Can Anyone Translate the Name of a New Israeli Political Party?

Ha-Maḥaneh ha-Mamlakhti is the new Hebrew name of what was formerly known, in reference to the colors of the Israeli flag, as the Blue-and-White party—the centrist political grouping with eight seats in the Knesset that is headed by former IDF chief-of-staff Benny Gantz. Blue-and-White was renamed after being joined last week by another ex-army chief, the popular Gadi Eisenkot, who made the change a condition for coming on board, and it is now known in English as . . . well, what?

Ha-maḥaneh, as the English-language edition of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz observed in an article headlined “New party chooses a name untranslatable to English,” is “easy enough to translate. [It means] the camp, as in political camp. . . . But ha-mamlakhti, poses a challenge.” (The participle ha-, it should be pointed out, attached to the noun it precedes, is the Hebrew definite article, and adjectives in Hebrew follow their nouns and repeat their articles.) Mamlakhti, Haaretz continued, “loosely translates as civil, centrist, or national, and also has connotations of statesmanlike behavior and non-partisanship. . . . However, the term still proves slippery for anything outside the Hebrew language. The Jerusalem Post originally opted for the State Camp, while the Times of Israel went with the National Camp. The jury at Haaretz was still out [when] a party spokesman finally announced that it would be called the National Unity Party.”

And yet mamlakhtiyut, the noun formed from mamlakhti (both words are stressed on their final syllable), does not mean “national unity,” which is aḥdut l’umit in Hebrew. Can one do better? Trying to answer that involves delving into the two words’ history.