While the world turns its eyes away from the Gaza crisis, Israel continues to violate its unilaterally declared ceasefire and many Gazans are still without water, medical care, and electricity.

The damage in the Gaza Strip is horrifying.

More maps show the progression of damage in Gaza during Israel’s latest offensive as well as the damage in Gaza City.

If we look at some more maps, we are reminded that the violence, the destruction, the oppression in Gaza are not new…

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Palestinian villages depopulated and razed by Israel in 1948 and 1967.

Palestinian refugees.

The apartheid wall.

The Gaza Strip in 2007.

Israel has constructed its map of the region, its borders, its territory through the use of force, by fighting wars and building walls. The effects are more than just lines on a map, and in the last 25 days those effects include 1317  dead Palestinians, including 419 dead children, and 5340 injured.

In our work we are committed to creating maps that open up space, tear down walls, destroy borders, maps that create connections between people and places, maps that challenge oppression and inequality.  The new map of Gaza is not out of our hands  – there are things we all can do as academics , taxpayers, and consumers.

And if you have more maps of Gaza or the Palestinian struggle please send them in…

Thursday, Jan. 15, 7:00 – 9:00 pm
Nelson Mandela Auditorium, Fed Ex Global Education Center, UNC-CH

Speakers:
Laila El-Haddad is a freelance journalist from Gaza. Her blog, “Raising Yousuf and Noor: Diary of a Palestinian Mother,” explores the complex relationships between the personal and the political as she raises her children while negotiating displacement and occupation. http://a-mother-from-gaza.blogspot.com/

Rann Bar-On is an Israeli activist and graduate student at Duke University. He has worked with the International Solidarity Movement in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Rann advocates for an end to the Occupation and resistance to militaristic Israeli government policies. He is especially interested in the Shministim – a group of Israeli high-school students who are imprisoned for daring to refuse to serve in Israel’s occupying army.

Marty Rosenbluth: Formerly Amnesty International USA’s Country Specialist for Israel, the Occupied Territories and the Palestinian Authority, he is currently a human rights lawyer working with the Southern Coalition for Social Justice in Durham. Through his work with Amnesty, he documented violations by all parties to the conflict, including participating in Amnesty’s fact-finding mission in northern Israel during the war between Israel and Lebanon in the summer of 2006 where he documented Hezbullah attacks on Israeli civilians as well as meeting with Israeli officials to discuss IDF attacks on civilians in Southern Lebanon.

Dr. Sarah Shields: Associate Professor of Middle Eastern History at UNC-CH, she is the author of Mosul before Iraq and teaches courses on the Arab-Israel conflict, Islamic civilization, the Modern Middle East.

We are horrified/outraged/saddened by the tragedy/massacre/something occurring in Gaza. We want to do something to stop the Israeli attacks. We often turn to mapping in times like these. But of course, cartography was born in the midst of war, conflict and violence and that bond is not easily broken.

The BBC has a map comparing “Israeli Attacks on Gaza” to “Palestinian Rocket Attacks against Israel”
BBC Map
From this map one might be lead to think this is a conflict between two equals, with equal numbers of causalities on both sides. One might even be led to believe Israel’s claim that it is defending itself, only attacking “targets”, that all the Palestinians are dying in “clashes” between Hamas forces and the IDF. One certainly would not see the over 900 Palestinians that Israel has killed in the last 17 days, the nearly 300 children that have been killed, the refugee camps and schools that Israel has bombed. Nor would one see the effects of Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip — the lack of clean water, electricity, food, medical care. Even less would one see the cumulative effects of the Israeli occupation — the constant threat of violence, people denied their basic human rights and their ability to control their own lives and make their livelihoods.

But then again, how do you show horror, outrage, sadness on a map? How can you map even a single lost life? But 917 people killed in 17 days, 284 children? Or even write about it…