Mapping The Zionist State: Colonial Cartographic Practice in the 20th century

Unveiling a complex relic from 1932: a colonial map harnessed by Keren Hayesod, deftly wielded as a fundraising instrument to garner contributions from the Jewish-American community

Introduction

In the realm of geography, the conventional distinction that alienate maps as scientific and political formations has been challenged, redrawn, problematized, and reinvented since the emergence of post-colonial studies in the Western Academy. Professor John Pickles, in 2004, challenged the prevailing categorization of maps, which had been rigidly divided into binary classifications. He highlighted that this classification system failed to encompass the full extent of the influential role maps play in navigating geography's intricate web of power dynamics. Maps, Pickles argued, wield an authority that intricately interlaces with geography, often unnoticed and unchallenged.[1]

Critical geography, a perspective that deeply scrutinizes spatial relationships,[2] would view maps as not only a form of communication but also as powerful instruments that influence and legitimize specific forms of knowledge and collective spatial perceptions, shaped by social, cultural, political, and historic assumptions and preferences. Thus, those that critically analyse maps would view the instrument as a tool that transcends its traditional role as objective representations of geographic information and assume a multifaceted nature, serving as a utensil for shaping spatial imaginations and institutionalizing particular ideologies. A compelling example that exemplifies the significance of the theoretical foundations of critical geography can be found in the ongoing occupation and ethnic cleansing of Historic Palestine, where the Israeli state has historically employed and relied on cartographic production as a means to assert its authority and to lay claim to the land that is inhabited by the Indigenous Palestinian population. Research on the cartography of Palestine serves as a captivating illustration of how maps can be utilized as tools to establish a sense of legitimacy, perpetuate certain narratives, and shape exclusivist spatial perceptions that allow for a collective push for the erasure of people.

Prior to the commencement of the first Aliyah to Palestine in 1881, British and European Zionists worked side by side to produce the cartographic knowledge of the Holy Land as their tool to assert authority over the epistemological avenues of how one views and studies Palestine.[3] It is noteworthy to state that the mechanisms employed to control this region extend from solely knowledge to a gradual aim at territorial control while encompassing the creation of symbolic and pedagogical interpretations of the Holy Land to further legitimize one’s own claims.[4] This employment of cartography as a means of establishing authority and shaping perceptions is evident in the multifaceted approach taken by British and European Zionists in Historic Palestine.

This blog's overarching purpose is to elucidate how the Israeli state harnessed maps to cement its historical presence and national legitimacy. Additionally, it delves into the concept of cartographic erasure, a method perpetuated by the Israel to sustain its occupation. The extensive coverage of this topic stems from its role as an illustrative case study demonstrating how settler colonialism encompasses an epistemological conquest as crucial as its physical land control.

Why I wrote on cartography is because I feel that too often supporters of the Palestinian cause narrowly label the events in Historic Palestine as Apartheid when a mere trip down the archives can show how that the broader narrative is far more intricate. The Zionist project has fundamentally altered the essence of the region, reshaping its perception and collective memory. Essential to this analysis is the role of critical cartography, spotlighting how our prevailing epistemological framework—shaped by overarching colonial structures—further informs our pursuit of liberation. Studying cartography can expose how dominant epistemologies are crafted and manipulated, underscoring their entwinement with prevailing colonial paradigms. Through this examination, we uncover the intricate dynamics that influence our understanding and messaging in the quest for justice and liberation

Pre-State Mapping

In Culture and Imperialism, renowned Palestinian-American intellectual Edward Said argues that “struggle over geography” is one that is “not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings.”.[5] Said’s thesis provides readers an alternative and more substantial understanding that posits how modern imperialism equally viewed land domination by means of controlling 1) the physical space of the land and importantly by 2) controlling the understanding of what the land entails. Throughout his book, Said exemplified imperial fallacies to view the world monolithically through binaries of the civilized, Europe and its white settlers, and the barbaric primitive population, Indigenous and non-Europeans. An examination into early Zionist thinking illustrates the colonial nature imbedded in mapping Palestine.

The Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF) was the earliest European Zionist group to map Palestine. Established in 1865, the Fund was a British upper-class private society that aimed to "apply the rules of science" in their archeological and cartographic discoveries of the holy land.[6] With the help of European cartographic technology, the PEF obtained a foothold in how Palestine was to be represented and discussed. The rhetoric surrounding "scientific inquiry" has created a divide amongst those seeking to understand the research conducted by the Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF). Zena Agha's paper, "Maps, Technology, and Decolonial Spatial Practices in Palestine," argues that since maps produced by the PEF were so advanced and sophisticated, they were utilized as military planning aids during the British invasion of Palestine 50 years after their publication.[7] Agha's strategic analysis brings to light the foundation established by the PEF, which aided The British Mandate efforts and supported Jewish Zionists in their colonization of Arab land. The maps produced focused heavily on western Palestine, which is presently considered Israel proper. Mapping practices during the mandate period were primarily intended for military, political, and economic planning, with little attention paid to the indigenous Palestinian population.[8] Palestinians were rarely depicted as people who lived on the land, and mapping practices often portrayed them as nomadic individuals.

Figure 1.0 A sample of Eretz Israel boxes. Retrieved from Christine Leuenberger, and Itzhak Shnell. The Politics of Maps Page 57

The early Zionist mapping practices played a significant role in discrediting Arab claims to the land of Palestine and in inventing notions of Zionist claims over the land. Pamphlets presenting early maps were heavily distributed initially to solicit support from European Jews in effort to reinforce the Zionist narrative that the region was unpopulated and waiting to be claimed by its rightful owners. These maps featured topographic and religious markings intended to support Jewish claims to the land, while also perpetuating orientalist stereotypes that depicted Arabs as nomads and marginalized their presence in the region.[9]

In addition to the distribution of mapping pamphlets, the most monumental tool used by Zionists was a metal donation box called the "Ertz Israel Box" (Figure 1.0), with donations collected used to aid Zionist efforts in buying land to create the exclusively Jewish colonies across Western Palestine. The Ertz Israel Box was distributed across Jewish communities in North Africa, Europe, and North America, featuring a printed Hebrew map with biblical names. The box served as a tangible representation of the Zionist claim to the land and was intended to evoke emotions among the global Jewish community to recruit agents for Zionist socialization and colonization of Historic Palestine. The Jewish National Fund proudly proclaimed that the donation box enabled every Jew, regardless of age or gender, to become a partner in the Zionist enterprise and be personally involved in the development of the land.[10] In turning colonization efforts into a collective movement through the imaginative footprint the map provided, the JNF, alongside other Zionist organizations, had succeeded in normalizing and conveying an acceptance of Jewish colonial admissions which created widespread acceptance of Zionism and Zionist leaders within the Jewish faith and on the world stage. The recognition of the JNF as representing the interests of the Jewish diaspora by the League of Nations marked the proliferation of Zionist educational propaganda and allowed for a colonial imagination to permeate Jewish circles. The use of mapping and propaganda by early Zionists underscores the power of visual representations in shaping perceptions of the land and people and highlights the role of colonialism in the establishment of the Israeli state. Leuenberger and Schnell, in their book "The Politics of Maps," posit that the donation Box has evolved into a cultural icon that symbolizes the imagined conquest and creation of a Jewish-Zionist state, thereby creating a "JNF culture... that had its own behavioral norms and ritualistic gatherings".[11] In just a decade, the JNF's colonial aspirations had transformed the collective Jewish identity from being rooted in dedication to shared historic values to being exclusively tied to territory, under the auspices of Zionist ideology. Leuenberger and Schnell further illustrate how, in the early 20th century, the notion of the land of Israel was considered "esoteric and abstract,"[12] and could only be established by a messianic miracle, but by the 1930s any notions of the land of Israel had become deeply rooted in the territorial conquest of Palestine under Zionist exclusivist leadership. One may confidently conclude that the map had aided the Zionist aspiration in altering both the religious and political identity of what European/Ashkenazi Judaism entailed to meet its goal of colonizing and creating a state in Historic Palestine.

