Mapping a Catastrophe

The absolute catastrophe that has been unfolding in Israel/Palestine is of an unimaginable scale. The suffering, destruction, and inevitable long-term detrimental consequences on peacebuilding for generations to come is unfathomable. Over the course of many years conducting research in Israel/Palestine I have experienced two wars between Israel-Gaza. The Israeli government called them Operation Pillar of Defense in 2012 and Operation Protective Edge in 2014 respectively; to declare them "wars" would have had legal ramifications that the Israeli government did not want (Rivital and Cohen, 2014). In 2014, whilst missiles were aimed at Jerusalem, people stayed home, waiting out the war wearily in their living rooms and seeking shelter in their "safe rooms" upon the sound of the red code alarm; in Gaza, on the other hand, exhausted mothers, with no respite from bombing and no safe shelter, told their children that when there is a bombing raid they should all go to the same room so they may die together. At the time, amid mental and physical exhaustion, people would assure one another continuously, "this will not last much longer – one or two days," "there will be a ceasefire by Friday, I am sure." Yet, Friday turned into another Friday and yet another Friday. This was 2014, and the war lasted 50 days. As the current war enters its 7th month since October 7th, 2023, I wonder whether, amid the mental and physical exhaustion that comes with living through a state of war, hope for a ceasefire, for respite, for peace still lives on? Then again, I know it does; in 2014 when I asked my local friend Adara despairingly: "There is no hope, is there?," she turned to me reproachfully: "I live here. I cannot afford to give up hope."

What brought us to this pivotal, historical, and destructive moment is multifaceted and complex. It is traceable to colonialism, Zionism, nation-building, and ethno-nationalism; land rights, land annexation and occupation; orientalism, racism, and othering; and borders, walls, fences, and policy failures. What brought us to this point also has to do with maps and the imagined communities and territorial imaginaries they conjure up. The focus of this contribution is on maps and how they create particular geopolitical imaginaries and hegemonic narratives that may serve some and not others.

Maps have long been used as tools to pursue various political projects; they have helped create states, spatial imaginations, and national identities. Map-making in Israel/Palestine powerfully reveals the interlinkages between cartography and politics. How to delineate these territories has been subject to continuous controversy; Israeli and Palestinian protagonists have used maps to make various geopolitical claims. Within Israel, map-makers have historically used two different and opposing geopolitical visions to construct national maps.

After the 1967 war and Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza , the pre-war territorial consensus gave way to "map wars" waged by various governmental and non-governmental organizations (Leuenberger and Schnell 2010).1 Israeli organizations that are part of the "peace camp" produced maps that draw attention to such issues as Israel’s occupational strategies in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (oPts), its non-compliance with international law, and the need for the recognition of Palestinians’ right to their historical lands and human rights. They map the territories according to international law, challenge dominant "hebraized" (Maoz and Golan, 2001; Falah, 1996) geopolitical mappings, and emphasize the largely erased Palestinian-Arab topography of the land. "Peace camp" advocates also argue for the feasibility of the long-favored two-state solution to solve the Israeli-Palestinian impasse.

Conversely, the Israeli political right (Marsden, 2023; Arian et. Al., 1992) has historically made maps that are constituted by two different yet complementary discourses: the "national-religious" as well as the "secular expansionist" discourses (Leuenberger and Schnell 2020). Advocates of the "national-religious" discourse tend to emphasize Jewish rootedness in what is considered "Greater Israel" and encourage settlements of what are thought to be the Biblical lands of the Jewish people. Consequently, they tend to "hebraize" and "judaize" (Zink 2009) the territory, while delegitimizing Palestinian land claims. Advocates of the "secular expansionist discourse," on the other hand, campaign for a ‘territorially plump’ Israel for its national security and defense and oppose Palestinian statehood citing the "security primacy" (Konrad 2014). The center-right Likud party frequently invokes the "secular expansionist" discourse; its ideological goals have long included settling and annexing territory for security purposes. To do so has always gone hand in hand with claiming these territories as part of what some consider to be Jewish ancestral lands.

