An emotional debate has erupted over the absence of Palestine on Google Maps. But why does it matter whether Palestinians are on the map? Historian of science Petter Hellström looks at maps of the colonial era for clues

The issue caught fire after the Forum of Palestinian Journalists accused Google of removing Palestine from their maps. This, the organisation argued, made the tech giant complicit in Israeli policies of annexation and settlement of the occupied territories. Google responded that they had never labelled Palestine in the first place, while blaming a technical bug for removing the labels for the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. While many commentators pointed out the inflated nature of the claim, fewer have engaged with the long-term implications of cartographic omission.

Because Palestine, after all, has been removed. It is there on old paper maps, of the Holy Land, of the Roman and Ottoman empires, of the British mandate. Yet in our digital age, a search on Google Maps for Israel produces a map without Palestine. It displays Israeli urban centres down to a few thousand inhabitants, and even marks Ma’ale Adumin, an Israeli settlement on the occupied West Bank. At the same time it shows no Palestinian place-names or urban centres, not even major ones like Gaza City, Khan Yunis or Nablus. The dotted, inconsistent borders of the occupied territories leave the impression that they are not claimed or administered by anyone.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Israel and the Palestinian territories on Google Maps, 19 August 2016. Following strong criticism regarding their omission, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank were re-labelled on 19 August. The Golan Heights, between Israel and Syria, remain unlabelled. Photograph: Geographicus/Google Maps

While many commentators have pointed out that Palestine is not the only disputed territory in the world, comparisons with Crimea and other disputed regions fall short. Other map controversies are about where borders should be drawn between two sovereign states, yet at stake in the case of Palestine is whether the country and its people exist at all. Israeli nationalists have long denied this – the architects of Israel even rallied under the slogan “a land without a people for a people without a land”. Palestine is presently the only state recognised by the UN not to appear on Google Maps. [See footnote.]

Historians of cartography have long studied the practices and consequences of cartographic omission. In a landmark study, “New England cartography and the Native Americans”, published posthumously in 1994, the British historian of cartography J. B. Harley analysed seventeenth-century maps to follow the progressive replacement of the Native Americans with European settlers. In Harley’s analysis, the maps were something more than historical records of that process. Because they made the colonists visible at the expense of the indigenous population, they were also instruments of colonial legitimisation.

Many colonial mapmakers preferred to leave the areas of predominantly indigenous presence blank, rather than to reproduce an indigenous geography; one example is Herman Moll’s 1729 map of New England and the adjacent colonies, seen above. The traces of indigenous presence, past and present, were gradually removed from the maps as the colonists pushed west. The apparent emptiness helped to justify the settlers’ sense that they had discovered a virgin territory, promised to them by Providence. The pattern was the same in all areas of colonial activity, including Australia and Africa.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest John Smith’s map of New England, drawn in 1614 and later published in London, showing no traces of the indigenous population. Photograph: Wikimedia

Incidentally, Harley’s study began as a conference paper entitled “Victims of a map”, a title he borrowed from an anthology of contemporary Palestinian and Lebanese poetry. Discussing the implications of not representing Native American place-names on colonial maps, Harley quoted the Israeli historian and political scientist Meron Benvenisti, deputy mayor and chief planning officer of Jerusalem in 1971­–78, who described the process with which the Israeli state Hebraized the place-names of the country they had conquered: “Like all immigrant societies, we attempted to erase all alien names”, Benvenisti said. “The Hebrew map of Israel constitutes one stratum in my consciousness, underlaid by the stratum of the previous Arab map.”

If a map were to represent a territory in all its detail, it would need to be as large as the territory itself, as famously noted by Jorge Luis Borges in his short story “On exactitude in science”. Thus, drawing a map always involves choices, whether they are reflected or not. In the conflict-ridden Middle East, those choices are often blatantly political. The official map of Israel, available on the web page of the Israeli government, integrates the occupied territories into Israel and is devoid of any Palestinian place-names. Conversely, Palestinian maps often label the whole country as Palestine – effectively a refusal to acknowledge the development since 1948.

Official map of Israel, integrating the occupied territories and showing no Palestinian place-names, as seen on 18 August 2016. Photograph: Govmap

Does this mean we should suspect Google of any political agenda? As the project Disputed Territories demonstrated in 2014, Google Maps shows you different maps of disputed territories depending on which country you are in when you access them. Google, after all, is a commercial actor: they make their billions by pleasing their customers. In the polarised conflict over Palestine, not labelling the occupied territories as either Israeli or Palestinian might well cause the least total amount of indignation. Still it is only one of several possible solutions. If, as others have argued, we mapped political realities rather than conflicting political ideals, Google might have marked Palestine as an occupied territory, rather than as an independent state.

Map is not territory, and introducing or removing a name on the map does not invalidate the existence of the thing it refers to: it was European colonists, not their maps, who dispossessed the Native Americans. But everyone who has been to school or who has navigated with a map knows how they direct our attention and shape our experience – and memory – of reality.

Immersed in the values and evident truths of their time and place, but also eager to please their readers, mapmakers of the colonial era represented overseas territories from their particular perspective. Trying to stay impartial in the eyes of customers and the surrounding society, the mapmakers at Google similarly represent – and so reproduce – the world as it appears from their culturally encoded point of view. When they chose not to mark Palestine on their maps, they only codified into a cartographic image, how they and their fellow westerners already viewed the world.

• Note added 24 August 2016: State of Palestine is recognised by the UN as a non-member State.

