Repository | Book | Chapter

Consider the maps in figures 1 and 2. They represent typical examples from responses of about 600 Jewish settlers and 1500 Palestinians, living in the occupied territories, to the question: Which is the nearest city to your settlement" [1]. As can be seen in figure 1, in all Jewish settlements the majority of the inhabitants have ignored nearby Arab cities and referred to Israeli-Jewish cities, even though this implied a distortion from the cartographic point of view. The responses of the Palestinians, in figure 2, are just a mirror image of figure 1: Most Palestinians have ignored nearby Israeli settlements. An interesting variation is figure Id in which most respondents have indeed ignored the option of a nearest Arab city but were not certain as to the nearest Israeli city. Their responses are distributed in more or less equal proportions among several Israeli towns. Figure 2c is the Palestinian parallel of this situation. Another interesting example is figure 2d. It shows that Israeli Arabs tend to ignore nearby Palestinian-Arab settlements on the east side of the Green Line.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-48779-8_21

Full citation: