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Atlas Of The Conflict: Israel-Palestine
Palestine Center Book Review No. 13 (10
March 2010)
Each month, we conduct a review of a recent book that deals with issues relating to Palestine and/or the Israel/Palestine conflict. Books that are chosen for review can be academic or non-academic, historical or fictional. Next month we will be reviewing Threads of Identity: Preserving Palestinian Costume and Heritage by Widad Kamel Kawar. If you would like to suggest a book for review, please contact the Palestine Center.
Atlas Of The
Conflict: Israel-Palestine
written by Malkit Shoshan
Hardcover: 320 pages, 010 Publishers; 1st
edition (10 October 2010)
By Yousef Munayyer
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been
characterized as being about several things.
Some argue it’s about ethnicity, some say
religion, while still others say politics or
ideology. Whatever your persuasion, there is
one undeniable reality about this conflict:
it’s a people struggling to stay connected to
their land. The territorial aspect lies at the
heart of every facet of the Palestinian
struggle, whether it’s the location of
depopulated villages, the border that denotes
the boundaries of Jerusalem or the Armistice
Line which separates territory recognized as
occupied from that which is recognized as
Israel. Maps tell the story of the Palestinian
cause better than any testimony from a refugee,
than any human rights report, than any party or
leader. The documentation, in black and white,
of one people usurping the land of another,
year after year, decade after decade, is a
simple and straightforward explanation of
exactly how the injustice facing the
Palestinians was and continues to be carried
out.
Palestinians have valued the history of
Palestine’s geography greatly. They know that
the documentation of how Palestine was may be
the only record proving a connection between
Palestinians and their land into the future,
given ongoing Israel colonization. Many atlases
or historical works documenting the
depopulation of Palestine stand as testimonies
to crimes committed. Walid Khalidi’s seminal
All the Remains and Salman Abu Sitta’s
über-comprehensive Atlas of Palestine:
1948 are two that come to mind.
But Malkit Shoshan’s contribution, Atlas of
the Conflict: Israel-Palestine, is
different. Shoshan is an Israeli. Yet, while
the contributions of Palestinian historians and
geographers may have been motivated by a
patriotic yearning, Shoshan’s drive to document
these territorial changes comes from a
different and still noble origin. As discussed
in her atlas, Shoshan was an Israeli
architecture student at the Technion a decade
ago when she was asked to design a shopping
mall for an empty plot of land near Tel Aviv.
When doing preliminary site research she
discovered the plot to be a destroyed
Palestinian cemetery. She decided then to stop
designing and instead "learn the history of
[her] country, - a history that is never
directly told." She writes:
Driven by curiosity, I started collecting illustrations, maps, photographs, diagrams and other visual materials. Textual testimonies, although important, simply weren’t tangible enough for my purposes, as the lack a sense of scale. I wanted to know what the image of over 500 destroyed Palestinian localities would look like, on a map with a relative scale, in space, and in comparison to the thousands of newly-built Israeli localities.
It is extremely difficult to grasp an architectural project on the scale of a state or a nation. To plan, design and construct a building takes years. To destroy a whole country and build another one on top of it took a couple of decades. For me, this new sense of scale and its realities resulted in a personal episode of complete bewilderment...I was brought up in a Zionist context. We were overwhelmingly and completely appreciative of Israel, considering it a miracle: a nation that had constructed itself almost seamlessly from thousands of years in the past right up to the present day. The 2,000 years of exile were absent in my historical consciousness. You can say I had been led to believe that Israel had always been there, and that the tragedy of Palestine has nothing to do with it: that it was just an incidental episode.
As maps are usually drawn by whoever is in power, the powerless can so easily disappear from them.
The process by which Shoshan put together her
atlas was clearly an awakening for her, and
those who are unfamiliar with the history and
geography of Palestine in the last 100 years
will encounter a similar awakening. She goes
far beyond the mapping of Palestine’s
depopulation from 1947-1949 and includes the
history of recent Zionist settlement, the
destruction of villages after 1948, the
changing maps after various Arab-Israeli wars,
maps of settlement patterns in the occupied
West Bank, Gaza Strip and occupied Jerusalem,
as well as detailed maps of the apartheid wall
that runs through Palestinian
territory.
A downside to the book is that it is quite
small in dimension which occasionally makes the
reading of detailed maps difficult to read.
However, this is simultaneously an upside
because Shoshan’s atlas retains all the detail
of a much heavier and unwieldy atlas in a
convenient size allowing it to fit nicely on a
bookshelf or desk for regular reference.
Jam-packed with information, detail, maps,
images and explanations, Malkit Shoshan’s atlas
may lead those unfamiliar with the geography of
this conflict to experience an epiphany like
the one that led the author to undertake this
impressive work.
Yousef
Munayyer is Executive Director of the
Palestine Center. This book review may be used
without permission but with proper attribution
to the Center.
The views in this review are those of the
author and do not necessarily reflect those of
The Jerusalem Fund.