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A Century of Colonial Mapping in Palestine with Zena Agha
361 Plays4 years ago
Zena Agha and host Yara Hawari discuss how decades of colonial mappings, first by British imperialism and then by the Israeli colonial project, have undermined Palestinian self-determination and explore how Palestinians are fighting back.
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Transcript
The Role of Maps in State Formation
00:00:00
Speaker
The Hebrew map was and very much continues to be an exercise in state formation. It's a kind of living, breathing document of settler colonialism where Zionist ideology is really infused with and folded into the spatial practices and the spatial manipulations of the Israeli state.
Introduction to Palestinian Human Rights Podcast
00:00:24
Speaker
This is We Think in Palestine, a podcast from Ashabaka, the Palestinian Policy Network, a virtual think tank that aims to foster public debate on Palestinian human rights and self-determination. We draw upon the vast knowledge and experience of the Palestinian people.
00:00:40
Speaker
whether in Palestine or in exile, to put forward strong and diverse Palestinian policy voices. In this podcast, we will be bringing these voices to you so that you can listen to Palestinians sharing their analysis wherever you are in the world.
Symbolism of Mapping in Power Dynamics
00:01:00
Speaker
The practice of mapping in Palestine and Israel has long been an exercise in power, imperialism and dispossession.
00:01:06
Speaker
The Shabaka Policy Analyst, Zina Azhar, published a policy brief in January this year examining how Palestinians have been excluded from maps of their own land, from the British Mandate to today, and explores ways that Palestinians can and do reclaim maps as a means of resistance. I'm Yara Hawady, your host, the Shabaka's Senior Policy Analyst, and for our first ever podcast, we've invited Zina Azhar, former US Policy Fellow, to discuss her brief. Zina, thank you so much for joining us.
00:01:36
Speaker
My absolute pleasure. Thank you for having me. Perhaps we can start off by discussing mapping and cartography in general. Why is it important and what are the power dynamics involved? Actually, you've sort of gone right to the core of the subject. Why are maps important when what's happening on the land deserve so much attention?
Maps as Instruments of Colonialism and Nationalism
00:01:56
Speaker
I think they're important because the world maps of today are very much colonial and nationalistic enterprises. They reflect the predominantly Western acquisition and control of territory. So even though at one point maps were intended as sort of navigational tools, the effect of it in real term is to contain the diversity of a single bounded area as a form of control and then charting that visually. So I think the reason why we should spend a lot of time thinking about and critiquing maps
00:02:26
Speaker
is because they hieroglyphs of what was acquired and what is intended. And they're essentially a contested space where land gets drawn, redrawn and reconceptualized on a visual plane, visual two-dimensional plane.
Edward Said's Perspective on Geography Struggles
00:02:42
Speaker
Thank you, Sinha. That's really interesting. Now, in your policy brief, you quote Edward Said in your piece who explained that the struggle over geography was one not only about soldiers and cannons,
00:02:55
Speaker
but also about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings. What exactly is it that Saeed is talking about here? And maybe you could elaborate a little bit with the specificity to Palestine. Sure. I think what Saeed is trying to say in this quote is that essentially
00:03:13
Speaker
contested geography, contested land isn't just a question of the outward militaristic side of warfare, it's also about the ideas and the ideologies that go into constructing a place and a large part of that are images and of course maps as visual images represent a particular
00:03:32
Speaker
idea of the place and in many ways kind of dictate the way that the warfare gets conducted and I think actually if we contextualise this we'll get a clearer understanding of what it is that he was getting at so you know let's not forget that the latter half of the 19th century really just saw a flurry of Orientalist exploration of Palestine mostly by European scholars who are conducting you know historical linguistic archaeological geographic studies and surveys
00:03:57
Speaker
a particular interest actually in biblical and religious areas of which of course Palestine is a very kind of significant location.
Impact of British Mapping on Territorial Control
00:04:06
Speaker
So up until this point I think these medieval and early modern or religious maps typically featured very sort of fantastical imaginings of Palestine Israel you know with these biblical place names these more modern conceptions
00:04:21
Speaker
and these modern interpretations of maps, these sort of explorers come cartographers, really based their maps on a realism and an accuracy, which was dictated by a kind of enlightenment style scientific, innovative commerce method. So even though, you know, the British mandate didn't actually come into effect until, you know, the early 1920s, the British government in many ways have been sort of vying for control and domination over Palestine for decades.
