Israel's transportation minister announced a plan on Monday to change English and Arabic street signs to reflect just their Hebrew names.

"This government, and certainly this minister, will not allow anyone to turn Jewish Jerusalem to Palestinian Al-Quds," said Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz, the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper reported.

The daily Hebrew-language paper, Israel's largest, reported Monday that the plan had been in the works for the past year.

English and Arabic road signs for Israeli cities had generally avoided alienating one side, in most cases calling the Palestinian capital Jerusalem in English, Al-Quds in Arabic and Yerushalayim in Hebrew, the three names most commonly used in each respective language. Some signs spell out the Hebrew version first, with the Arabic in parentheses.

But on Monday Transportation Minister Katz, a Knesset member of the Israeli right-wing Likud Party, announced that all references would soon wipe clean Palestinian language from the signs, and reflect a Hebrew-only transliteration in English and Arabic.

"The names on the signs should reflect the reality of the local population, which is exactly why Israeli signs must have Hebrew transliteration," Katz insisted.

But even if that local population is not particularly Jewish, the signs will be changed as well, according to the newspaper. It noted that for instance the sign for Nazareth, Israel's largest Palestinian city, will be changed to Natsrat in Arabic and English.

Katz said, "Almost all Israeli communities' names have previous names," given to them by the indigenous population before the Israeli state. "Some Palestinian maps still refer to the Israeli cities by their [Arabic-language] pre-1948 names."

Katz also claimed that Palestinian citizens of Israel view Israeli cities as settlements, and insisted that in response, "I will not allow that on our signs."

Nevertheless the minister alleged that changing the names in Arabic to spellings never before used would not affect the Palestinians. "We will continue to serve the Arab public and have signs in Arabic," he said, adding, "I have no problem with an Area B [joint Palestinian Authority-Israeli control] sign reading 'Nablus' in Arabic."

According to Yeshaayahu Ronen, who heads the ministry's Planning Department, the planned changes have nothing to do with politics and are simply about making things easier for "those speaking foreign languages, citizens and tourists alike."

It was not clear if his reference to citizens speaking a foreign language was about Israel's large English-language immigrant population or about Arabic, spoken by Israel's Palestinian minority and one of the country's two official languages. English is not an official language.