Review Essay: Mapping Israel-Palestine. Political Geography 30(8) more

Political Geography xxx (2011) 1–4 Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Political Geography journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/polgeo Review essay Mapping Israel–Palestine Atlas of the Arab–Israeli Conflict, Gilbert Martin, 1st ed. Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc. (1974). /The Routledge Atlas of the Arab–Israeli Conflict, Martin Gilbert. 9th ed. Routledge (2008). Atlas of the Conflict: Israel–Palestine, Shoshan Malkit. 010 Publishers, Rotterdam (2010). Subjective Atlas of Palestine, Edited Annelys de Vet (Ed.). 010 Publishers, Rotterdam (2007). “God was evidently not strong in geography,” Voltaire once quipped. Even if meant in jest, Voltaire’s remark is worth consideration in the context of Israel–Palestine. It is (Jewish) religion that is evoked in the geography of Israeli territorial presence and expansion in the “Holy Land”: the decisions (whether bestowed by God or men) as to whom the territory belongs and who is allowed to live or move on which part of it, the control and sovereignty over land, its external delimitations and internal boundaries, what it is named, as well as symbolic landscapes related to it. The Greek definition of geography is writing-of-earth. Following that, cartography – writing-of-maps – is part of geography’s fundamentals. In the modern-day balance of “writing” the territory of Israel–Palestine, the outputs weigh heavily on the Israeli side, whether because of access to land and mapping technologies or military and economic might. Maps of any territory are expressions of ideological and political values, functioning as symbolic elements that reflect abstract and concrete national and local sentiments and goals. The politics of map-making and the power maps serve is part of a process of territorial socialization. Moreover, map production is a process structured by political and social norms and values (whether the cartographer is aware of it or not). Mapping is an interpretive act, in which the map conveys not merely facts but also, and always, the author’s intentions and values. The politics of mapping however lie not only in what one maps, but also in how one maps. Any map is by definition ideologically fraught. Any map of Israel–Palestine arguably more so. As W.J.T. Mitchell wrote of Israel–Palestine, it is so ridden with interests and contending histories that “it is a wonder that the earth’s crust does not buckle under [its] weight” (p. 199). What then to make of an atlas? More than any other cartographic representation of the territory and conflict in question, Sir Martin Gilbert’s Atlas of the Arab–Israeli Conflict has established itself (if by sales numbers alone) as a historically authoritative text on the subject. First published in 1974, it is now in its ninth edition. Gilbert’s atlas begins with a map of the “Jews of Palestine before the Arab Conquest of 1000BC – 63AD” and follows with maps of Jewish dispersal across the Levant, North Africa and Europe; Jewish expulsion from various parts of Europe; and Jews in Palestine, jumping a few millennia in the span of four pages. These are certainly important historical moments, but beginning an atlas of the conflict with Jewish presence in the region is embedded in the assumption that history of the territory begins then too. As Gabriel Piterberg puts it more eloquently, “the land, too, was condemned to an exile as long as there was no Jewish sovereignty over it: it lacked any meaningful or authentic history” (2001: p. 32). And although the title of his atlas already suggests as much, Gilbert does not mention any inhabitants as Palestinians, but rather, as Arabs, who appear for the first time as part of the conflict at the end of the 19th century. Jewish history and mobility transcends the conflict, Arabs emerge as (part of) the conflict. Palestinians do not appear until 1969–1972 in reference to terrorism and, importantly, terrorism outside of Israel (he uses the term Palestine only in reference to pre-1947, thereafter the entire territory is called Israel). In contrast, the two maps that denote “Terrorism Inside Israel” do not refer to “Palestinians” but “Arabs.” Gilbert’s maps and semantics simultaneously “erase” Palestinian presence and expel them altogether out of Israel (-Palestine). Gilbert’s is not an official Zionist or Israeli atlas, although it certainly can be. Gilbert’s atlas provides crude black and white maps with no coherence in scale, legends or demarcations; some maps include textual information, some don’t; some maps are about the flow of people over five centuries, some are focused on military campaigns over five days. In each of the subsequent editions, Gilbert has added more maps (the current one ends with the 2008 Annapolis talks) but always kept the initial ones intact. The terminology of the atlas has not changed over the decades either, and is one that would sit well with hawkish Israeli leaders: sometimes Palestinian and Israeli locales are termed on equal footing, as in “The Palestinian and Israeli