The Reaction: Map of the Day!

By J. Thomas Duffy

Last week, we gave Juan Cole's post "Quote of the Day", on the Israeli announcement of housing expansion on the day Vice President Joe Biden arrived to, hopefully, jump-start the stalled peace talks, and now, causing a good deal of tension.

Today, he follows up (with pointers to the blog flare-up, between Andrew Sullivan and Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic, with additional commentary from Spencer Ackerman and Matthew Yglesias) with more;

The Map: The Story of Palestinian Nationhood Thwarted After the League of Nations Recognized It

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.

[snip]

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.

Phew!

You can almost look at that map and think it was shaken, like an Etch-A-Sketch.

Go read Juan Cole's "The Map: The Story of Palestinian Nationhood Thwarted After the League of Nations Recognized It", it's a good briefer on what's all the fuss going on.

Bonus Bonus

Steve Clemons, over on The Washington Note, has a bit of fun, creating some hijinks, reworking, tongue-in-cheek, an AIPAC press release;