The Image of Israel's Geographical Transformation (In Honor of Israel Prize Recipient, Prof. Elisha Efrat)

Mapping Israel, mapping Palestine : how segregated landscapes shape scientific knowledge

“…One example is the often-retold story of the birth of the Green Line boundary of the West Bank in 1949 during negotiations between Jordan and Israel. The border was drawn by hand onto a paper map, and on that paper map it seemed thin and detailed, but when administrators later tried to mark the now-militarized boundary on the ground, they found that large areas of the landscape lay entirely inside the line of the boundary, whose thickness on the ground at its most refined was equivalent to 250 meters, or the width of several buildings (Figure 4.1) (Cameron 2011;Blake 1995;Brawer 1990); for this reason, more recent treaties often use lists of coordinates instead of maps as the definitive indications of contested borders (e.g. Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and State of Israel 1998).…”

“…In the early stages of the project, the PPIB leaders struggled to implement their goals during an era when historic restrictions on the movement of Palestinians in the West Bank crystallized into an increasingly complex system of control. Whereas in the decades between the 1967 war and the 1994 Oslo accords, Israeli forces focused upon erasing the vestiges of the Green Line border from the land in order to cement the government's claim over the recently occupied territories (Brawer 1990), in the post-Oslo period the focus turned towards regulation of Palestinian population movements between the jumble of newly-defined areas within the West Bank that were given to Palestinian management (Figure 4.2).…”