Presence in Samaria” (read: not the “West Bank”); maps of Israeli settlements in and around Jerusalem are referred to as “Jewish areas,” “Jewish suburbs,” or “Israeli towns.” In maps meant to denote Israeli settlements in the West Bank, the little black dots of the settlements virtually disappear in the chaos of the surrounding Arab villages’ and towns’ dots. Arab “attacks” and “invasions” are met with an Israeli “response” and “sense of insecurity.” Gaza is described as a base for terror (as early as 1969); Lebanon, Syria and Jordan are noted each as a “Base for Terror.” Gilbert’s atlas is a prime example of map-making as a process of creating, rather than simply revealing, knowledge. Imbued with value judgments, it is a reflection of his (and Zionist/Israelihawkish) cultural and political worldview, producing only a certain kind of knowledge about Israel–Palestine and the conflict. While founded on historical research and facts, his atlas promotes an ideological vision for public consumption through “one-sided” claims, whose political purpose I cannot help but read as pushing Palestinians “off the map.” Thus, his atlas follows a long tradition of Zionism’s advancement of control over territory, creation of an doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2011.10.003 2 Review essay / Political Geography xxx (2011) 1–4 uninterrupted Jewish history in Palestine–Israel dating back to the days of the Bible, and representation of Palestinians as either nonexistent, part of a wider Arab “nation,” or terrorists. That maps are statements in the struggle for power and domination over territory – that they are, in essence, territorial claims – has been an accepted problematic in critical geography since the 1980s (see Kitchin & Dodge, 2007; Perkins, 2004; Wood, 2010), a point disregarded in Gilbert’s successive editions. Zionist and Israeli territorial claims of a land purportedly empty motivated one particular Israeli architecture student to produce a different kind of atlas. In 2000, Malkit Shoshan was assigned to design a shopping mall near Tel Aviv. Doing site research on an empty plot of land, she discovered it to be a destroyed Palestinian cemetery. She stopped designing. In the introduction of Atlas of the Conflict: Israel–Palestine, she writes: I wanted to know what the image of over 500 destroyed Palestinian localities would look like, on a map with a relative scale, in space, and in comparison to the thousands of newly-built Israeli localities [.] To plan, design and construct a building takes years. To destroy a whole country and build another one on top of it took a couple of decades. For me, this new sense of scale and its realities resulted in a personal episode of complete bewilderment (p. 6). Shoshan’s atlas is the result of her ten-year spatial analysis of “the creation of Israel in the light of the destruction of Palestine.” Shoshan combines maps with descriptive graphics, photographs, and a lexicon of key terms in an attempt to show “things as they are” in their temporal developments from a presumably impartial perspective. Many of her maps are focused in their intentions: settlements’ territorial expansion, road networks, particular kinds of buildings. One can begin to understand the differences between a refugee camp, an “unrecognized village,” an outpost, a kibbutz, and a moshav – on either side of the Green Line. With each unfolding page, it becomes clear that the spatial shifts of people, resources, and territorial demarcations are signifiers of political movements and inequalities, bringing into question both “Israel” and “Palestine.” Shoshan’s atlas is at its a core a modernist conception of maps as documents charged with confessing the truth of landscape. It is also, unlike Gilbert’s atlas, an aesthetically beautiful and provocative piece of work: coherent, consistent, with impeccable designs, labels, and legends – even the odd ratio of the book is reflective of the dimension of the territory. Jewish-Israeli populations and territory are designated in blue, Palestinian ones in brown. While doing so may seem reasonable enough when trying to analyze the conflict, it problematically perpetuates separation (between “two” sides) and unity (one Israeli and one Palestinian experience). She uses grey to denote both Palestinian and Israeli populations/territories, and flushes the shades of grey into hues of blue or brown depending on density of people, control, or other factors. Her color choice, the details of her maps, and zooming in seem to borrow explicitly from the map of Jewish settlements in the West Bank by Eyal Weizman and B’Tselem in 2002, which first denoted settlements not as dots but shaded areas thus documenting the horizontal extent of Israeli land grabs. (The difference is significant: 2% versus 47% of the West Bank; a point that Gilbert conveniently omits. For example, Gilbert’s maps of settlements as dots with population in 1976 and 2005 denoted on the side suggests an increase in population density rather than territorial expansion.) To that end, Shoshan’s close-ups of the West Bank aesthetically don’t