Such diverse geopolitical concerns are indicative of the ever-increasing political fragmentation of the Israeli populace; the political right is pitted against the political left (Shalev 2014), and the national- religious and the ultra-orthodox against the secular segments of society. Already in 2004, Israel had become a sectarian society, undermining Israel’s "social integration, collective identity, and the legitimacy of its institutions potentially [putting] an end to the era of Zionist ideology, by replacing Zionism with alternative ideologies, either particularistic in nature (such as Jewish-religious) or more universal in nature (such as post-Zionism or anti-Zionism)" (Yuchtman-Yaar and Shavit, 2004: 345). In the decades since, there has been shift towards the "Jewish-religious" ideology and the political right-wing.

By 2015, some of Israel’s most notable commentators declared the death of the two-state solution. At the same time, the political and defense establishment as well as the media became dominated by a new elite; they advocated for the redemption of the "Promised Land" and the alleged superiority and legitimacy of the Jewish project to settle the land, invoking the Bible as evidence. At the same time, orientalist, and racist beliefs about "others," particularly Palestinians (Levy, 2015), are propagated in public discourse, the media and school textbooks (Bar-Tal and Teichman, 2009; Peled-Elhanan, 2023). The "othering" of Palestinians has been enhanced by the walls, fences, and other closure mechanisms that separate Israelis from Palestinians across the West Bank, Israel, and Gaza (see e.g. Hallaq 2003; Jones at.al, 2016; Leuenberger 2014; UNOCHA 2023; Hasson, 2019). Such infrastructures of division help create, maintain, and enforce a "sectarian consciousness" (Shirlow, 2003), and provide the condition for dehumanizing and delegitimizing narratives of the ‘other’ to appear ever more plausible; a precondition for discrimination, exploitation, expulsion, killings, and genocide (Bar-Tal, 2000).2

Israel’s socio-political fragmentation and shift to the political right thus transpired alongside the delegitimization of Palestinians. It is within this cultural context, in 2022, that the mayor of the historically liberal city of Tel Aviv warned that Israel was heading toward a fascist theocracy (Staff 2022). In 2018, the new "nation state law" (Hostovsky Brandes, 2018) defined the Israeli state as representing the Jewish people only. Given Israel’s multi-ethnic make-up such an exclusivist definition of the state undermines its democratic nature. Yet, the desire for a Jewish state seems to increasingly trump concerns over the loss of democracy, especially if democracy would mean sharing political power with non-Jews.

The move to the right has to do with demography too. The ultra-Orthodox, Orthodox, and traditional religious, who historically have been on the political right, have significantly higher birthrates than the secular segments of society. Also, an increasing percentage of youth describe themselves as right wing (CSIS, 2022). The fact that younger generations have had little or no exposure to Palestinians has only contributed to their hardened attitude towards them. Consequently, the current Israeli government coalition, which is coined as "the most right-wing government in Israeli history" (Marsden, 2023), increasingly represents an ever-greater popular majority that concurs on several political issues, ranging from support for settlers in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (oPts) to the desire to re-occupy and re-claim Gaza (Frenjek, 2023). Moreover, large scale external events, such as the first and second Intifada (the Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation) in 1987-1993 and 2000-2005 respectively, boosted the move to the right and increased political polarization. After the attack by Hamas on Southern Israel on Oct 7th, 2023, the shift to the right only accelerated, and the left pro-peace camp became further marginalized.

Nevertheless, dissenters from the dominant right-wing political stance persisted within Israel. Numerous organizations, intellectuals, and Knesset members critique current Israeli government policies (JSTreet; Peace Now; Betselem; Gisha; Ir Amin; Wiener 2023; Spitzer-Resnick, 2023; Barak, 2024; Serhan, 2024). Peace and security, they say, is only possible with a negotiated territorial settlement with the Palestinians. They advocate for the "peace camp" vision within Israel and in Washington DC. However, such critical voices and narratives are silenced and persecuted in Israel and elsewhere as critics are accused of either antisemitism or of being "self-hating Jews" (Finlay, 2005).

