Place,space,and counter-mapping digital memory work

Abstract

This article examines how counter-maps offer both an alternative visual reading of the land and a mechanism to share memories of a space and place. There has been a rich conversation on the resistance offered by counter-maps, as well as the diverse immersive experiences provided by apps and online platforms. Less discussed is how the counter-maps situate memory work as resistance. This article considers two immersive digital counter-maps, Jerusalem, We Are Here (2016) and Tantura: Executions and Mass Graves in Palestine (2023), and questions what makes a counter-map counter? Second, how does cartographical countering constitute digital memory work? The article concludes that the counter-maps facilitate memory work by providing a dynamic digital archive that witnesses the cartographical violence of erasure that occurs in mainstream online maps as well as on the ground. In doing so, counter-map creators practice and engage users in memory work that recentres marginalized cultural memory narratives.

Introduction

The day is overcast in Jerusalem and the street is quiet except for birdsong and the occasional car that passes the end of the road. On the pavement, couples sit on a low wall. Although separately engaged in their activities (talking, browsing, reading), they are perhaps united in their purpose: waiting for a movie to start at the Lev Smadar Theater to their right. Located on Lloyd George Street in the Katamon/قطمون neighbourhood, the Theater is an appropriate entry point for a virtual journey into the past, its history a snapshot of the neighbourhood’s changing community since the cinema’s establishment in 1935. Chosen for the immersive documentary, Jerusalem, We Are Here (JWAH) (2016), by the filmmaker, Dorit Naaman, the cinema situates the user at the start of three virtual tours that, along with accompanying digital maps, archival material and oral narratives, unpack how the politics of the region has touched individual families, buildings and public spaces.

The cinema is one of several sites on the tour and on the street outside, travellers are reminded that past power dynamics are imprinted onto contemporary urban spaces. At times, the legacy is literal, the streets named after Mandate era figures leaving mnemonic traces: the theatre is on Lloyd George Street, named after the former British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George; downtown, King George Street, commemorates King George V. The mnemonic traces not only recall the eponymous public figures, they also temporally orient the traveller, reminding them, decades later, of who exercised authority for a time and how this authority determined which names would be memorialized and which would not (Azaryahu, 2004: 305). Like lovers carving names and hearts into park trees, colonial urban planners and cartographers re/named streets after prominent political figures, inserting distant individuals into the local cityscape in the misplaced certainty of lasting dominance.

There is, of course, a difference between the park lovers and the cartographer. While the former are inspired by the wish for enduring love, renaming streets is ‘a powerful demonstration of ideological control over public urban space’ (Azaryahu, 2011: 484). Street names can transform a space from a collection of mnemonic traces into a mnemonic net that knots politics, history, agency and power. Like Eviatar Zerubavel’s (2003) concept of ‘mnemonic bridging’ that views the ‘constancy of place [as] a formidable basis for establishing a strong sense of sameness’ (pp. 40–41), the mnemonic net extends beyond individual buildings and locations (such as the Hagia Sophia [Zerubavel, 2003: 43]) to encompass the multiple nodes (including streets, statues and squares) that make up a neighbourhood. Swept in its scope is the thoroughfare, surrounding buildings, and to an extent, the inhabitants, too, as the mnemonic net ‘gives meaning’ (Schilling, 2020), gathering residents in (wittingly or otherwise) acts of urban remembrance.

For the names that remain, their presence triggers memories as well as an acknowledgement of a past that is not confined to the history books but continues to shape the region today. While the mnemonic traces are instructive, prompting questions about their presence, they also bring unease, as Pierre Nora’s (1989) neat distinction between history and memory breaks down and history refuses to remain a quiet ‘representation of the past’ (p. 8). Instead, the British Mandate, and its role in the Nakba, stimulates a collision between the ‘spaces, gestures, images, and objects’ (Nora, 1989: 9) of memory and a history that transforms memory from ‘just life’ (Nora, 1989: 8) to memory as present-day life.

The decision to keep a place or street name, contextualize it or replace it is part of the broader process of reckoning with the past, including how the past is framed and taught to subsequent generations. However, what if the past is not wholly past? In such instances, there is no pause for colonial amnesia to be fostered. Rather, the injustices and inequalities of previous decades continue, rendering the past a temporal past, but the impact still of the now. While the British Mandate ended in 1948, the establishment of the state of Israel ensured that cartography would remain a political tool, one that can dehumanize (Specht, 2024), divide and ‘collapse relational and constitutive differences’ (Abushama, 2024: 5). Pushing against this, Palestinian and Israeli NGOs, architects, artists, urban planners and researchers have produced digital counter-maps that blend archival and crowdsourced data to produce platforms that layer spaces, places and names by decade.