add much to the WeizmanB’Tselem maps. Zooming in to see water infrastructure, one doesn’t fathom the inequality between the resources allowed in Israeli settlements versus limitations imposed on West Bank cities. I wished I could juxtapose a map of water infrastructure to one of population; or contrast “illegal” Palestinian construction and Israeli urban growth in the Negev or Galilee. I wondered whether Shoshan’s atlas wouldn’t be more dynamic as a website, with an ability to click and compare, updating “additions” as the wall grows and settlements expand. Are the conflict’s geographic dynamic changes perhaps too difficult to display in traditional planometric projections? And, if so, what does that tell us not just about the Israeli– Palestinian conflict but about the nature and function of maps as representational media? An interesting tension builds in Shoshan’s atlas: each map offers a slice of what is at a particular moment and place and for a particular population. One understands that mapping any aspect of Palestine–Israel will quickly feel outdated compared to the “facts on the ground” – the latter a euphemism used by successive Israeli governments to refer to settlements and other infrastructures in Palestinian territories as permanent “writings”. But there are deeper problems. First, the tremendous amount of data is at once overwhelming and insufficient. There are so many maps, one is bound to lose the forest for the trees (never mind that 36 maps on one page, each the size of a coin, are a stretch for any set of eyes). It is the attempted totality that becomes, paradoxically, the atlas’ weakness. Second, and more problematically, although she alludes to the conflicts over and problematics of geography (this is why she made the atlas in the first place), nowhere does Shoshan show that cartography too is a creative–destructive practice. Her entire exercise becomes a fetishized one that does not overcome the fundamental problem of “writing geography” and the seeming neutrality and authority of cartography. For example, including the Green Line in every map suggests that the root cause of the conflict is the breech over that “border” (and that the conflict’s “end” is a two-state solution?). But the Green Line is itself a cartographic outcome of political decisions which neither delineates where Palestinians or Jews have and continue to live nor what land(s) they claim. Moreover, it is surprising that Shoshan, as Gilbert, begins her atlas with Jewish presence on the land (although in thirty-six different temporal snapshots) but does not do the same for Arabs/Palestinians. When Palestinians do first appear in Shoshan’s atlas, they emerge as brown dots in 1918 under the heading “Patterns of Settlement” (itself a curious choice of words given the term’s connotations post-1967). Shoshan’s atlas does problematize the relationship between history and territory in a way that is occluded by Gilbert: she includes destroyed Palestinian villages, Israeli land confiscation mechanisms, contemporary images, graphics, plans and maps of Palestinian refugee camps. Providing maps of the two populations at the same moment in time side by side also communicates some of the core tensions of the conflict. She takes the first step in a critical cartography: that there is no “right” way to “write-territory” and that, she, as cartographer, is aware of the politics and context of her map’s productions. But Shoshan stops there. Keen on representing un-truths lurking beneath hegemonic Israeli representations, she clings to the idea of cartography as objective. Fastened on increasing maps’ effectiveness through superior design, she conceives of her readers as apolitical recipients of (true) knowledge, and posits herself as the expert technician. In the end, the primacy she gives to mapping, its aesthetics, and its objectivity renders important aspects of Israel, of Palestine, and of the conflict, invisible. Invisibility and blanks necessarily exist on all maps. The exercise of mapping erases dissonance, chaos, emotions, and memories from our geographical imagination by rendering invisible such disorderly spaces under neat graphics of (national) order. White spaces, blanks, and “terra incognita” are evocative of a longer Review essay / Political Geography xxx (2011) 1–4 3 history of the desire to make the unknown known and disguise uneven (and often exploitative) power structures: a blank Africa ready to be “mapped” by European colonists or an “empty” Palestine ready to be Judaized. Maps have traditionally been used to “write” and contain the material world, and consequently, its territories and peoples. From this aspect, Shoshan’s atlas remains emblematic of an occupier purveying territory. What Shoshan’s atlas lacks in emotional insight, in the un/representable chaos of everyday life that necessarily exists in a place like Israel–Palestine, is made up in Annelys DeVet’s A Subjective Atlas of Palestine published by the same Dutch outfit. DeVet’s book does not fit the formulaic slick, shiny pages of an atlas, nor an art book, nor a coffee table book, but their