Ideological Influences on Geographical Domination
00:04:47
Speaker
And this really began, I would say, with the first detailed survey of Palestine, which was the 1871 to 1877 Palestine exploration fund. The extensive survey actually was instrumental for Britain's invasion of Palestine in the First World War. The scope of the survey matched almost exactly the borders of what the British mandate of Palestine would be 50 years on.
00:05:12
Speaker
And so I think what Said is trying to indicate here is that although there is a sort of military and very clear, real, politic aspect of acquiring and dominating geography and having a geographical imperative.
Myth Perpetuation Through Maps
00:05:25
Speaker
In reality, a lot of it is fueled by and motivated by ideas about forms, images, imaginings, maps, and all of these ideologies that go into constructing space, and actually in many ways are the root ideas behind the military intervention. I think how maps are used in morphological organization is something that people don't necessarily think about that much. There's something that I always remember being told about
00:05:55
Speaker
that when the British were first colonising Palestine, they would send archaeologists and explorers who would carry a Bible in one hand and a trowel in the other.
00:06:08
Speaker
And I think it really emphasises the use of biblical narratives and stories to map Palestine.
Post-1948 Geographic Renaming
00:06:15
Speaker
So a land without a people for a people without a land was and is such a key tenet of Zionism. And of course, we know that the land of Palestine wasn't empty. But one of the main ways in which this myth was propped up was as a result of mapping. And as you mentioned, under the British mandate,
00:06:35
Speaker
And then later after the establishment of the state of Israel, how and why do they continue to do this after the state of Israel was established? Yeah, it's a very good question. I mean, creating the Hebrew map was really the imperative after the neck of 1948, which of course denotes the loss of the Palestinian homeland in the displacement of over three quarters of a million Palestinians.
00:07:00
Speaker
Zionism was always an ideology up until it built facts on the ground. And the maps were essentially a way of both demonstrating what facts had been created, but also imagining future facts. So it kind of worked in two directions at the same time in the past and in the future. And so right from the beginning, the new state of Israel set out to transform the national map from Arabic to Hebrew.
State-Sponsored Renaming Projects
00:07:21
Speaker
And this was very clearly a way of Zionist nation building. There was a myriad of ways in which they did this, one of
00:07:28
Speaker
which were to affix Hebrew names to all geographical features and the idea was to essentially fuse a kind of biblical Jewish history with territorial control and essentially to make sure or render the Hebrew language as the only language through which to understand the landscape.
00:07:48
Speaker
the effect there would be to erase experiences in the history of the original inhabitants. And this was by design. This was a very clear state-sponsored project. David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, really understood that place names weren't just a sort of linguistic choice. They were sort of an expression of power relations.
00:08:07
Speaker
He assembled a commission not a year after the Nakba to quote the term in Hebrew place names, sorry, Hebrew names to all the places, mountains, valleys, spring, road, and the like in the area of the Negev in the Nakab itself. And over eight months, they did indeed kind of utterly transform the Nakab desert into what is now called the Negev. And in 1950, in August, they produced this Hebrew map of the area. And this was very much like a prototype of what went on to happen across the country. You know, they gathered
00:08:36
Speaker
place names from British colonial maps, they translated existing Arabic names and then situated these names in the kind of biblical, religious and historical context to lend them authenticity for the Zionist project of place making.
Paradoxical Attitudes Towards Arabic in Maps
00:08:52
Speaker
What happened in the Nakab was then expanded across the country. And by 1951, this was state policy to assign names to newly created places. And so barely a decade after the state was created, this commission had assigned almost 3,000 new names. Whereas the names of Palestinian villages were removed from Israel's official index or just simply wiped off the map. Many of the maps of this period actually just showed places disappearing, these disappearing dots of which everyone represented a village and the people and the family.
00:09:21
Speaker
and the histories of that. But I think actually, if I can, I think one of the really important things to talk about this sort of Hebrewization of the map is that it displays a really, really paradoxical relationship to the Arabic language.
Continued Evolution of Hebrew Mapping
00:09:35
Speaker
So on the one hand, Arabic was accused of being foreign and alien and kind of parasitic almost. On the other, it was sort of this undisputed marker of authenticity and indigeneity.
00:09:47
Speaker
Palestinians, also the theory went, sort of possessed this intimate knowledge and relationship to the land and their continued presence on the land over centuries gave them this intimate knowledge. And so Arabic placemames were kind of presumed to be the natural extension of these preserved ancient names and traditions of biblical times. And for the commission that went about renaming all of these places, they became a clue to the past. So
00:10:12
Speaker
know, they affected how the Hebrew names were chosen and they did this either by directly translating the meaning of Arabic names or if the sounds were similar, kind of appropriating them with a Hebrew inflection. And so I think, you know, it's very important to emphasize not just on where the dots get placed and what gets put where, but also how do we call and how do we
00:10:34
Speaker
use language to assert these new places. And of course, I think, you know, the last part of your question in terms of how Israel continues to do this today is paramount.