As digital counter-maps proliferate, this article explores the interplay between counter-maps and memories of space and place in Palestine-Israel. There is a rich body of work on the resistance facilitated by counter-maps, including mental maps in Kashmir (Junaid, 2020), Palestinian counter-cartography on Google Earth (Quiquivix, 2014), and journalistic cartography (Lowan-Trudeau, 2021), to name but a few. Counter-maps have also taken various forms over the years, including participatory geographic information systems (PGIS) from the 1960s onwards (Specht and Feigenbaum, 2019), cartographic visualizations and data activism in 1970s Canada (Kidd, 2019), and maps that draw on Indigenous witness statements to document colonial violence in Peru (Block, 2019). However, less discussed is how the maps situate memory work as affect and resistance. Adopting Brian Massumi’s (2015) understanding of the political aspects of affect, the counter-maps discussed in this article are at once cartographically informative, as well as triggers for ‘the stirrings [first or otherwise] of the political, flush with the felt intensities of life’. Reflecting on the possibilities for radical (Caswell, 2021), cross-temporal (Landsberg, 2004) digital memory work, this article asks what makes a counter-map counter? And, in what ways does countering constitute memory work? As Israeli settler-colonial violence continues across historic Palestine, counter-maps emphasize the connections between the past and present, as well as recording and witnessing current events. By doing so, they contribute a dynamic archive that is cross-temporal and continuously updated, creating a digital record of memories and testimonies.

Memories and spaces

In Adania Shibli’s (2020 [2017]) novel, Minor Detail, the unnamed protagonist drives to the border with Egypt searching for the site where, in 1949, Zionist soldiers sexually assaulted and murdered a young Palestinian woman. While the book considers how the archives hold intricate detail for some, yet less (in this case, ‘minor’) for others, it is equally an account of cartographical erasure as the protagonist sifts through maps of the 1940s and present day, noting the absence of Palestinian place names and landmarks. As she does so, a form of counter-mapping develops, and while neither we, as readers, nor the protagonist are consciously counter-mapping, the recognition of cartographical erasure is shared with counter-mapping projects in Palestine and beyond. In the Palestinian context, Palestine Open Maps digitizes what Shibli’s (2020 [2017]) traveller was doing in her car: overlaying maps from the 1930s, 1940s, through to the satellite images of today (p. 85). By adding and tweaking temporal layers, the landscape changes: aerial spaces are retrospectively populated as villages of varying sizes appear; the sites that remain shift names from Hebrew to Arabic, language telling a story of depopulation and displacement amid ruins and new builds.

The terms used here, ‘changes’ and ‘shifts’, are misleading, perhaps suggesting a smooth transformation, instead of the longer process of dispossession. Place names are entangled with power, historical, political and territorial (Masalha, 2015) and the act of renaming (and of reclaiming names) requires us to not only take note, but also question: who is doing the renaming? What is the significance of the new place name? And, importantly, who is being unnamed? The final question might raise a grammatical flag, a request for a ‘where’ in place of the ‘who’ when discussing space and place. The ‘who’ and the ‘where’ are inextricable, though, given the flowing connection between identity, place and space. Identity shapes how a space and place is understood, experienced and remembered. Moving in the opposite direction, spaces and places influence how identity is felt and articulated. In the case of the latter, fresh ties can be forged, and a sense of self realized, while in the former, space and place connect with other facets of identity, including location(s), gender, starting points, opportunities and end points, all ‘contouring’, in this case, the Palestinian identity (Sherwell, 2006: 430).

To this can be added the meshing of the personal and political. In the case of the personal, emotions and senses are significant in the contouring process. How we remember spaces and places is not devoid of feeling, whether it is emotional (such as fear, anxiety or joy) or of the senses (such as the comfort of brodo di pollo that evokes home and safety). Places and spaces are recalled through an emotional and sensory framework, a continuation of the process that nurtures belonging and topophilia (Tuan, 1990 [1974]) when in situ. Attachment to a space comes with a ‘familiarity and ease, with the assurance of nurture and security, with the memory of sounds and smells, of communal activities and homely pleasures accumulated over time’ (Tuan, 2001 [1977]: 159), while a place can double as ‘an archive of fond memories’ (Tuan, 2001 [1977]: 154) as much as a site of familiarity and ease. The convergence of the senses and spatial experiences has been studied in a range of alternative maps: from the scent-based senses of belonging in the Black Country (Groes and Mercer, 2021), to sensory memories and urban smellscapes (Henshaw, 2013; Verbeek and Van Campen, 2015), and more broadly, the ways that touch, taste and scent help us to remember and understand objects and places (Tuan, 2001 [1977]).

