I imagine that by now most JWN readers have seen the thought-provoking nautical representation (shown below) by French cartographer Julien Bousac of the land mass that is (as of now) left to the Palestinians of the West Bank…
Bousac comments on that page that,
- To make things clear, areas ‘under water’ [in the map] strictly reflect C zones, plus the East Jerusalem area, i.e. areas that have officially remained under full Israeli control and occupation following the [Oslo] Agreements.
He also seems fully aware of the irony/paradox of using a “romantic” kind of imagery like this to represent a grim reality.
I think this is a great device. One shocking aspect is, of course, that it demonstrates that the whole area of occupied east Jerusalem is “under water”, i.e. unavailable for Palestinian land-use or development planning purposes.
However, readers should be aware that Bousac’s map still considerably under- over-represents the amount of West Bank land that is available to the Palestinians, since he marks the large areas of the southeastern West Bank that have been arbitrarily designated by Israel as “nature reserves” as being somehow “above water.”
You can find another representation of what is currently available to the Palestinians if you look at the small map in the bottom-left corner of this larger (PDF) map from UN-OCHA. Only the areas left white in that small map are now available to the Palestinians.
I note that designating land as a “nature reserve” is a trick the Israelis have often used to render it unavailable for Palestinian development. That sort of it puts it into a lock-box for them. Then, when the occupation authorities discover they have the budget or need to develop it for themselves, as settlements or whatever, they speedily “un-green” it– and presto, it is available for Israeli development. Many Palestinians have, as a result, become pretty cynical about Israel’s claims that it “cares for” the enviroment of the land that both peoples claim to love.
Sari Hanafi is a Palestinian sociologist who has been arguing that what the Israelis have been pursuing towards the Palestinians living in the area of Mandate Palestine constitutes a policy of “spaciocide”:
- the Israeli colonial project is ‘spacio-cidal’ (as opposed to genocidal), in that it targets land for the purpose of rendering inevitable the ‘voluntary’ transfer of the Palestinian population, primarily by targeting the space upon which the Palestinian people live. This systematic destruction of the Palestinian living space becomes possible by exercising the state of exception and deploying bio-politics to categorize Palestinians into different groups, with the aim of rendering them powerless…
Other examples of spaciocide abound around the world… including Saddam Hussein’s draining of the marshes.
Anyway, here, for those who haven’t seen it yet, is a small version of Bousac’s map.
‘However, readers should be aware that Bousac’s map still considerably under-represents the amount of West Bank land that is available to the Palestinians, since he marks the large areas of the southeastern West Bank that have been arbitrarily designated by Israel as “nature reserves” as being somehow “above water.”‘
I take it that you mean ‘Bousac’s map considerably over represents the amount of West Bank land that is available
Oops, bevin, thanks!
commentary’s response to this was that it was anti semetic because it was obviously meant to show jews “being driven into the sea”
I’m serious. at contentions their blog
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/tobin/65112
It represents the land allocated to the Jews by the May 15, 1948 Arab invasion. It is another pipe-dream map of a Holy Land without Israel, the conscious expression of the usually-hidden genocidal wish of some streams of Palestinian nationalism.
Pity the nationalist movement that so clearly telegraphs such goals, it only strengthens its opponents’ resolve.
No need to go to “Commentary”. Eurosabra is right here with us.
Here is s slightly harder question for Eurosabra: How is it that in this fantasy map, Palestinians only live on islands, but none of the Israelis live in lakes?
In other words, the “sea” into which the Isralis have allegedly been driven, poor things, is contiguous, but the land is all broken up into little pieces?
Needless to say, I am looking at this from a South African point of view, having often seen the map of the Bantustan territories as they used to be, under the old regime here.
The “islands” map is striking, but there is another set, a series of four maps, that shows the shrinking of the Palestinian living space over time since the very 1948 that you mention, Eurosabra, relative to the ever-larger parts gobbled up by the Israeli colonialists.
As to your parting shot, it is true that in South Africa, the resolve of some of the colonialists did grow during the struggle, in just the way that you suggest. But this fanaticisation effect of the struggle on the colonialists was offset by the awakening of a larger portion of them to what was really going on, and the detachment of very significant numbers of them to the loiberations side.
Partition and viability are decided by peace, or the lack thereof, Ottoman Palestine was divided into several vilayets, and it was intermittently unsafe to travel the roads because of brigandage, yet formally the place was under one sovereign and at peace. The 1947 Partition Plan, like the Peel Plan, would have produced two interdependent states, each with severe limitations, but viable in their interdependence, in a state of peace. What did not work was division and militarization across a wartime border, a continuing occupation, and “Land for War”, and the facile ZA comparison which does not admit that Israeli expansion has been driven by external threat and constant war.
Again, I do not see any Palestinian faction willing to make peace, and I think a restoration of the de facto situation from ’49-’67 is most likely, with a repartition by an Israeli security border leaving the West Bank in the hands of a Hamas state which will unleash an apocalyptic war.