Erasing Palestinians Presence: Post-1948 Cartography

Following the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948, which resulted in the displacement of 80% of the Arab population by Zionist militia, the toponymy of the land saw a massive overhaul. The Zionists sought to uproot any presence of Arab society to make way for its colonial project to “making the desert bloom”.[13] In an article on the appropriation of Palestinian place names, Nur Masalha argues that the "de-Arabization" of Palestine predicated on a range of central renaming patterns post-1948, including a state-sanctioned toponymicide which aimed to erase any Arab presence to make way for state-supervised projects focused on Hebrewizing/Judaizing the land’s representations and narrated history. The initiation of the project began following Prime Minister Ben-Gurion's visit to the Naqab/Negav in June 1949 where he stressed a sense of urgency to "give Hebrew names"[14] to the land following the establishment of the state. Thus, with the help of the Government Names Committee (GNC), Gurion and fellow Zionist military leaders sought to reinvent the map by driving "political attributes that could be consciously mobilised by the Zionist hegemonic project."[15] From the outset, the GNC was assigned to renaming 561 different geographic features of the Negev using nothing but Hebrew and the bible as references. However, as Basem Ra'ad argued[16], the GNC faced difficulty in following the demands made by Gurion, as they exhausted all biblical names possible,  leading them to shifting their strategy from erasing Arabic from the map to mass translating the indigenous Arabic names into Hebrew – an appropriation method termed mimicry.

Between 1948 and 1967, the Israeli state made all efforts to erase Historic Palestine from any documents that held spatial representations, which stifled Palestinians to having to rely on collective memory, a form of historical documentation that was ignored by the West and their allies to claim their right to self-determination. Beyond the physical bulldozing of Palestinian villages, the Zionist leadership, with the assistance of its supporters in Europe and the United States, adopted a vigorous deployment of force against any narrative, whether academic or collective memory, that gave voice or power to the Palestinian heritage or experience/perspective concerning Israel’s ‘war of independence’. This process of deletion culminated in the creation of a “metaphorical palimpsest”[17] , where the rich historical fabric of one community was obliterated to make way for the inscription of the history of another community over it, as argued by Ilan Pappe, a member of Israel’s ‘New Historians’, in his groundbreaking book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. This process of erasure also resulted in the reduction and elimination of Palestinians from most texts, particularly the map, as argued that maps easily communicate the spatial presence of a people and their history. Consequently, the erasure of this history from the map and most archives[18] led to a threat of integrity that placed Palestinians in the periphery of all institutions, making an insurmountable task to garnish international support for their liberation between 1948-1967.

After the 1967 war, the convergence of cartography with occupation and colonization took new strides with the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) taking a primary role in facilitating the planning of a slow ethnic cleansing, a strategy that Israel had endorsed after completing its mission to fully control of the land between the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan River. Throughout the entirety of modern Zionism, demographic control and pressure had been central in discourse. From Theodor Herzl to Ben-Gurion, to current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, all have professed the necessity of ensuring the Arab population does not reach 40% of the legally entitled citizens of the state.[19] The initiation of slow ethnic cleaning, argues Saad Amira, is a process that “manifests gradually and often invisibly, in contrast to spectacular violence that more frequently garners media and political attention”.[20] Amira highlights how slow violence results in the displacement of the Palestinians without initially physically moving individuals, it strands them fragmented in disposable ecosystems that were once flourishing, leaving them unable to maintain their previous ways of life. These ecosystems include both the land and urban public spaces in Palestine.

The degradation and destruction of Palestinian ecosystems can be traced back to the psychological tactics employed by the Israeli state in Palestinian territories. From 1967 to 1995, the state frequently imposed curfews to instill fear, assert its power, and restrict collective resistance. These curfews were primarily aimed at aiding the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) in accumulating census data in the occupied territories. [21] Roberto Bachi, founder and lead enumerator of the CBS, stated in a report on the enumeration of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Northern Sinai, and Golan Heights that the CBS, in cooperation with the Israeli army, carried out the enumeration process from house to house under intense and mandatory curfews. After the Israeli state had occupied the rest of Palestine, cartographic means played a crucial role as the state heavily relied on such cartographic knowledge to ease its control of both the land and the people with  the census playing a decisive role for power brokers in this regard. Surveillance became one of the main controlling mechanisms that the Israeli regime could now exploit, as enumeration provided the occupying power with knowledge of ways to manipulate the cohesiveness of Palestinian society, fragmenting and dividing it for its colonial ambitions, and preventing those who fled from returning. Evidence for such motivations is highlighted by the rapid nature in how cartographic knowledge that was collected after the 6-day war. Such knowledge placed the state in a prime position to further dispossess Palestinian ecosystems, which reciprocated Israel's desire to free up the land for its expansionist aspirations. To understand the level of acceptance cartographers had in furthering Israel’s colonial aspirations, one must view Bachi's revelation in an interview with the Graphical Rational Patterns where he fondly looked back on dehumanizing Palestinians for his data consumption as a moment that made him feel with like a "kindergarten boy playing with colored papers,"[22] affording him boundless amusement. A glance into the archives demonstrate the vital role cartographic means played for the Israeli state in disposing Palestinian ecosystems.