When considering these creative maps, the question of categories arises. That is, are all alternative maps ‘counter-maps’? If not, how do they differ? An answer can be found in not only the name but also the objective: in Bas Groes and Tom Mercer’s (2021) ‘Snidge Scrumpin’ (‘nose foraging’), the smell map adds layers to existing sites and places. In turn, the places are not disputed but augmented through the olfactory dimension. On the other hand, counter-maps interrogate contemporary spaces and places; re-evaluate names, boundaries and borders; draw questioning eyes to empty spaces; and invite users to listen to marginalized and oppressed voices, whether from the archive or today. The critical possibilities of counter-maps are diverse, yet they might be tempered by Kitchin and Dodge’s caution that they do ‘not challenge the ontological status of the map; rather [counter-mapping] simply reveals the politics of mapping’ (Kitchin and Dodge, 2007: 332). While there is a convincing argument regarding the authors’ primary point, we can question whether almost 20 years on, there is anything simple about what counter-maps reveal. Peeling back the layers, introducing new ones that highlight lines of oppression and restriction, the counter-maps do reveal the politics of mapping, as well as a new way of seeing, critically, politically, affectively and analytically. For those freshly learning about Palestine and the ways that the Israeli occupation shapes daily life (and has done since 1948), counter-maps make seeing a point of discovery, a trigger for awareness, and in some cases, activism that takes the politics from the counter/map and carries it into everyday acts of resistance, whether in situ or abroad.

In the cases of the aforementioned counter-maps, memory and the senses are present, whether it is in the stories of daily activities or the scents that filled the streets. In the smell map of the Black Country, a shared facet emerges: the recognition of time passing. As the region’s scents shift from factory suds and bone, ‘to turmeric, garlic, and cumin from the Black Country’s numerous gurdwaras (the place of worship for Sikhs) and langars (community kitchens)’ (Groes, 2018: n.p.) and the ‘bouquet of stale beer and body odour in pubs that smell perhaps too honestly since the smoking ban [of 2007]’ (Groes, 2018: n.p.), the user gains a sense of the socio-cultural shifts over time. Groes and Mercer’s smell map triggers gentle nostalgia and awareness, but the use of sensory experiences in counter-maps is fraught because it is not always fondness that is triggered. Where loss or displacement has occurred, warm emotions are replaced by painful ones: heightened grief that extends the algia (Boym, 2001: xiii) beyond a longing to return and into a longing for somewhere unreachable. Amid loss, the love that guides topophilia is replaced by topolypi, a grief or sadness associated with a place or space that is unreachable, its loss recent or transgenerational, and felt by those close by or from a distance. The affective aspect of counter-maps is also active, connecting with sadness and fondness, Massumi’s (2015) ‘stirrings’ and ‘flush[ness]’ enveloping our capacity to hold contrasting feelings, while political affect stirs memory and turns it towards political and memory work.

In many digital counter-maps, the loss is channelled into action and though the past cannot be preserved, it can be used to reconstruct (Assmann and Czaplicka, 1995). Responding to the erasure of Palestinian towns and villages from mainstream maps, counter-maps imagine not just a different cartography, but another way of moving between places. Spaces and places in their entirety comprise not only the communal nucleus, but the surrounding exits, entries and edgelands, which expand and contract as the lines are contested, breached or renegotiated. In peacetime, the boundary of a village might be quietly acknowledged, a sign carrying the village’s name and its twin in another country confirming that we have entered. When conflict and/or a settler-colonial regime prevails, the boundaries denote not only entry/exit, but also us/them, ownership (mine/theirs) and power (the oppressed/oppressor). Boundaries are, as Steve Pile (2008) notes, part of an ever-evolving process that is ‘always in the making’ (p. 208), and a facet can be added to his physical, social, cultural, economic and psychological (p. 208) process: the political, which includes the religious, nationalist, military and ideological. In Palestine-Israel, boundaries take many physical, political forms, including ‘enclavisation’ in which Palestinian territory is closed off as a mechanism of Israeli control (Falah, 2007: 1344), ‘bantustanisation’, a form of ‘fractionalising’ the Occupied West Bank (Falah, 2007: 1371), and ‘spatial buffering’, where a ‘dynamic spiral operating in “buffering” [. . .] leads to a further expansion of the buffered zone’ (Falah, 2007: 1357). Movement between these spaces is marked by bureaucratic lines that reinscribe colonial and settler-colonial distinctions between who can move and where, who cannot, whose time matters (Abu Hatoum, 2021; Hage, 2015; Hammami, 2001; Tawil-Souri, 2017) and ultimately, how lives are valued and sustained. As Helga Tawil-Souri explains, the multiple, colour-coded ID cards (hawiya) reinforce inequalities of power and im/mobility by determining who can and cannot cross a border and/or boundary, a policy that decides who is ‘un-bound’ or ‘bound’ (Tawil-Souri, 2012: 164).

