NY Times: This week, leading Israeli, Palestinian and American officials have agreed that the creation of a Palestinian state on territory in the West Bank and Gaza is essential to peace in the Middle East. But spend any time looking at a map of the West Bank as it is today, or with any of the many different proposals for how that map might be redrawn to accommodate the aspirations of both Israelis and Palestinians, and it becomes clear why any sensible mapmaker might choose to steer well clear of the challenge of drawing up that state.
But first, let’s see where the agreement lies. On Tuesday in Washington, Vice President Joe Biden reiterated that the Obama administration’s vision for peace in the Middle East includes the creation of a Palestinian state. In a speech to members of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Mr. Biden said that Palestinians leaders “must combat terror and incitement against Israel” and Israeli leaders need to accept that “Israel has to work toward a two-state solution.” After the aside, “You’re not going to like my saying this,” Mr. Biden emphasized that, to make space for a Palestinian state, Israel has to “not build more settlements,” in the areas of the West Bank it currently controls.
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So, since Israel has no intention of withdrawing completely from the West Bank, what kind of map might incorporate part of the territory into Israel and still make the remaining part a truly “viable” state?
To get a better idea of where the mapmakers are starting from, take a look at a fanciful map of the West Bank called “L’archipel de Palestine orientale” (”The Archipelago of Eastern Palestine”), drawn by Julien Bousac for the French publication Le Monde Diplomatique, and republished recently on the blog Strange Maps. Mr. Bousac’s imaginary map illustrates how fragmented the areas of the West Bank currently under the control of the Palestinian Authority are by portraying them as islands, divided by areas under Israeli control, which are represented by the sea.
An imaginary map of the West Bank, showing areas under the control of the Palestinian Authority as an archipelago.
In a post on this imaginary map, the French blogger Gilles Paris shows an excerpt from the real map of the various zones of control in the West Bank produced by the United Nations that Mr. Bousac used as the basis for his drawing. On Thursday, the same U.N. body that produced that map, the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, released a report on the “fragmentation” of Bethlehem caused by Israel’s security barrier and settlements. As The Guardian’s Rory McCarthy reports, Israel’s new foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, “lives in Nokdim, one of the Jewish settlements in the Bethlehem area.”
In an interview, Mr. Bousac told the blog Strange Maps that his map “is not about ‘drowning’ or ‘flooding’ the Israeli population, nor dividing territories along ethnic lines,” but is simply “an illustration of the West Bank’s ongoing fragmentation based on the (originally temporary) A/B/C zoning which came out of the Oslo process.”
As Strange Maps explains, “the dotted lines symbolising shipping links, the palm trees signifying protected beach land, and the purple symbols representing various aspects of seaside pleasure” are “totally fanciful but the small blue ships, next to those parts of the map labeled “Zone sous surveillance” (”Zone under surveillance”) have “some bearing on reality, as the locations of the warships match those of permanent Israeli checkpoints.”
What Mr. Bousac’s imaginary map does quite neatly is illustrate that while there are countries in the world made up of pieces of land as divided as those parts of the West Bank currently under Palestinian control, there are none that are not real archipelagos, surrounded by water, rather than by parts of another state.
Since some degree of fragmentation is a feature of many of the maps proposed by Israeli governments in recent years for the shape of a Palestinian state, it seems important to ask what chance a country with this landlocked archipelago shape really has of becoming a viable nation-state. Mr. Bousac’s illustration, like the real map it is based on, also puts some of the failure of the Palestinian Authority to function more like a state since the Oslo Accords were signed into context.
This leaves aside the more obvious problem that the biggest island in a Palestinian archipelago is the Gaza Strip, which is completely cut off from the West Bank. In a fascinating essay in the Abu Dhabi newspaper The National, the Indian writer Pankaj Mishra looked at parallel in the recent histories of Israel and India, and that prompts the thought that we have seen an attempt to create one country out of two isolated territories in the past — in the form of Pakistan, which originally included the mass of territory that eventually broke away to become the separate country of Bangladesh. That history, unfortunately, does little to support the idea that a similarly divided Palestinian state will have an easy time developing into one country.
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Here are some maps to help illustrate what a two-state solution looks like according to:
Olmert's Final Status Map
Israel’s Final Status Options:
Israel's Final Status Options
Israeli Separation Options in 2003:
Israel's Separation Options 2003
1 Comment
November 2, 2009 at 11:11 am
[...] be back to this map again later, but in the meantime, here’s the post from another WordPress blog where I got the [...]