Conclusion

            In conclusion, a meticulous examination of the Israeli state's cartographic practices reveals how politics and colonialism shaped the Zionist leadership's utilization of maps. Rather than mere objective depictions of geographic information, maps were employed as potent instruments of authority, shaping perceptions, and legitimizing specific narratives based on cultural, social, political, and historical assumptions. Early British and Zionist cartography played a pivotal role in discrediting Palestinian claims, resulting in the erasure of their entitlement to the land and facilitating the uncontested claim that "the land without a people" was open for "the people without a land." This historical development highlights how Israel owes much of its existence to the strategic manipulation and revisionism of the map. As the Palestinian people and their allies discover the ways in which cartography was utilized by Zionists, counter-mapping will undoubtedly proliferate to deconstruct popular notions of the Israeli map, liberating both the physical and epistemological landscape of Historic Palestine

[1] John Pickles. A History of Spaces : Cartographic Reason, Mapping, and the Geo-Coded World.

London ;: Routledge, 2004.

[2] Denis Cosgrove. “Epistemology, Geography, and Cartography: Matthew Edney on Brian

Harley’s Cartographic Theories.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 97, no. 1 (2007): 202–209.

[3] Yossi Katz. “Identity, Nationalism, and Placenames: Zionist Efforts to Preserve the Original

Local Hebrew Names in Official Publications of the Mandate Government of Palestine.” Names 43, no. 2 (1995): 103–118.

[4] Nur Masalha. “Settler-Colonialism, Memoricide and Indigenous Toponymic Memory: The

Appropriation of Palestinian Place Names by the Israeli State.” The Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies : a multidisciplinary journal 14, no. 1 (2015): 3–57.

[5] Edward W Said. Culture and Imperialism. 1st Vintage Books ed. New York: Vintage Books,

1994 Page 15

[6] Zena Agha. “Maps, Technology, and Decolonial Spatial Practices in Palestine.” Al - Shabaka, May 4, 2022. https://al-shabaka.org/briefs/maps-technology-and-decolonial-spatial-practices-in-palestine/. 

[7] Ibid

[8] Yair Wallach. “Trapped in Mirror-Images: The Rhetoric of Maps in Israel/Palestine.” Political

geography 30, no. 7 (2011): 358–369.

[9] Christine Leuenberger, and Itzhak Shnell. The Politics of Maps : Cartographic Constructions of

Israel/Palestine. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2020. Page 55-98

[10] Ibid Page 57   

[11] Ibid 58

[12] Ibid 59

[13] Shmuel Lederman. “Making the Desert Bloom: Hannah Arendt and Zionist Discourse.” The

European legacy, toward new paradigms 21, no. 4 (2016): 393–407.

[14] Nur Masalha. “Settler-Colonialism, Memoricide and Indigenous Toponymic Memory: The Appropriation of Palestinian Place Names by the Israeli State.” Page 33

[15] Ibid Page 32

[16] Basem Raʻad Hidden Histories : Palestine and the Eastern Mediterranean. London ;: Pluto

Press, 2010. Page 188-189

[17] Ilan Pappé. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Oxford: Oneworld, 2006. Page 138-139

[18] For more information on the obstacles of a Palestinian Archive visit https://electronicintifada.net/content/how-israel-erases-palestinian-cultural-memory/36026

[19] Ilan Pappé. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine Page 250

[20] Saad Amira. “The Slow Violence of Israeli Settler-Colonialism and the Political Ecology of

Ethnic Cleansing in the West Bank.” Settler Colonial Studies 11, no. 4 2020 page 515

[21] Jess Bier. “Removing Borders, Erasing Palestinians: Israeli Population Maps after 1967.” The MIT Press Reader, May 27, 2021. https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/removing-borders-erasing-palestinians-israeli-population-maps/. 

[22] Quote retrieved from Jess Bier. “Removing Borders, Erasing Palestinians: Israeli Population Maps after 1967.”