions
• Record elders telling your family stories before they're gone

Resources

• Humanize Gaza: Submit and read stories of those killed
• B'Tselem: Documentation on Palestinian children denied registration
• Adalah: Legal work against residency revocation through paperwork

"Your forgetting was never my responsibility." — Hiba

"You name your child after a martyr because you're betting that their name carrying that history is worth the weight that it puts on them, that it's better for your kid to carry a name that still hurts than for that name to be forgotten completely." — Hiba