While Mahmoud Abbas was attempting to use legal and bureaucratic means to forge borders for a potential homeland, Israel was busy forcibly relocating its Bedouin population and revoking residency status from East Jerusalemites. Even maps that aim to highlight the fragmentation of Palestinians often present Israel as permanent, as opposed to a dynamic entity with no recognized borders. To paraphrase the late Edward Said, this discourse serves to strip the actual geography from the most geographical of conflicts. It enforces the erroneous notion that the Nakba has ended, and the conflict has become a protracted border dispute. This program of ethnic cleansing has merely shifted its focus from violent means to bureaucratic ones as Israel has adapted to the popularization of human rights discourse and occupation law.
One of the main aims of the Zionist enterprise in Israel has been to inscribe an ethno-national identity to the very landscape. It accomplishes this by transferring and removing populations to forge and reify new ethno-religious lines to create and maintain an exclusively Jewish national space. At first, this involved a direct and violent ethnic cleansing to accomplish. As human rights discourse became an internationally accepted paradigm through which an occupation could be managed and Palestinian-Israelis began wielding democratic tools never intended for them, Israel was forced to use legal means to maintain this ethnically homogenous political space.
While Israel resorts to increasingly insane methods to dispossess Palestinians both in Israel and out, it becomes increasingly clear that the Nakba will not end until a new paradigm for resistance is adopted. This resistance needs to reject the discourse of sovereignty and challenge the very legal and spatial discourse that has enabled Palestinian dispossession to continue. Though the UN bid was valuable, inasmuch as it invited the world community to the two-state solution’s funeral, it did not directly challenge the legal and bureaucratic dispossession Palestinians are still experiencing. Though the media was eager to play the bid as Palestine finding equal footing to Israel, it is important to remember that there is a conflict on the ground, and Israel is very clearly succeeding.
Beautiful pictures go far to explain what Israel’s so-called peace proposals come down to. THESE MAPS should be published on the walls of subway stations in NYC and San Francisco, etc,
“While Israel resorts to increasingly insane methods to dispossess Palestinians both in Israel and out, it becomes increasingly clear that the Nakba will not end until a new paradigm for resistance is adopted. ”
Israel is closing down the last openings for a two state solution.
http://israelmatzav.blogspot.com/2011/08/palestinians-threaten-one-state.html
A document produced by a group of prominent ‘Palestinians’ advocates seeking a ‘one-state solution’ in the event that – as expected – the unilateral drive for ‘Palestinian statehood’ does not produce a ‘Palestinian state’ (regardless of the vote in the UN General Assembly).
Among the participants in the group’s workshops over the past year in Jericho, Gaza and Istanbul were Omar Abdel Razek, the former finance minister in the Hamas government in the West Bank, and Nasser al-Shaer, that government’s education minister. Next to them sat senior Fatah officials including associates of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas − former Foreign Minister Nabil Shaath and senior adviser Mohammad Shtayyeh. Other signatories are Naser al-Kidwa, a former Palestinian observer at the United Nations, Fatah Deputy Secretary General and Communications Minister Sabri Saydam, and former economics minister and businessman Mazen Sinokrot.
Already in the preface, the authors stress that “strategic unity,” now greatly enhanced by the reconciliation process, is a key condition for putting together an effective strategy. The document’s starting point: Given the Israeli government’s intransigence, the option of settling the conflict via bilateral negotiations − the path pursued by the Palestinian leadership for 20 years − is no longer available.
What are the sources for the maps and how is the land defined as Palestinian or Jewish? I’m not doubting you, but I think it’d be helpful to have definitions under each map for what is meant by the two terms.
What I’ve read is that the Zionists had purchased around 6-7 percent of the land by 1947, and land ownership aside, the UN partition gave 55 percent of the land to the Jewish state though Jews were only one third of the population, and that even the proposed Jewish state had very nearly as many Palestinians as Jews.
One of the difficulties I have discussing this subject with friends is that the facts are so heavily weighted in favor of the Palestinians you don’t sound fairminded if you say what you know.
I/P talking points have been stuck on “human rights discourse” for a long time. Americans, for the most part, understand the conflict from “human rights” and “cycle of violence” viewpoints and this has served Israel very well. The term “human rights” is relevant but its old and tired and used in so many contexts that it becomes an abstraction. “Cycle of violence” implies a tit for tat parity which suggests that the injustice begins and ends with acts of violence. Israelis understand this very well and have been willing to suffer occasional scoldings over having gone too far in their military campaigns as long as the critique remains focused on the cycle of violence and human rights abuses.
Including the geography and Zionist ideology as part of the critique would go a long way towards a better understanding on the part of Americans up and down the scales of American life. I’m happy to see that this is what’s starting to happen.
Donald,
The map at the top of the post is distributed quite widely in the Occupied Territories and abroad. The definition for “Arab” vs. “Jewish” is ownership of land, rather than the demographic make-up of that land. Also note that in the transition between pre-1948 and post-1948 stages, it is not defined as “Jewish.” Instead “Israeli” is used indicating the creation of the state, and the nationalization of formerly Arab land. The map I link to in the post is provided by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian affairs.
For a demographic distribution, you should take a look at this map by Ahmad Barclay from 2009
http://arenaofspeculation.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/palestinian-jewish-2009.png
I think this map is useful in showing the problem in partition along ethnic/religious lines, as there is no clear delineation between a “Jewish” state and an “Arab” one.
pabelmont, the map at the top of the post in my mind is very useful, though when I originally submitted the post that map was not included in my analysis. I was specifically referring to the UNOCHA map, and maps in the same vein. My point was not that they were useless in showing Palestinian dispossession, but that they create a cognitive dissonance between Palestinians across the green line, Palestinians in Israel, Palestinians in Gaza, and Palestinians in the Diaspora. Truth is, they are all part of the same phenomenon of ethnic cleansing, rather than separate tragedies each on their own.