number of academic journals, edited volumes and popular news outlets. She was a Fulbright Scholar, a Fulbright Specialist, and an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Science & Technology Policy Fellow (STPF). Leuenberger was the recipient of a National Science Foundation Scholar’s award to investigate the history and sociology of mapping practices in Israel and the Palestinian Territories. She is currently conducting research on issues of migration and borders, and is engaged in peace and educational initiatives in the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa.
Izhak Schnell is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Geography and Human Environment at Tel Aviv University and former President of the Israeli Association of Geographers. His works focus on the analysis of social space under globalization and socio-spatial integration and segregation of social groups in globalized realities, interpretations of the meanings of spaces and places including the representations of spaces and places like art and cartographic pieces and the monitoring of urban environments as risks for health and urban parks as restorative environments.
Leuenberger applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, The Politics of Maps: Cartographic Constructions of Israel/Palestine, and reported the following:
Page 99 in The Politics of Maps might as well have been the core of our book. At the heart of the Israel-Palestinian conflict is the Green Line – the internationally recognized 1949 Armistice Line between Israel and the West Bank. Adhering to it for delineating Israeli and Palestinian territories is seen as fundamental to the long-favored two-state-solution. Yet the story of the Green Line starts with a badly delineated blue line by the military general Moshe Dayan. He was, according to an eyewitness, not much of a map-reader, when, with a thick blue pencil, he drew a line onto a map. However, “the width of the line of the pencil was nearly 2 millimeters”. At the time, the eyewitness asked, “what are you doing?” pointing out that this line on the ground is 300 meters wide, cutting through villages, separating farmers from their land, and leaving a strip of no-man’s land ill-defined. His objection was dismissed. To this day, the delineation of the Green Line, its meaning in international law, and its consequences for territorial sovereignty, is under dispute.Learn more about The Politics of Maps at the Oxford University Press website.
The story of the Green Line is emblematic of what this book is about. In the 9 chapters we focus on how maps have helped make the Israeli state in 1948, and how in the early 1990s, Palestinians surveyed and mapped the territory allocated to a future State of Palestine. In both cases, maps had geopolitical functions to help build envisioned nation-states, yet they also became weapons in map wars, that are being waged by various stakeholders over whether to delineate the Green Line and how to demarcate contested territories. Such map wars in Israel/Palestine exemplify processes underway in other states across the globe, whether in South Africa or Ukraine, which are engaged in disputes over the territorial integrity of nation-states.
We cannot refer to page 99 without mentioning a book cited there published in 1999 by the sociologist Michael Feige. He was an analyst of Israeli-Palestinian spatial arrangement – a fighter for reason, tolerance and peace – and a jolly fellow who liked his coffee. I last saw him at Ben-Gurion University getting a coffee. I told him at the time that I admire his work. In 2016 he was killed in a terror attack in an upscale café in Tel Aviv. A man who tried to understand and analyze why Israelis and Palestinians found themselves in such an entrenched conflict become its victim.
There are too many victims of this conflict – too many on the Palestinian side, and, while far fewer, also too many on the Israeli side. The conflict is also corrosive for both societies. Badly delineated territories and thoughtless policies that fail to respect the human and spatial rights of two people in the same land come with dire consequences. Thus, we need to analyze the predicaments we are in and find solutions that are sustainable and just to the people who share the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan Valley. And one thing is clear – more maps – such as the Vision for Peace Conceptual Map proposed by the US Administration in 2020 - that do not attend to the realities on the ground are not the solution.
--Marshal Zeringue
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