Google Earth was created in 2005. A year later, it experienced revolutionary excitement.
A Palestinian from Jenin, Thameen Darby, created the Nakba layer, mapping Palestinian villages destroyed or depopulated during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. The maps showed parts of Palestine that are not even visible on maps created by Palestinian authorities, geographer Linda Quiquivix, who has studied the Nakba map and maps of Palestine, told Tel Aviv Tribune.
The 2006 Nakba map sparked controversy and anger among some Israelis who reported it to their local police as an “attack on real geography.”
But what is real geography? Do the maps we see every day accurately represent borders and spaces?
Do cards lie?
“Not only is it easy to lie with maps, it is essential,” wrote cartographer Mark Monmoneir in his book How to Lie with Maps.
He showed that condensing complex three-dimensional spaces onto a two-dimensional sheet of paper is necessarily reductive. Maps are made by people, historically those who hold power. So it is a projection of how people perceive the world – projections full of preconceptions and prejudices.
However, the maps are also deliberately biased to distort people’s perceptions of spaces and issues, he argued. “A good propagandist knows how to shape opinion by manipulating cards,” writes Monmoneir.
Propaganda maps were popular during and even before the 20th century, when warring nations used cartography to advance their war agenda, depicting opposing nations as negative caricatures.
Different symbols were used on the cards: for example, the octopus with its multiple tentacles was used to represent the aggressor. While a British cartographer used the octopus to represent Russia, a French cartographer depicted Winston Churchill as a mollusk. Propaganda cards were also popular during the Cold War.
The cartographic hegemony of the West
A commonly used model for world maps today is called the Mercator projection, created by European cartographer Geert de Kremer in 1569. The projection has been criticized for being largely misleading because it significantly distorts proportions. Although three Canadas can fit inside Africa, Africa is significantly smaller and less detailed than Canada on the map. Fourteen Greenlands can squeeze into Africa, but on Mercator’s map, Danish territory is almost as big as Africa.
Alaska looks bigger than Mexico, but in reality it is smaller. Europe – not counting Russia – appears to be about the same size as South America. In reality, South America is almost twice as big. And Europe is at the center of the map, with Asia-Pacific on the periphery, while Asia is the globe’s most populous continent, the largest land mass on the planet, and today, the center economic nerve center of the world.
In the 1800s, the Gall-Peters projection was introduced, reversing the Eurocentric proportions of the Mercator projection and more accurately sizing land masses. However, it was not until the 1970s that the Gall-Peters projection was introduced to a wider audience. And most educational institutions around the world still use the Mercator projection to teach geography in the classroom.
Card Wars
It’s not just about the Mercator projection.
In May 2019, former US President Donald Trump signed “nice” on a map of Israel indicating that the occupied Golan Heights belongs to Israel rather than Syrian territory. The Golan Heights were occupied by Israel during the Six-Day War in 1967 and then effectively annexed in 1981, a move that was not recognized by the international community.
In November of the same year, the lower house of the Russian Parliament announced that Apple Maps would show Crimea as part of Russia as seen from Russia. Crimea was annexed by Russia from Ukraine in March 2014, a move that was criticized internationally. Initially, Apple suggested presenting Crimea as an undefined territory, but it ended up complying with Russia, earning condemnation from the Ukrainians. Mashable reported in 2022 that Apple had begun clearly marking Crimea as part of Ukraine, at least outside of Russia.
Additionally, China uses maritime maps to claim the entire South China Sea. Using a U-shaped line called the nine-dash line, Chinese maps declare that the South China Sea – a key maritime trade route – belongs entirely to China. This constitutes a bone of contention between China and its Southeast Asian neighbors, including Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam, which also claim the waters closest to their shores.
An international court ruled in 2016 that the map did not provide China with a legal basis to claim the sea, but that did not stop the nine-dash line from appearing on a recently released Chinese national map in 2023.
Both India and Pakistan control parts of Kashmir. After New Delhi revoked Indian-controlled Kashmir’s semi-autonomous status, stripping it of its statehood and splitting it into two federally governed territories in 2019, Islamabad fought back – with a map. In 2020, Islamabad unveiled a map showing all of Kashmir – including the part controlled by India – as belonging to Pakistan.
Israel’s current war on Gaza is also not immune to concerns about the use of maps.
Semafor media reported that after the escalation of violence between Israel and Hamas on October 7, Planet Labs, which provided crucial satellite images, began restricting and obscuring images of Gaza.
What are cards like the Nakba card used for?
Countermaps challenge the dominant cartography that has historically influenced how the world views the world.
They are also called ascending charts or resistance charts. The Nakba map is an example. Quiquivix discovered the Nakba map during his attempts to trace how Palestinians use maps.
She also began to realize that after the Oslo Accords in 1993, much of the Palestinian leadership’s energy had been devoted to creating maps parallel to a state of Israel, leaning toward a vision of “two-state” territory. The leaders mapped only the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, and not all of Palestine “where refugees (believe they) still have the right of return, and where there are also Palestinian citizens of Israel,” he said. she explained. Israel has denied Palestinians expelled from their lands in 1948, as well as their descendants, the right of return.
According to her, this led to the cartographic erasure of Palestinians. On the other hand, Darby’s Nakba map shows villages that Palestinian refugees in exile can use to “show the world where their villages are located that were destroyed or occupied to create the State of Israel.”
The advent of the Internet has given residents and communities platforms to share their own maps, Quiquivix said.
“It is much more difficult for the dominant world to hide its contradictions. »