Impact of Maps on Geopolitical Perceptions
00:10:43
Speaker
The Hebrew map is still being crafted, both within and beyond the Green Line, which is, of course, the armistice line of 1949. So, you know, despite the fact that settlements are constitute a war crime and violate the Article 49 of the Fourteenth Convention,
00:10:57
Speaker
the ongoing building of settlements and the ongoing naming of these settlements is used to create a very dizzying portrayal of conflicting political and military space and make the map contested and give this perception that actually within the Green Line there is a fixed sovereign state whereas beyond the Green Line it's contested and dizzying and in flux and contested.
00:11:22
Speaker
And I think this is one of the ways in which maps actually tell lies and what goes back to what I was saying at the beginning of our discussion about how maps give a perception and outward perception of the way that the world is. And so in looking at the map of today, it actually tells a full story of fixed place and negotiable space rather than
00:11:41
Speaker
contested area from the river to the sea.
Counter-Mapping Efforts Against Erasure
00:11:44
Speaker
So in sum, I think the important point to make is that the Hebrew map was and very much continues to be an exercise in state formation. It's a kind of living breathing document of settler colonialism where Zionist ideology is really infused with and folded into the spatial practices and the spatial manipulations of the Israeli state.
00:12:03
Speaker
If you're enjoying this podcast, please visit our website, www.al-shabaka.org, where you will find more Palestinian policy analysis and where you can join our mailing list and donate to support our work.
Tech's Dual Role in Mapping and Alienation
00:12:19
Speaker
And I think the erasing of Arabic place names has actually been quite a successful endeavor, unfortunately, to the extent that also many Palestinians are today unaware of the indigenous names that existed in Palestine before the settler colonial invasion.
00:12:37
Speaker
But there are efforts to counter that, and we'll go on to that a little bit later, but there are efforts of counter mapping, of documenting destroyed localities. There's, of course, the infamous map of, you know, disappearing Palestine which shows
00:12:54
Speaker
in stages, the loss of Palestinian land, the Zionist settler colonial project. All of these, I think, are important endeavors in countering this use of mapping against the Palestinian people. But I think perhaps we'll go on to that in a bit. I wanted to fast forward a bit to today and talk more about the technological advances in mapping and its limits and possibilities, especially in Palestine.
Google Maps and Israeli Narratives
00:13:23
Speaker
Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, I think what we're seeing today is really a kind of corporatization of technologies which in the past had the possibility of having a very democratizing power, but actually in reality only serve to manipulate and further alienate Palestinians from their land and their understanding of space. You know, there have been huge technological advances over the past two decades. It's sort of a radically altered how humans interact with space, you know,
00:13:51
Speaker
All this military technology of GPS and GIS, which in the past was not available to the public, now provides everyday people with the opportunity of seeing high resolution geospatial data. And it's used for all kinds of things. It's used for advocacy, for accountability, for analysis.
00:14:08
Speaker
It's used by different groups who track climate breakdown to global poverty and, you know, a range of other things in between. So it really, you know, when used for good, it can really be instrumental in telling a different story. I think where the problem has arisen is that actually these technologies are often owned and controlled by tech interests, usually Western and usually with a particular political agenda. And I think here it's sort of important to talk about Google because they are both
00:14:37
Speaker
biggest global player and also a really detrimental actor in Palestinian mapping practices, and I think Hamler, the Arab Centre for Social Media.
00:14:47
Speaker
sorry, social media advancement, which is based in Palestine, issued this report about two years ago now, which really argues that Google Maps serves very clearly the interests of the Israeli government, facilitates its attempts to shrink its responsibilities towards the occupied populations, which of course are Palestinians, but it also essentially creates these routes that are only designed for Israelis and illegal settlers,
00:15:10
Speaker
and can actively be dangerous for Palestinians. And so what you end up seeing here is, again, not only are Palestinians written off their map, they're also not even spoken to. So even for a map for themselves, they're unable to access their land through contemporary cartography. And you know, you see this in a particular, just by assuming that the software just assumes that the user is either an Israeli ID holder or a foreign national.
00:15:37
Speaker
So it specifies particular routes and streets and roads that are on checkpoints which are designed for a particular population at the detriment of the occupied population. But then it also has a big problem in labeling and naming. Israel has actually never declared its borders and yet Google gives Israel a very clear label and boundary as if it were this uncontested block of territory.
