As part of the "sentimental cartography of ongoing brutalization", we invited Elis Mendoza and Sergio Beltrán-García to write about the ongoing genocide in Palestine. The authors share their reflection with us, taking as a starting point the way in which images are captured and disseminated from the frameworks that the geographical outlines themselves imply, making the maps necessary elements to understand the colonial and genocidal occupation of Israel.

The war of the Israeli State against the Palestinian people has unmasked an evidentiary crisis, that is, a profound disruption in the ways in which evidence about serious human rights violations is socialized and politically operated. Revealing that the international mechanisms built over 76 years —which claim to foster international order— have failed to stop the crimes of the occupation. Perhaps, these mechanisms were never designed to stop neocolonial and extractivist states.

It is essential to continue to witness the images and videos that the Gazan and West Bank population document, and to view them in contrast to the Zionist propaganda of the state of Israel. Accompanying suffering —even as witnesses— takes on the importance of keeping alive the possibility of valuing each body and each story, not as an act of pity or compassion, but of political imagination, which lays the foundation for future poetic actions to repair the damage caused as a possibility of a refoundation of politics, as shared by the Mexican philosopher Enrique Diaz Alvarez.

The war of the Israeli State against the Palestinian people has unmasked an evidentiary crisis, that is, a profound disruption in the ways in which evidence about serious human rights violations is socialized and politically operated

Witnessing the genocide also requires analyzing it through the maps generated by the occupation of Palestinian bodies, territories and stories. In order to make the effects of such mappings visible, it is necessary to translate them from the bird's eye view to the human scale of testimony. We know that neither history nor the archives that serve as the basis for its writing are neutral objects, since both are legitimizing sources of power. Ancient maps, as repositories of information and artifacts for analysis, have traditionally been tools of colonial expansion. Therefore, we can read them to reveal their functioning as such.

Since the advent of aerial photography, the zenithal plan has been given an aura of de facto veracity. Likewise, satellite images have been elevated as absolute evidence, and it has been assumed that images produced by mechanical or electronic means cannot hide valuable information or be altered. However, from the moment photography was born, techniques for its alteration were also created. As Susan Sontag reminds us, in her writing “Looking at War”, photography as a document of war is born with a contradiction: on the one hand, its condition of objectivity is intrinsic, but it inevitably always assumes a specific point of view. In the same way, in the processing of satellite images with remote sensing, there is a point of view of the person who decides what and how to view the images. What were once captions are now complex narratives produced by the media or experts through isolating, filtering, intervening and processing those images. In order to analyze the mass-produced satellite images of the conflict, it is necessary to understand how the territorial reading of that space originated.

Ancient maps, as repositories of information and artifacts for analysis, have traditionally been tools of colonial expansion. Therefore, we can read them to reveal their functioning as such.

The first map, the partition by the UN

Let's return to the map and the zenithal view that allowed the dividing and snatching away of the Palestinian’s territory, through treaties and decrees that began with the stroke of a pen and today make use of artificial intelligence. In 1916 —and anticipating the fall of the Ottoman Empire—, France and England divided the territories of the Levant through the Sykes-Picot agreement, splitting them into four: those that were under French control, those under English control, and the independent territories under influence from France or England. The map, kept in the National Archives of England, shows a large blue first line that ran from Persia to the Jordan River. Two more parallel lines created the areas under European control. The distribution of what they considered the spoils of war through these lines grouped, segregated and fragmented numerous peoples, echoing the division of political borders in Africa established at the Berlin Conference of 1885, and that we would later see again in the partition of India. It is essential not to forget that the defeat of the Ottoman Empire was carried out thanks to the support of several Arab peoples to whom England had promised their independence.

At the beginning of the 20th century, mass migrations of Jewish people to Palestine had already begun, promoted by the Jewish National Fund, created in 1901, during the Fifth Zionist Congress in Basel. Its objective was to buy Ottoman lands for the establishment of a Jewish state. In 1947, after the Holocaust and a lobbying campaign by the Jewish community, the UN decided to split Palestine into two parts. The drawing of the boundaries of the State of Israel assigned it almost 55% of the territory, a decision that triggered clashes and attacks on Palestinian villages. A UN report describes the murder of 750 men, women and children by a group of terrorists protected by the Hagana, the Jewish militia that operated in Palestine since the early 20th century. This act of terror provoked a warlike reaction from neighboring Arab countries, which, when defeated, triggered the displacement of nearly 750,000 Palestinians. This is the event that Palestinians call the Nakba, the catastrophe.

The green line

Following the Arab-Israeli War and as a result of the Rhodes Armistice Agreements, a new temporary territorial division was drawn that gave Israel control over 78% of the territory. This line is known as the green line, due to the wax marker that Moshe Dayan, commander of the Jerusalem District, used to draw it. Parallel to this line, Lieutenant Colonel Abdullah al-Tal also drew a line with a red pencil. These lines on the map materialized in the division of the territory under Israeli and Jordanian rule and new safety zones converted into no man's land. Traced by hand on a map printed on cotton at a scale of 1:20,000, the lines with irregular trajectories on the paper had a thickness of 3 mm, which would translate over the territory into strips of up to 60 meters wide and up to 3 kilometers, extending like fingers on a hand to ensure Israel's occupation, access to Palestinian cities and handfuls of fertile territories and crops. The passage of the green line condemned 125 houses, as well as extensive areas of Jerusalem, to abandonment and ruin.