amalgam, itself the result of a workshop of Palestinian artists and designers. The soft paperback has rounded edges, its matte pages feel like recycled paper, the cover has a Palestinian town brushed over in pastel colors. Already from the outside, nothing about DeVet’s atlas is imposing or daunting: and that’s the point. This is not meant to be an authoritative compendium. Indeed, the bottom-up approach challenges dominant ways of representing “nations” and demystifies map-making itself. In the post-structural shift in critical geography towards a distrust and challenge of all-encompassing knowledge claims, the map reader’s agency has become as important to consider as that of the mapmaker herself. DeVet’s atlas challenges the binaries between author–reader, producer–consumer, design–use, map– space, nation–territory, in showing how maps and mappings are always in a state of becoming, always in a state of a simultaneity. The atlas – knowingly or not – seems to borrow from queer and feminist theories, by which I do not simply mean mapping the marginalized and sub-altern. In the first instance, DeVet uses mapping as an intervention which disrupts the (hetero)normativity of space, positing space, let alone map-making, itself as fluid (see Brown & Knopp, 2008). In the second, by focusing on situated knowledge, positionality, reflexivity and performativity, the atlas brings attention to the importance of emotion in social life and in knowledge production (see Kwan, 2007). Moreover, as an ethnographic and collaborative process, the knowledge portrayed in the atlas is bound to the place where it is made, connected to the everyday ways in which Palestinians come to know and to be in Palestine–Israel. At the same time however, the context beyond the territory and beyond the map is also explored and charted. DeVet’s atlas does not include many maps – and most are hand or computer drawn in ways that do not objectively represent a particular territory. One map of Palestine looks like a cow, one a bitten-into cracker resting on the saucer of a cup, another an unfinished game of tic-tac-toe. In the world of map-making the foundational ontology is that the world can be objectively and truthfully mapped; the challenge is simply one of better, more thorough, or more balanced cartography. This is exemplified in Shoshan’s atlas. But as Kitchin and Dodge (2007) explain, what should be at stake in critical geography is not only the ontological underpinnings of maps, but the rethinking of cartography itself in recognizing the process as necessarily ontogenetic. That is, maps have no secure ontological status, they are processes that emerge through practice and constant reterritorialization. There is an important contradiction to keep in mind here. The Palestinian–Israeli conflict is deeply rooted in the “problem” of territory (and mapping that territory). But there are a host of issues, although related to territory – historical narratives, concepts of identity, cultural memory, nationalisms, the sense of belonging, the future character of the one (or two) state(s), let alone the naming of locales and the whole entity – which cannot be addressed by maps, nor for that matter, by territorial redresses. This leads Yair Wallach to call for, in the case of Palestine–Israel specifically, but also generally, a “de-territorialized reading of maps” (2011, p. 367). As I alluded to above, DeVet goes even further by “de-territorializing” the production and the context of maps, not just their readings and consumption. The handful of maps in DeVet’s atlas should not be understood as examples of “counter-mapping” in Denis Wood’s (2010) sense: in opposition to the state. Such a perspective is itself counterproductive, for every map since the first one created from time immemorial can be construed as a counter-map – by that token, Gilbert’s atlas is a collection of Zionist counter-maps to Roman and Arab conquests, the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, Nazism, Ottoman rule, the British Mandate and so on; Shoshan’s atlas is a series of maps, counter-maps, counter-counter-maps, ad infinitum. Rather, the maps in DeVet’s atlas as well as the atlas as a whole challenge the very ontology of cartography. They offer an alternative to the Western understanding and expectation that an atlas, or a map, must be a binding of “scientific representations” as the legitimate means by which to reveal truth or knowledge. What ultimately provides most insight in DeVet’s atlas is everything else that signifies mapping Palestine. The atlas portrays snippets of Palestinian life: the bureaucratic nightmare that is the paperwork necessary to get out of Ramallah, an array of official and make-shift garbage cans. Popular music CD covers, surreptitiously taken photographs with a mobile phone inside a prison, pictures of children playing, Audubon-like representations of herbs, berries and flowers to be found in Palestine’s natural beauty. A twopage spread of different chickpea-based dishes (so much more than the proverbial hummus!), postcards, and agendas of tourist magazines. Computer