Potential for Democratization through Tech
00:15:58
Speaker
Jerusalem is marked as its capital despite the sort of internationally contested status.
00:16:03
Speaker
And Palestinian localities are de-emphasized on the map just visually. They're made to look smaller, or they don't feature at all, as in the case of a lot of Bedouin villages. So whatever the Israeli state deems as credible or legitimate gets given this sort of stamp of approval by Google and whatever is not. And so I think the way in which this Google and these other tech companies really emphasize Israeli localities, illegal or otherwise, is absolutely dire for the way
00:16:30
Speaker
in the way that Palestinians understand their sense of space. It has really represented or come to represent a missed opportunity actually to use technological advancements to democratize the practice of mapping which for so many decades has been such a colonial and violent practice.
Activism and Campaigns Targeting Google
00:16:46
Speaker
Thanks for that Zina. Yeah, Google Maps is a huge problem when it comes to the West Bank and
00:16:53
Speaker
for sure Gaza as well. The Palestinian localities are barely even mentioned on Google Maps. And what you find is that the Israeli settlements are clearly demarcated. And if you want to use Google Maps GPS function to get from point A to point B, you can do that if you want to travel between settlements easily. Google Maps will map out that route for you. But for Palestinian localities, you don't have that service at all because it's as if
00:17:23
Speaker
Palestinian localities and Palestinians don't exist on Google Maps. And that's a huge problem, not only for Palestinians themselves, but also for narrating what is Palestine when people, visitors and tourists come to the West Bank and Palestine, they could easily think that Palestinians don't exist because these places are not mapped. Yeah. And actually on that point, there has been a huge effort to actually hold Google to account. You know, there was
00:17:51
Speaker
this glitch in 2016, removed the names of the West Bank and Gaza from the map, which then prompted a petition, which was called Google, put Palestine on your maps. And it got over 600,000 signatures. I mean, people are engaged into this
Global Patterns of Mapping Marginalization
00:18:05
Speaker
discussion. They're aware of the way in which these these erasures happen. It's just that a lot of these tech companies actually don't really listen to their users. And so these, you know, that their entreaties form on deaf ears.
00:18:16
Speaker
And I suppose it's not particularly surprising that these companies are complicit in Palestinian erasure, especially when we consider what else they are complicit in. And I think this is a really important point to note that these kinds of practices that happen in Palestine also happen elsewhere in the world as a means to erase.
00:18:38
Speaker
indigenous people, working class people, all different types of communities. So it's a way to think about Palestine in a sort of more internationalist sense, that the structures of power that are working in Palestine are also working elsewhere. Yeah, absolutely. And I think, you know, this is part of the work of, you know, de-exceptionising Palestine means actually understanding where these habits and these patterns happen, because they are patterns.
00:19:06
Speaker
many ways Palestine is singled out insofar as it's sort of focused both in terms of the oppression but also in terms of solidarity but actually these mapping practices happen in all contested spaces this is not unique to the Palestinian struggle I think what is unique is to have two different colonizers who are such meticulous mappers such as the British Empire what was the British Empire and the Zionist state I think
00:19:31
Speaker
in the past, you know, often these places get forgotten. Palestine has
Decolonial Practices in Counter-Mapping
00:19:35
Speaker
never been forgotten, it's just been completely redrawn and therefore these things actually leave traces and they leave crumbs and a large part of the work of counter-cultural work and for, you know, Palestinians and anti-Zionist allies who are looking to find Palestine on the map, the work is actually following these breadcrumbs to piece together an imagined future and a possible counter-map.
00:19:57
Speaker
So Zina, that brings me nicely on to my final question. And this is really about this notion of counter mapping and how it can be used as a material practice in the process of decolonizing Palestine. Yeah, I mean, there has been in recent years a huge surge in decolonizing maps. And it's, you know, it's a process much bigger than just changing the names on a map.
00:20:25
Speaker
It's a process that really involves sort of acknowledging the experiences of colonized subjects and documenting and exposing these colonial systems and structures that have led to their destruction on the other. So I think it actually just goes beyond the map as artifacts. The map is really the culmination of all of these practices, just as we were talking about Saeed earlier.