Despite Israel’s increasingly polarized politics, the support of the US (the largest supplier of Israeli foreign aid) has more recently bolstered the interests and concerns of the Israeli right-wing, thereby providing legitimacy to their claims. Indeed, American public discourse on Israel/Palestine has been largely shaped by Israeli right-wing priorities. A case in point is the 2020 "Trump peace plan," officially entitled "Peace to Prosperity: A Vision to Improve the Lives of the Palestinian and Israeli People," that included two "conceptual" maps that envisaged the contours and borders of the State of Israel and a proposed State of Palestine to allegedly solve the "Israeli-Palestinian conflict" (The White House 2020).

Drawing maps and borders of Israel/Palestine had always been contentious. In fact, after the 1993 Oslo Accords , Israeli political parties largely refrained from publishing maps as they could become the basis for negotiation and compromise over land claims with the Palestinians.3 Indeed: "no formal, clear maps delineating Israel’s future borders and the borders of a future Palestinian state were [ever] presented to the public" (Keinon, 2020). Yet, the White House under the leadership of then President Donald Trump unveiled maps as part of the "Trump peace plan."

After the plan’s announcement at a White House Press conference on January 28, 2020, both Israeli and Palestinian experts agreed that, what was often referred to as, the "Deal of the Century" (the DoC), was crafted in "a Jewish-Israeli-house" and passed onto allies at the White House. Indeed, the plan was produced by Israeli-US political protagonists known for their alliances to the Israeli political right-wing. Yet, by outsourcing the drawing of potentially contentious maps to the White House, the Israeli administration could get its geopolitical vision cartographically realized as it represents "the territory that Israel feels it can live with" (Keinon, 2020).

The Trump plan relies on the "national-religious discourse" as it emphasizes Jewish historical rootedness in the land. It also is aligned with the "secular expansionist discourse" as the plan’s defining parameter is Israel’s security, which is used to justify Israel retaining 30% of the West Bank (Leuenberger 2023). Moreover, throughout the negotiations of the Trump plan and its maps, "the Palestinian side was kept in the dark" (Falah, 2020, 52; Arieli, 2020; Isaac and Khalilieh, 2020). Consequently, according to the Israel human rights organization Betselem, the DoC was "like a Swiss cheese, with the cheese being offered to the Israelis and the holes to the Palestinians" (Betselem 2020).

Experts denounced the Trump plan a policy failure and as a result the US lost the already little credibility it might have had as an ostensibly neutral negotiator (Sanger 2020). The plan failed not only because Palestinians were excluded from what should have been a multilateral negotiation, but also because scientific and diplomatic experts were sidelined in favor of a closed circle of political insiders. Yet, despite its inadequacies, the Trump plan and its maps will inevitably become a starting point of any future peace talks (Sher and Cohen, 2020; Malley and Gordon, 2020).

In the aftermath of the failed Trump plan, the Israeli political establishment was focused on normalizing relations with other Arab countries, rather than addressing the Palestinian issue. Indeed, the Palestinian issue seemed to have been contained and managed. It became largely invisible in the Israeli political sphere until Oct 7th, 2023 (Mekelberg, 2024). The attacks by Hamas on Southern Israel on that day, killed over 1,200 Israelis, shocked the world and profoundly traumatized an Israeli public whose collective psyche still reels from memories of the Holocaust, historical persecution, and the resultant siege mentality (Bar-Tal and Antebi, 1992). On Oct 8th Noah Efron (2023) wrote:

"most of us are dumb from the shock of it all, and the horror. It is a moment of strange and awkward quiet. Soon it will pass. There will be a counter-attack on Gaza that will produce its own tragedies, and there will be fights here and abroad about how much counter-attack is too much, or too little Soon, maybe already by the time you read this, the quiet will be gone, the fighting will have started, in Gaza and among ourselves. But for a brief moment, at least, we can see these things now."

