Global Courant
Google Earth was born in 2005. A year later, it experienced a revolutionary shock.
A Palestinian man from Jenin, Thameen Darby, created the Nakba layer and mapped Palestinian villages that were destroyed or depopulated during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. The maps showed parts of Palestine that are not even visible on maps made by the Palestinian authorities, geographer Linda Quiquivix, who researched the Nakba map and maps of Palestine, told Al Jazeera.
The 2006 Nakba map sparked controversy and anger among some Israelis who reported it to their local police as an “attack on true geography.”
But what is real geography? Do the maps we see every day accurately represent boundaries and spaces?
Do cards lie?
“It’s not only easy to lie with maps, it’s 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 inevitably reductive. Maps are made by people, historically those with power. Therefore, they are a projection of how people see the world – projections that are full of preconceived ideas and prejudices.
However, maps are also deliberately skewed to distort people’s perceptions of spaces and issues, he argued. “A good propagandist knows how to shape opinion by manipulating maps,” Monmoneir wrote.
Propaganda maps were popular during and even before the 20th century, when warring countries used cartography to further their war agenda, portraying enemy countries as negative caricatures.
Different symbols were used on the cards: for example, the octopus with its multiple tentacles was used to depict the aggressor. While a British cartographer used the octopus to depict Russia, a French cartographer depicted Winston Churchill as the mollusk. Propaganda cards were also popular during the Cold War.
This Italian political cartoon shows a map of Europe and the Near East at the end of the Russo-Turkish War, with most countries personified as human figures, with the main exception being Russia, which is a large octopus, followed by Greece as a crab (HUM Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images) 1917 French vintage WWI propaganda card depicting the German invasion as a giant octopus during World War I (Arterra/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
The card hegemony of the West
A common template used 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 widely misleading, as it significantly distorts proportions. Although three Canadas can fit in Africa, Africa is significantly smaller and less detailed than Canada on the map. Fourteen Greenlands could push into Africa – but the Mercator map shows Denmark’s territory as almost as large as Africa.
Alaska seems bigger than Mexico, while in reality it is smaller. Europe – excluding Russia – appears to be about the same size as South America. In reality, South America is almost twice as big. And Europe is located in the center of the map, with the Asia-Pacific on the periphery, while Asia is the world’s most populous continent, the planet’s largest landmass, and today the world’s economic nerve center.
In the 19th century, the Gall-Peters projection was introduced, undermining the Eurocentric proportions of the Mercator projection and sizing landmasses more accurately. 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 classrooms.
Mapping wars
It’s not just the Mercator projection, though.
In May 2019, former US President Donald Trump signed “nice” on a map of Israel, indicating that the occupied Golan Heights belong to Israel, and not Syrian territory. The Golan Heights was occupied by Israel during the 1967 Six-Day War and then effectively annexed in 1981, a move that has not been recognized by the international community.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shows a map of Israel showing the Golan Heights within the state’s borders, signed by US President Donald Trump on May 30, 2019 (File: Thomas Coex/AFP)
In November of the same year, the lower house of the Russian parliament announced that Apple Maps would show Crimea as part of Russia when viewed from Russia. Crimea was annexed by Russia from Ukraine in March 2014, a move that was internationally criticized. Apple initially proposed labeling Crimea as an undefined territory, but the company ultimately complied with Russia and drew condemnation from the Ukrainians. Mashable reported in 2022 that Apple began clearly marking Crimea as part of Ukraine, at least outside of Russia.
A man looks at a computer screen showing a map of the Crimean Peninsula with a pop-up window reading: ‘Crimea, Russia’ on the site of Russian internet company Mail.Ru (AFP) on March 21, 2014 in Moscow.
Furthermore, China uses maritime maps to claim the entire South China Sea. Using a U-shaped line, the nine-dash line, China’s maps indicate that the South China Sea – a major maritime trade route – belongs entirely to China. This has been a point of contention between China and its neighbors in Southeast Asia, including Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam, which also lay claim to the waters closest to their coasts.
An international tribunal ruled in 2016 that the map does not provide China with legal grounds to claim the sea, but this did not stop the nine-dash line from appearing on a recently released Chinese national map in 2023.
India and Pakistan both control parts of Kashmir. After New Delhi revoked the semi-autonomous status of Indian-controlled Kashmir in 2019, revoking its statehood and dividing it into two federally administered territories, Islamabad hit back – with a map. In 2020, Islamabad unveiled a map that showed all of Kashmir – including the Indian-controlled part – as belonging to Pakistan.
The current Israeli war against 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 do cards like the Nakba card do?
Counter cards challenge dominant cards that have historically influenced the way the world sees the world.
They are also called bottom-up cards or resistance cards. The Nakba card is an example. Quiquivix learned about the Nakba map during her efforts to track how Palestinians have used maps.
She also came to see that after the 1993 Oslo Accords, much of the Palestinian leadership’s energy was focused on creating maps that paralleled a state of Israel, and tended toward a “two-state” vision of the country. The leadership only mapped the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, and not all of Palestine “where the refugees (they believe) still have the right of return, and where there are also Palestinian citizens of Israel,” she explained. Israel has denied the Palestinians who were expelled from their land in 1948, and their descendants, the right to return.
This, she said, has led to the cartographic erasure of Palestinians. On the other hand, Darby’s Nakba map includes villages that Palestinian refugees in exile can use to “show the world where their villages are that were destroyed or occupied to create the State of Israel.”
The advent of the internet has provided locals and communities with platforms to share their own maps, according to Quiquivix.
“It’s just so much harder for the dominant world to hide its contradictions.”