renditions of water pipes are complemented by all the different words for hookah, drawings of an imaginary Palestinian currency, pictures of morning routines in public spaces, panoramas of checkpoints, desert scapes and green rolling hills. This is a completely different kind of cartography: an emotional geography of lived experiences that opens political possibilities. The result is an unpretentious portrayal of the varied life of Palestinians. “Like a surrealist dream come true, where things are not exactly what they seem and negotiating one’s identity and place is an endless effort of normalization. Normalcy is not to be taken for granted, it has to be imagined and invented” (p. 8), claims artist and writer Hassan Khader in the introduction. The chaos of life is not hidden below an air of neutral precision. There is no central narrative, no clear-cut maps of what is happening to the territory, no linear order, no hegemonic portrayals. Here, “mapping” – broadly redefined – is not the empirical search for verifiable generalization, it is the dyadic process at the heart of representations without fixed meanings: narratives, photographs, drawings, sketches, performances, maps, tourist guides, letters. The atlas not only “demythologizes” the map(s), but emphasizes the corporeal, affective, and unwriteable dimensions of existence, and does so by making emotions and feelings integral aspects of all kinds of geospatial representations (see Kwan, 2007). What comes across is that Palestine and Palestinians are “normal”: both unique and just like everyone/where else. DeVet’s atlas shares no premise for an objective or scientific cartography; in fact it displays that no such thing is possible. The images, snapshots and graphics demonstrate how the abstractions of cartographic reason are hideously partial and always ontogenetic. In reformulating what we might expect of an atlas, by inserting subjectivities into the art of cartography, and thus providing the participants in her project and the reader a wider possibility of interpretation, DeVet’s atlas destabilizes the very orthodoxy of cartography. DeVet’s atlas problematizes and moves beyond the very act of creating an atlas as claiming an authority to know and etching that knowledge on the territory. Her atlas suggests that no map can ever communicate what the territory is, let alone 4 Review essay / Political Geography xxx (2011) 1–4 what kinds of experiences and feelings those may evoke. It also highlights how Israel–Palestine is produced, reproduced, presented, and represented as various kinds of geographies according to a range of contested and contestable ontologies. While Shoshan’s atlas highlights the geographic “deformations” of Palestine–Israel, DeVet’s reveals the landscapes that lie behind all kinds of fabrications: political, territorial, and cartographic. This is not the same as claiming that Palestinians’ experiences are post-structural or post-modern. Palestinians are disoriented, destabilized, de-centered and fragmented; Palestine’s cartography (in the “classical” sense) may very well be impossible in a context in which people find it difficult to grasp their surroundings or define their location. But what has made a particular geography esoteric for Palestinians is not just the vagaries of late capitalism, postmodernism, or hyper-space, but the very (modern) politics of colonialism that continues to “write” Palestinian geography as inaccessible – as simultaneously flaunted and veiled in Gilbert’s atlas for example. DeVet’s collection tells the spatial story of geographical poetry. In doing so, she challenges long-held assumptions about cartography, about Israel–Palestine, and about the normalcy of everyday life under circumstances that either Voltaire or God would have a hard time making sense of. References B’Tselem, & Weizman, Eyal (May 2002). Map of settlements in the West Bank. Available at: http://www.btselem.org/sites/default/files/map/settlements_map_eng. pdf. Brown, Michael, & Knopp, Larry (2008). Queering the map: the productive tensions of colliding epistemologies. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 98(1), 40–58. Kitchin, Rob, & Dodge, Martin (2007). Rethinking maps. Progress in Human Geography, 31(3), 331–344. Kwan, Mei-Po (2007). Affecting geospatial technologies: toward a feminist politics of emotion. The Professional Geographer, 59(1), 22–34. Mitchell, W. J. T. (2000). Holy landscapes: Israel, Palestine, and the American Wilderness. Critical Inquiry, 26, 193–223. Perkins, Chris (2004). Cartography – Cultures of mapping: power in practice. Progress in Human Geography, 28(3), 381–391. Piterberg, Gabriel (2001). Erasures. New Left Review, 10(July-August), 31–46. Wallach, Yair (2011). Trapped in mirror-images: the rhetoric of maps in Israel/Palestine. Political Geography, 30, 358–369. Wood, Denis (2010). Rethinking the power of maps. New York: The Guilford Press. Helga Tawil-Souri* Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University, 239 Greene Street, 7th Floor, New York, NY 10003, USA * Tel.: þ1 212 992 9437. E-mail address: helga@nyu.edu