The subsequent Israeli revenge attack on Gaza (Lustick 2023), justified in terms of the need to eradicate Hamas, has killed over 35,000 Palestinians, displaced the majority of its population, and reduced a large portion of the besieged enclave to rubble. Some speak of urbicide, domicide, genocide, ethnic cleaning, expulsion, educide (Jack, 2024; Wintour, 2023; Teibel and Staff 2023; Inlakesh, 2023; International Court of Justice 2024), others speak of self-defense, antisemitism, and historical justice.

At this pivotal moment the US administration under President Biden came out to stand side-by-side with Israel’s most right-wing government in its history (The White House 2023). Dissident voices within US policy circles were sidelined (Gramer, 2023), while military aid flowed to Israel with or without Congressional approval. Yet, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barack (2024) points out that the smoke screen of legitimacy behind which the current Israeli government is pursuing its policies may fool Israel’s closest ally, the US. Barack suggests that Israel’s current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may possibly acquiesce to some US demands, however, concerned that his far-right coalition might abandon him as a result he "will whisper to his far-right allies: 'Don’t leave. I fooled Obama, I fooled Trump, and I will fool Biden, too—and we will survive. Trust me!'" (Barak, 2024). With Biden increasingly facing a political backlash and with his electoral support dwindling, efforts have been made to repair the immense damage that unconditional support of the Israeli government campaign in Gaza has done to US legitimacy as a presumed bastion for upholding international law, human rights, and democratic governance (Kurtzer-Ellenbogen, 2024).

US support for Israel’s war on Gaza should also be assessed in light of the settler imaginings that the war has enabled. In January 2024, various right-wing and settler organizations, ranging from The Samaria Regional Council to the Nachala Movement Israel, organized the Conference for the Victory of Israel – Settlement Brings Security: Returning to the Gaza Strip and Northern Samaria (Yalon, 2024). The venue brought together far-right sympathizers, including many public figures, Knesset members, and ministers of the current coalition government. Speakers advocated for re-settling Gaza and transferring Palestinians from the Strip through "voluntary emigration." The location of the proposed new Jewish settlements in Gaza were marked on an oversized map (Fig 1).

Fig. 1 Image, Author's own.

Given the participation of far-right ministers and members of the current governing coalition at the conference, a report from the Foundation for Middle East Peace (2024) suggests:

"We can no longer look at this as some kind of fringe phenomena. Even if the idea [of settling Gaza] sounds far-fetched right now, we have to realize that over time, Israel has developed a tradition of beginning with what seem like extreme policies on the margins and [them] then creeping into the mainstream. I would expect that this government over the next number of years will make efforts to increasingly legitimize the idea of Israel occupying the Gaza Strip and rebuilding settlements, and then little by little, try to lay the groundwork to do it."

The groundwork for resettling Gaza is already ongoing in terms of establishing new facts on the ground as well as in terms of territorial visions. Facts on the ground such as the building of roads, such as "Highway 749" that is to divide Gaza, is under way and commentators point out that "There is no doubt that the Israeli army is preparing to stay here for a very long time. This kind of road is not paved for two months only" (Middle East Eye, 2024; see also Morris et.al. 2024; Kenney-Shawa, 2024). Also, an Israeli real estate company that builds settlements in the West Bank, posted images of Israeli settlements transposed onto the devasted Gaza landscape, advertising beach houses along the seafront at pre-sale prices (Fig 2) (Collard 2023). After it caused international media outrage and condemnation, the company claimed that the post was satirical and took it down. Nevertheless, such territorial imaginaries align with campaigns for resettling of Gaza.

Fig. 2 Author: Collard 2023.

