Content area
Full text
This article explores how geographical forms of Israel/Palestine are represented in maps sketched by high school students. The results show that they are significantly different from the geopolitical map, demonstrating the unique ways through which these students think about the national territory. The paper probes two sources that feed into the country's geographical image: its ongoing politics of treating boundaries as potential frontiers, and the school curriculum, which conveys a double message regarding borders. This image of a blurred geo-body invites for creative resolutions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
This article asks how Israel and Palestine are imagined by their inhabitants. Do Jews and Palestinians perceive of their country as having a geographical body? And if indeed they assume the country has a clear perimeter, what is its shape? These questions are exceptionally interesting when the controversy is over territory. Geographer Robert Sack argued that human territoriality - the attempt to affect actions and interactions by asserting control over a specific geographic area - is not accidental but rather a complex strategy.1 De-territorialization, its flip-side, is part of this strategy. Here I ask how do territorialization and de-territorialization manifest themselves in Israeli and Palestinian imaginations of national boundaries and which forces feed them.
To do so, we look into the mental maps of Israeli high school students. Mental maps, also known as cognitive maps, can be defined as representations of people's perception of an area, or in Fredric Jameson's more Marxist interpretation, as a "representation of the subject's Imaginary relationship to his or her Real conditions of existence."2 The mental maps of the high school students revealed what might be termed as a consistent confusion regarding their country's perimeter.
This confusion echoes earlier work on the simultaneous construction of Israel's borders as barriers as well as potential gateways for expansion. In other words, borders, from the state's inception, have been concurrently sanctified and trivialized.3 This logic influenced the students' imagination of their country.4 While they did outline the state's border, and created a division between "inside" and "outside," a national body versus its surroundings, the body was quite unlike the one found in standard cartographic depictions. Drawing the shape of the state turned out to be a complicated task.
The limits of this study should...