These imaginary lines on the land translated into a system of forts, walls and barricades in Jordan and Israel. The line in Jerusalem would not materialize until 1962. However, the careless and changing outline on paper has caused, and continues to cause, a series of uncertainties and conflicts among inhabitants near areas of the green line, where Israel decides to enforce it as it sees fit. The green line also arbitrarily decreed the nationalities and, therefore, the rights of the inhabitants of these sections.

Israeli writer and activist Jeff Halper called this a “control matrix”: a system through which the Palestinians' every move was not only monitored, but also slowed down, eroding the cohesion of their communities.

Fragmentation of new maps

In 1967, a new map emerged from the so-called Six-Day War between Israel, Egypt, Jordan and Syria, or the Naksa (the retreat) for the Palestinians. Israel entered the Gaza Strip and the Sinai, and took control of East Jerusalem and major West Bank cities. In Hollow Land, Eyal Weizman describes the expansion of Israeli territory through a series of annexations of Egyptian, Syrian and Jordanian territories as the beginning of an era of prosperity, a product of cheap labor in the occupied territories. That year, Israel decided to eliminate all traces of the green armistice line, both in documents and physical barriers, annexing East Jerusalem. Weizman argues that the division and annexation of territories is due to the extraction of resources, mainly access to water that accumulates under the West Bank territory.

The Allon Plan, although never officially adopted, would become the ideological guide for Israeli expansion. It defended dominance over strategic areas, maximizing its area of influence while minimizing the Palestinian population therein. This would be followed by the Wachman Plan, in 1976, with the proposal of a series of settlements in sparsely populated areas that effectively surrounded the most densified Palestinian areas. This facilitated the control of the movements of Palestinian people and prevented the growth of their living areas. A year later, Ariel Sharon, then president of the Inter-Ministerial Committee for Settlements, took up this plan, adding the occupation of the high mountain areas and “belts” (or edges of Palestinian lands) with urban and industrial development centers —all with the aim of further fragmenting the Palestinian territory. The Drobles plan increased this terrible atomization of Palestine, proposing a series of connections between the territories dominated by Israel to transform the Palestinian territory into a kind of archipelago.

Israeli writer and activist Jeff Halper called this a “control matrix”: a system through which the Palestinians' every move was not only monitored, but also slowed down, eroding the cohesion of their communities. Weizman argues that, for every movement of Palestinian people, there is a corresponding obstacle placed by Israeli forces through movement valves. Over time, these logics increased: Palestinian lands were invaded with antennas as part of the imposition of a necessary security infrastructure, which would be followed by the arrival of guards and their families to soon become a colony that would also be surrounded by areas of protection. While the Palestinians were being corralled, the Israelis invented new forms of invasion and uninterrupted movement, two radically opposite realities for two peoples living in the same territory.

In 1991, in the context of the Gulf War, checkpoints were extended throughout all areas, forcing Palestinians to request administrative permits to move from one part of Palestine to another. Following the Oslo agreements in 1995 with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), led by Yasser Arafat, Israel withdrew its troops from Gaza. However, in 1995, following a new agreement, the Palestinian territory was divided into three zones: zone A, under Palestinian control; zone B, under Israeli military control and civilian control by the PLO; and zone C, under Israeli control.

In the ongoing genocide, the use of artificial intelligence has allowed the Israeli military's surveillance and control to evolve into an accelerated and massive ability to designate multiple targets

Reversing the cartographic view: the red line

In The Lawless Line, Sandy Hilal and Alessandro Petti, from Decolonizing Architecture Art Research (DAAR), through their artistic practice, look at the consequences of these lines in people's lives, and describe the West Bank as a “geography permanently splintered by multiple prohibitions.” They investigate, analyze and construct narratives in the physical space of the line along the edges of towns and cities, crossing fields, olive and fruit orchards, roads, gardens, nurseries, fences, terraces, homes, public buildings, a football stadium, a mosque and, finally, a large recently built castle. The space of the line occupies a legal limbo in which the entire history of divisions and plans intersects with the growth of all institutions, traditions and populations.

Occupation in all dimensions

The system of walls and controls turned the West Bank into a three-dimensional labyrinth. In order for the Israelis to be able to live in the illusion of occupying a democratic and free territory with European standards, a series of highways, tunnels and bridges were deployed with not only seamless routes, but also with uninterrupted views of the landscape where Palestinians simply did not exist; each view was carefully curated and controlled. In the same way, a series of extractive tactics were deployed that would control access to underground water deposits and other natural resources, preventing the development of any industries in the future.

War technology developed in Israel has become its main export product. Added to the labyrinth of surveillance on the ground is a technological surveillance system that allows the Israeli army to dissect step by step how Palestinian lives unfold, but also where and how their resistance is expressed. In the ongoing genocide, the use of artificial intelligence has allowed the Israeli military's surveillance and control to evolve into an accelerated and massive ability to designate multiple targets. Through the Lavender and Where's Daddy? algorithms, the Israeli occupation forces have managed to leave to computers the choice of which Palestinian person is designated as a target, based on the behaviors, communications and locations they monitor. They also decide where and when to attack people —usually at night, while they are sleeping with their families. When the Israeli military claims its AI system is 90% accurate, the presumption of neutrality of now AI-mediated maps and images rears its head again.

The view that decides who lives and who dies is “intelligent”, which forces us to ask ourselves the meaning of this concept and the responsibility of whoever executes the program. But we must also ask ourselves about the type of satellite images and information that feeds the machine which, as we mentioned at the beginning of this writing, has a point of view and is seriously mediated by whoever produces it. This is especially important to take into account when human rights investigative groups record the destruction and cruelty of the crimes that the state of Israel commits daily and with impunity.