00:20:47
Speaker
You know, the map is really the end product. The map isn't the work itself, if you know what I mean. And you know that, of course, there's a lot of criticism that, which I believe is valid, that counter maps reproduce and embed a kind of existing exclusionary territorial or spatial understanding. But I actually do think that the ongoing counter mapping efforts of which there have been several
00:21:08
Speaker
by Palestinians and allies have created this sort of decolonised cartography, which moves really well past beyond just reasserting lines on a map. They work to collect, to document personal collective memories spatially and incorporate them into a legal and political framework. So, you know, there are many tomes that have worked to do this. Walid Khaledi's 1992 book, All That Remains, which charts each destroyed Palestinian village, Semmeli Salman Abu-Sidda,
00:21:36
Speaker
both of whom actually are Nakba survivors and the latter founder of the Palestine Man Society has drawn up a really comprehensive map for return using all these maps and highlighting that many of the areas of destroyed villages are actually uninhabited and therefore had never been repopulated and actually could accommodate the return of refugees and of its original peoples.
00:21:58
Speaker
and he produced this The Atlas of Palestine in 2010, which is a staggering historical record of pre-Neckba Palestine using aerial imagery.
Role of Apps in Counter-Mapping
00:22:07
Speaker
And so putting aside actually the mapping practices, you also see an embracing of technology and the power of different platforms to imagine this possible right of Palestinian refugees to return. So by taking the sort of detailed historical maps
00:22:24
Speaker
with uncensored high resolution images allows Palestinians to kind of catalog the remnants of villages and towns that were destroyed in the Nakba and imagine future localities. I mean, the most famous example on the map, which I actually used to find my own destroyed village was the Israeli NGO, Zochrot, which means remembering in Hebrew and is a really excellent anti-Zionist organization. And that, you know, the whole mission statement is essentially to Hebrewize the Nakba and make the Nakba legible to Israeli society. So they're doing the work
00:22:53
Speaker
within Israeli society. And one of their projects, which was the iNekba app, as in iPhone, but with Nekba at the end, they created this really interactive smartphone application in 2014. Over 40,000 people have downloaded it. It catalogs over 600 villages with detailed images, texts in the three different languages of Arabic, English, and Hebrew. And really importantly, they have Waze and Google Maps coordinates of how to show users how to get there. So actually, in many ways, it's
00:23:22
Speaker
decolonization and practice, you know, it's allowing people with a literal roadmap of finding these destroyed places and seeing them in real life and understanding what the space currently looks like and what was once there and creating an understanding to land that way. And that, you
Reimagining Mapping for Resistance
00:23:37
Speaker
know, to me, it really demonstrates a way in which technology can serve as a tool to tangibly imagine the palace in your right of return. So, I mean, you know, Sakhrot is a famous example, but there's also, you know, last year, the launch of Palestine Open Maps, which was a collaboration with
00:23:49
Speaker
between the excellent NGO Visualizing Palestine and Columbia University Studio X Amman. Actually, sorry, it was two years ago, I think. But it's an open source mapping project, which sort of, they have very detailed multi-layers maps, which sort of visually narrate these stories and they bring to light hidden geographies. And then of course, you know, Palestinians themselves have been creating maps of just getting around, like beyond just having a kind of a political,
00:24:20
Speaker
I mean, of course, all these maps are political, but beyond making a political statement of return, these maps are actually used with very practical functions. So the Durob Navigator, for one, is an example, which was, I think, launched last year. And it crowdsources road closures and traffic data, which actual Palestinians can use on a day-to-day level to alleviate traffic and get them moving around checkpoints faster. And there's so much more. Decolonizing art and architecture have produced maps.
00:24:50
Speaker
The Gaza War map is an excellent resource. Forensic architecture has done research. These movements that happen within 48 lands across the region and across the world really demonstrate that there's a huge scope for re-imagining and re-appropriating tools which in the past have been used to exclude
Maps as Decolonial Acts
00:25:07
Speaker
us. And of course, I think it's important to add that it's a means to an end. The map is not the end. Producing the map is not reclaiming Palestine, but it is.
00:25:14
Speaker
a de-colonial action or act insofar as it reasserts what return could look like and reasserts what Palestinian livelihood and space could look like. And for that, actually, I think it's a really revolutionary and liberating practice.
00:25:29
Speaker
Thank you, Zina. This is such a timely topic, especially, you know, with the presentation of the Trump plan earlier this year, which really was a practice in imperial mapping by excellence and all of the peace proposals prior to it, for that matter, which have always proposed nothing less than Palestinian banistalization and ghettoization.
00:25:54
Speaker
Sina, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you for joining us for our first ever Shabaka podcast. Thank you. I'm so glad I got to be part of it.
00:26:08
Speaker
Thank you for listening. Don't forget to subscribe and leave us a review. You can find more of our policy analysis and donate to support our work on our website www.al-shabuka.org. You can also follow us on Facebook and Twitter.