The Israelis on the French map are waterlogged corpses at the bottom of a sea of Arab fantasy, and they sway and twist in the weeds. Hopefully we get our Mandela and DeKlerk before that happens.
Apologies for repeating something I have written before on JWN, but colonialism is only ever viable when it is “driven by external threat and constant war”, and that was as true in South Africa as it is in Israel or was in the Roman Empire, come to that. The “frontier” is an indispensable part of colonialism. As soon as the frontier is stabilised, the colonial game is up.
There is no post-war or post-frontier steady state available for the colonists, unless they have achieved full genocide, as in the USA, Canada, Australia and Argentina, for some examples. So long as the colonised population survives, their successful political liberation struggle becomes the consequent of peace, and practically speaking, inevitable.
The Israelis know all this, and they have always known it. Their own literature is full of it, just as our SA colonialist literature was, both in Afrikaans and in English. Policy was worked out in the light of this knowledge, very explicitly, in both countries.
Your search for “any Palestinian faction willing to make peace” harks back to the very early colonial stage: the search for Chiefs to make (false) treaties with. This search of yours is a denial of the collective subjectivity of the conquered people, and is an insistence on only recongnising such Chiefs, and only the ones you choose to recognise. But the phase of such false legalities is in the past. You are proposing an impossible historical step backwards, and only for the sake of putting a spanner in the peace-works.
Your characterisation of South Africa’s liberation as a Mandela-and-de-Klerk affair is completely wrong and is only put forward to help these already retrogressive misrepresention of yours.
Just to finally clear something up, not directly to do with the above, as far as I can see: Why do so many posters her like to refer to South Africa as “ZA”? Z and A are the initials of South Africa as it is spelt in Dutch, not Afrikaans or any other of our official languages. So this repeated “ZA” comes across as very odd to a South African.
.za is South Africa’s country code on the Internet, which I’ve been using as a shorthand, not realizing that SA is the standard acronym in English, Afrikaans, and probably the 9 other languages as well.
I think you’re a doctrinaire anti-colonialist who is trying to smudge the issue that no side in Palestine accords Jews the legitimacy that the ANC in SA did to whites. Hamas’s militants expect Islam to dominate a unitary Palestine with a subjugated or absent Jewish population, whereas the State of Israel’s Declaration of Independence promises the development of the land for the benefit of all its inhabitants.
Thing is, unlike virtually every other Israeli here, I’ve crouched in the rubble of the street I was born in in Jerusalem, and I’ve seen the “subjectivity of the oppressed” spread by their own hands all over the shopping malls. I think you had a boutique revolution led by boutique revolutionaries, whereas suicide terrorism tells me pretty much all I need to know about Hamas’s plans for me and itself.
I don’t mind “doctrinaire anti-colonialist”. It’s a lot better than “protocolist”. But for the rest of your post, Eurosabra, I’d personally rather just pass for the moment. Let’s take it up another time. Unless others care to unpack it.
http://www.iso.org/iso/english_country_names_and_code_elements
ZA is also the ISO code for South Africa. SA for some reason has been assigned to Saudi Arabia. I don’t think it has any political connotations – – certainly no more than “CH” which is generally understood to mean Switzerland as written in Latin (Confoederatio Helvetica) rather than German or French.
I’ve read Wolf Sachs, and met Albie Sachs and Ronnie Kasrils. The kind of Left that fueled the SA solution no longer exists in Israel/Palestine, because the institutions that supported it, like the Railway Union, were co-opted and riven along national lines. I think SA benefited from a consensus on negotiation and acceptance of Others that used to exist in I/P among a non-nationalist left, but which no longer exists. Rebuilding it requires a revitalized Left, and I don’t think the demolition of the State of Israel by outside pressure is in the offing either. Palestine is not in the power position as India was with Goa, and no one yet has a multi-cultural communitarian-blind democracy to offer the other side, as SA developed. The problem is that by treating Israel as French Algeria, you may find that it destroys Palestine instead, as 1936 and 1948 destroyed the Palestinian society of the coastal plain. An argument about who is johnny-come-lately with weak roots in the Land and mutual pressure can have unforseen results, and most Israeli critics have lost not because their arguments were not heard, but because the structural problems throw everyone back on a radical nationalism.
Euro:
Normally I don’t read anything you write, since it is pretentious and nonsensical. Then you throw in this line about India and Goa and how you have read so and so and met so and so and how you had crouch in the rubble of the street you were born in. I find myself ROFLOL.
I strongly suggest you head back to Poland where your parents and their parents and there parents… were likely born. Its not too late to claim reparation.
I strongly suggest that the Palestinian people change course and make peace. I have seen too many suicides in detail, across the cafe, the cafeteria, or the bus station, and I fear that the future will bring mass suicide of Palestinians long before I board any supposed boat for Poland. Unlike you, I regard these people as my once and future neighbors, and I grieve the loss of the common future that appeared possible to the utopian political fringe of the 1920s, 30s, and 40s.
And doctrinaire Islamists like you will get them to Paradise rather than allowing them life on this Earth. They will have all the Palestinian earth they need, in the sanctity of death.