I have utilized the system for transliteration of Arabic into Latin characters established by the International Journal of Middle East Studies, and the Library of Congress system for transliterating Hebrew, with the exception of omitting most diacritical marks. Inevitably, however, inconsistencies emerged. This is especially true of certain words and proper names that have become widely recognized in English under a different spelling, or where individuals use a particular spelling of their names in English. In these cases, I have used the more popular spelling or the spelling used by those persons in their public lives. Thus, the reader will find “kibbutz” instead of “kibbuts”; “Yosef Weitz” instead of “Yosef Vaits”; “Izzat Tannous” instead of “‘Izzat Tannus”; “Chaim Weizmann” instead of “Hayyim Vaitsman”; “Adnan Abdelrazek” instead of “‘Adnan ‘Abd al-Raziq”; and so forth.
Arabic place names are almost always properly transliterated from their written form and not how they are pronounced locally. For example, residents in the village of ‘Arraba, in the northern region of Galilee, would pronounced their village name as “‘Arrabi.” A village by the same name in central Palestine is pronounced “‘Arrabeh” by its inhabitants. Villagers in Nayn would pronounce the name of their community as “Nein.” Once again, certain widely used alternative spellings in both Arabic and Hebrew place names have been kept, such as “Acre” instead of the Arabic “‘Akka” and the Hebrew “‘Akko,” and “Jerusalem” instead of the Arabic “al-Quds” and the Hebrew “Yerushalayim.”