The resettlement of Gaza has strong support amongst Israeli settlers who were forced to leave the Strip as part of the Israeli government’s disengagement plan from Gaza in 2005 (UN: The Question of Palestine, 2005; Roy 2005); for these settlers this is yet the best opportunity to return. Indeed, at the Conference for the Victory of Israel many speakers noted that this was an opportune time to get what they termed "historical justice" and to reclaim the "Promised Land" that the Israeli government had abandoned in 2005. For them, a return of Jewish settlements to Gaza meant security and victory (Dostri 2023). As settlers are planning for the return to Gaza, and ministers draw on both the Bible as well as the security mantra for justifications to do so, signs with the message "Return to Gush Katif" (a Jewish settlement abandoned in Gaza in 2005) have been hung on billboards across Israel. For this burgeoning social movement dedicated to reclaiming Gaza, the new Gaza map (see Fig 1) indicating new Jewish settlements and a "hebraized" landscape provides for a new expansionist territorial vision of the long hoped for "Greater Israel" (Segal, 2023). At the same time, the Palestinian-Arab topography becomes erased.

Maps have often been a prerequisite for establishing facts on the ground. They have served to erase people, conquer territories, and shape national imaginations. The Israeli weather map exemplifies the cartographic erasure of the Palestinian territories; it represents Israel from the River to the Sea with both Gaza and the West Bank incorporated into Israel’s national territory. Indeed after 1967, the Israeli Knesset decided to eliminate the Green Line, the internationally recognized 1949 armistice line between Israel and the Palestinian Territories, from Israel’s official maps. As a result, many Israelis do not know the Green Line’s location nor its legal status under international law. In a public imaginary in which Gaza has long been subsumed under the map of the whole of Israel, the disappearance of the Palestinians, their topography and their history could be swift if the international community were to let that happen.

In the 21st century, and at a time when minority and indigenous rights have become the talking points of intellectual circles, it is arguably time for Western politicians to act to uphold the values and rights embedded within international law, human rights, and democracy. In doing so, they would find partners for peace both in Israel’s civil society and in numerous organizational initiatives that have worked for peace, territorial equity, and human rights ever since the 1990s; and they would also find partners for peace in Palestinian society that have been planning for a two-state solution since the 1993 Oslo Accords (Leuenberger 2013; Leuenberger and El-Atrash 2014; 2015). However, in the meantime, the ever-growing global backlash to the catastrophe unfolding in Israel/Palestine, including the emerging voices from the Global South that are standing up for international law and human rights (Shidore and Ford 2024; Gbadamosi, 2024), may yet reconfigure dominant geopolitics. Hope may be faint, but, as Adara insisted in the midst of war in Jerusalem, to give up hope is not an option.

Endnotes

1. At the end of the 1967 war between Israel and its neighboring states Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, Israel more than tripled the territory under its control, occupying the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza, the Sinai Peninsula, and the Golan Heights. According to international law, the Palestinian Territories continue to be under Israeli occupation as Israel’s border can only be determined through peace negotiations and not through annexation. The UN Security Council and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) also maintain that all Jewish settlements in occupied territories contravene international law and the Fourth Geneva Convention (which prohibits the transfer of civilian populations into occupied territory). UN Resolution 242 also emphasized the inadmissibility of acquiring territory by war and emphasized the necessity to address the refugee issue, amongst other issues. For further information see the resolution at https://unispal.un.org/unispal.nsf/0/7D35E1F729DF491C85256EE700686136. Accessed May 20, 2021.

2. While infrastructures of division have historically created "sectarian consciousness," the use of technologies of war strengthens such sentiments by lowering feelings of responsibility, increasing possibilities for technologically mediated crime, and insulating perpetrators from the consequences of their own actions (Gusterson, 1991; Warburg, 2003; Petley, 2003; Hagan and Rymond-Richmond, 2008).

3. The Oslo Accords divided the Palestinian Territories into different territorial zones, including Zones A (under full Palestinian control), B (under Palestinian civil control and Israeli military control) and C (under full Israeli military control). The assumption was that full territorial control over all zones would eventually be transferred to the Palestinian Authorities. For the territorial delineation according to the Oslo Accords see UNOCHA Reference Map WB and Gaza 2006. https://www.ochaopt.org/content/reference-map-wb-and-gaza-2006. Accessed June 1, 2021.

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Published: 07/30/2024