Green, symbolizing Palestinian lands, which is inexorably disappearing, from 1947 to today. This series of four cards has been widely relayed online since October 7 and the Israeli military response to the Hamas attack in Israel.
The legends of these four maps are simple: on the first, which would show the situation in 1947, “Palestinian lands” are shown in green, while “Jewish settlements” are shown in white. On the second and third maps, showing the 1947 partition plan and then the situation from 1949 to 1967, “Israeli lands” and “Palestinian lands” are visible. Finally, a final map, simply titled “currently”, presents “Palestinian lands” and “Israeli and occupied lands”. A set of maps that is intended to be a visual representation of the reduction of Palestinian land.
Some observers of the conflict, or supporters of Israel, respond to this visual communication with another, more detailed set of maps. These are even called “facts” while the maps with Palestinian lands in green are called “fiction”.
On social media, both camps accuse each of the two maps of being incomplete or factually false. The last series of cards was created four years ago. His author, an anonymous person on the Reddit site, explains that he created it in response to the first series of maps showing the reduction of Palestinian land. As he himself acknowledges, his creation is not an example of criticism: “I am very aware that the maps mix four very different concepts: private land ownership, a United Nations proposal that has never been implementation, the territories of Israel, Egypt and Jordan after 1967, and the status after the signing of the Oslo Accords and the Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. »
Is the first set of maps too simplistic? The imagined response on Reddit misleading? We submitted them to the geographer Eric Verdeil, specialist in the region and professor at Sciences-Po Paris. “The first series of maps is a little simplistic, the second is based on enormous mystification,” he summarizes with 20 minutes.
“The progressive dispossession which is both land-based, but also administrative and political, of the Palestinians”
“Qualify the first series of cards [avec les terres palestiniennes en vert] of “fiction”, it is a little erroneous in my opinion, explains the specialist. This first series demonstrates the loss of substance of Palestinian sovereignty over this land for the benefit of Israeli control. »
And to detail: “On the first map, what is shown in white, these are Israeli properties, land that the Zionists bought to exploit. On the second and third maps, what is shown is not quite the same thing: we are in the order of politics and administration, not in the order of property. The final map in this series is a somewhat simplified representation that shows the areas over which the Palestinian Authority is supposed to have control and administrative capacity. »
For the geographer, what is questionable in this first series of maps “is that it mixes slightly different data. But, overall, it clearly shows the progressive dispossession which is both land-based, but also administrative and political, of the Palestinians. »
“The questionable process is to make Palestine in 1947 appear like a desert”
Eric Verdeil is more critical of the second series of maps, which mixes “private property, use of land and resources, official sovereignty and effective sovereignty, which became absent or very reduced after 1967 for the Palestinians”.
For the geographer, the first map which shows the situation in 1947, “illustrates in a certain way the Zionist slogan “a land without people for a people without land”, the Israeli people boasting of having made “the desert flourish” . The questionable process is to make Palestine in 1947 appear as a desert, evoked by the white areas (public and owned by the State) but which suddenly appear as if they were neither Palestinian nor used. »
However, he emphasizes, “the majority of it was indeed Palestinian land and used, even if not necessarily private: rangeland for livestock, often owned collectively by village communities, as was often the case in this region, where the lands amirieh, that is to say nominally held by the prince (amir) were in usufruct for those who developed them. »
The third map contains an error: Egypt administered, and not “colonized” the Gaza Strip. As for the last map, it obscures the colonization of part of the West Bank or the divisions over East Jerusalem. “And then, what we don’t see either is that we have the impression of a country without borders, when on the contrary, there are obstacles everywhere. »