The Map: A Palestinian Nation Thwarted & Speaking Truth to Power - Juan Cole

Last edited Sun Jul 13, 2014, 07:14 PM - Edit history (1)

A post by Juan Cole in 2010 titled : "Israel Humiliates Biden, Announces Further Colonization on Eve of US-Brokered Talks"
http://www.juancole.com/2010/03/israel-humiliates-biden-announces.html

set off an article in the Daily Dish in which Juan Cole says Andrew Sullivan mirrored the map he posted
http://www.theatlantic.com/daily-dish/archive/2010/03/goldblog-splutters/189381/

and caused a reactionary article by Jeffrey Goldberg in the Atlantic
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2010/03/andrew-sullivan-revises-history-again/37401/


This current article by Juan Cole that I am sharing is dated July 13, 2014 and discusses further the history of the map and all the links above can be found within that article which is linked at the bottom of this post.

Indeed I have not found anyone that writes with a more complete and comprehensive knowledge , with references, of the history of the area than Juan Cole. I do not mean this statement to imply in any way that I am an expert on the history of land. I am posting this to share an article from someone that I follow and find to be informed on the subject.






As part of my original posting, I mirrored a map of modern Palestinian history that has the virtue of showing graphically what has happened to the Palestinians politically and territorially in the past century. Andrew Sullivan then mirrored the map from my site, which set off a lot of thunder and noise among anti-Palestinian writers like Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic, but shed very little light. (PS, the map as a hard copy mapcard is available from Sabeel.)

The map is useful and accurate. It begins by showing the British Mandate of Palestine as of the mid-1920s. The British conquered the Ottoman districts that came to be the Mandate during World War I (the Ottoman sultan threw in with Austria and Germany against Britain, France and Russia, mainly out of fear of Russia).

But because of the rise of the League of Nations and the influence of President Woodrow Wilson’s ideas about self-determination, Britain and France could not decently simply make their new, previously Ottoman territories into mere colonies. The League of Nations awarded them “Mandates.” Britain got Palestine, France got Syria (which it made into Syria and Lebanon), Britain got Iraq.

The League of Nations Covenant spelled out what a Class A Mandate (i.e. territory that had been Ottoman) was:
“Article 22. Certain communities formerly belonging to the Turkish Empire have reached a stage of development where their existence as independent nations can be provisionally recognised subject to the rendering of administrative advice and assistance by a Mandatory [i.e., a Western power] until such time as they are able to stand alone. The wishes of these communities must be a principal consideration in the selection of the Mandatory.”


....



There is nothing inaccurate about the maps at all, historically. Goldberg maintained that the Palestinians’ ‘original sin’ was rejecting the 1947 UN partition plan. But since Ben Gurion and other expansionists went on to grab more territory later in history, it is not clear that the Palestinians could have avoided being occupied even if they had given away willingly so much of their country in 1947. The first original sin was the contradictory and feckless pledge by the British to sponsor Jewish immigration into their Mandate in Palestine, which they wickedly and fantastically promised would never inconvenience the Palestinians in any way. It was the same kind of original sin as the French policy of sponsoring a million colons in French Algeria, or the French attempt to create a Christian-dominated Lebanon where the Christians would be privileged by French policy. The second original sin was the refusal of the United States to allow Jews to immigrate in the 1930s and early 1940s, which forced them to go to Palestine to escape the monstrous, mass-murdering Nazis.

The map attracted so much ire and controversy not because it is inaccurate but because it clearly shows what has been done to the Palestinians, which the League of Nations had recognized as not far from achieving statehood in its Covenant. Their statehood and their territory has been taken from them, and they have been left stateless, without citizenship and therefore without basic civil and human rights. The map makes it easy to see this process. The map had to be stigmatized and made taboo. But even if that marginalization of an image could be accomplished, the squalid reality of Palestinian statelessness would remain, and the children of Gaza would still be being malnourished by the deliberate Israeli policy of blockading civilians. The map just points to a powerful reality; banishing the map does not change that reality.

http://www.juancole.com/2014/07/palestinian-thwarted-speaking.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=facebook