We need to start much further upstream and concern ourselves with fundamental stories about “us” and “them,” for instance, with the figure of a certain rainbow-colored elephant named, in most cases, Elmer —who is a symbol of accepting difference, and the possibility of identifying with, indeed even becoming (for a day) the other. Well, he’s Elmer in English, the language in which the author David McKee first composed him, and allowing for a slight vowel change, he’s the same in various other languages. He’s Elmar in German, for instance. In Hebrew, however, he is “Bentzi,” short for “Ben Zion,” or son of Zion, and in a quite literal way, the most Zionist name one could possibly give or be given. Not only was the rainbow colored elephant’s name hebraized, it was changed to make him a Hebrew figure, i.e.an exclusively Hebrew, exclusively Israeli, figure. To be “Bentzi,” doesn’t only mean not to be Elmer. It also means to be the kind of being that can only be “in the land of Zion.”

It is noteworthy, indeed, worrisome, disappointing, imprudent and counterproductive that powerful voices within Israeli political culture, including Israel’s Parliament, want to change the narrative. These voices want to undercut Arab claims on East Jerusalem (mind you, not Palestinian, as they deny that there is such a thing as Palestinian). Repugnant as this is, I think the change from Elmer to Bentzi is even more significant.

Why? It seems to me that whatever magical powers naming might have, such powers are especially forceful for the youngest among us. When the unquestioned authority of a parent (or, perhaps a bit less so, of a caregiver or other “competent adult”) says, “This is Bentzi,” the Bentzi-being of this particular patchwork elephant is established as an absolute truth. The appropriateness of this categorical naming is my concern. Most of us, after we pass the unbridgeable chasm into the land where there’s no tooth fairy (I understand this happens roughly between the ages of 5 and 8), no longer hold such a truth to be true. I fear the new Hebrew name for the elephant is as foundational as a fairytale.

The narrowing of the world, then, and the self-enclosure of the social group that consists of  those who know ‘Bentzi-the-patchwork-elephant,’ in opposition to all those “others” who call him by a different name—just one different name, crucially—go quite far in ensuring that the next generation(s) of Jewish Israelis adopt the “changed narrative” of East Jerusalem, and “Eretz Israel” writ large. Bentzi takes them much further, I would say by a wide margin, than how the news agencies and the municipal authorities “officially” refer to neighborhoods located there. Call these districts by Jewish names or by Arabic names, as you wish, so long as we, the Hebrew-speakers all know Elmer as Bentzi, as “the son of Zion” and thus “ours alone.” There’s precious little space to conceive of “ourselves” as an enlarged “we,” the truth of Elmer, the “we” which is able to live in a state alongside another “we,” together sharing the territory that rests between the river and the sea.

It’s true that hebraizing the names of East Jerusalem neighborhoods will make a two-state reality harder to envisage or enact. But if we focus on these kinds of controversies, we let the deeper problem continue to get worse. The real battle of ideas isn’t over the “downstream” political exclusions like these. It’s over the much deeper cultural exclusions that transpire every moment, in every home and every kindergarten, far “upstream” and much harder to set right.