Try as they might to capture the shifting lines, maps foremost bow to their creators: the agenda of the cartographer decides what is charted, what is not, and for that which moves constantly (such as flying checkpoints and moveable boundaries), the map fails utterly. Writing in 2005, Dianne Rocheleau reflected on the limits of the map and its ability to capture everyone and everything:

I am troubled by some elements of the recent rush to locate everyone and everything, once and for all, on simple maps that project complex and separate realities onto a single two-dimensional surface. This leaves people, their resources, their homes, and their habitats fixed in the Cartesian grid, what I like to call the iron grid of Descartes, reduced to a two-dimensional picture that, in any given place, can only ‘see’ and display one thing at a time on a flat surface. (Rocheleau, 2005: 328)

Rocheleau’s concern draws attention to two points: first, the fixed nature of the grid and the reduction of individuals, their homes, and their lives to anonymous cartographical squares and dots. In the context of settler colonialism, the reduction is not confined to the map: in his consideration of the Palestinian mobilizations and new mass resistance movements, Sai Englert indicates to the unified practices of protest that occur across historic Palestine and argues for a re-evaluation of how we discuss the impact of the Israeli occupation. In the case of counter-maps, the dividing lines spread from the land to the page, epistemology and how the occupation is framed in everyday discussions. Far from being confined to physical or bureaucratic lines, the cartographic boundaries hold ideological power, consolidating

the idea of a fragmented Palestinian people, that is too often reproduced in journalistic, academic, or official state and NGO output [. . .] the divisions imposed on the Palestinian people by the Israeli state are reproduced uncritically, with each section of the population treated separately: Palestinian refugees in different countries, Palestinians in the West Bank living under the rule of the PA, Palestinians in (East) Jerusalem in limbo as non-citizen residents of the Israeli state, Palestinians in Gaza under military blockade, and Palestinian citizens of Israel. (Englert, 2022: 218)

The cartographic lines have given rise to a compartmentalized view of historic Palestine; while the nuances of daily life under occupation are insightful when trying to grasp the vast ways that Israeli state oppression is practised, Englert – and the counter-maps – offer an urgent reminder that historic Palestine is unified: in mobilization, as well as its experience of oppression under the Israeli state.

Second, in the context of digital memory, the reduction to an ‘iron grid’ is symptomatic of the limitations of online access. Where once the past was pieced together through visits to multiple archives, today it is faster, streamlined. We have more detail than ever before, including reconstituted and digitized archives, restored film, salvaged recordings, translated texts, and in the case of cartography, interactive, immersive and regressive maps. However, the promise of a grasp on the past is a stretch:

Digital media have transformed the parameters of the past and have ushered in a new imaginary, that amazes in the very recognition of the scale of this post-scarcity culture, but that also, to repeat, makes visible our inability to encompass everything; the digital simultaneously affords synchronic and diachronic unlimited depth of vision that at the same time makes us aware of the human capacity to arrest and to hold and to keep the archive. [. . .]

Memory has been lost to the hyperconnective illusion of an open access world of the availability, accessibility, and reproducibility of the past. (Hoskins, 2018: 5)

Andrew Hoskins reminds us to temper not only our expectations of how accurately the past can be re/presented, but to be aware of the challenges of bias, erasure, and which memories are elusive (and why). In the case of the latter, access to Palestinian archives has been restricted in terms of physical access to the sites (Sela, 2018), ¹ archival violence as a method of silencing (Desai and Shahwan, 2022), and the destruction of the archives, most recently in the scholasticide perpetuated by the Israeli Occupation Forces in the Gaza Strip, which resulted in the loss of the Central Archives of Gaza City (Palestinian Ministry of Culture, 2023).

When taken together, the capacity for reduction and erasure by digital media shapes how a site is read via online mapping sites. A useful example of this limitation is provided by GoogleMaps: the platform has gained various bells and whistles over the years: streetview, info boxes, local tips and 3D in place of 2D. Despite these additions, contested areas and sites of violence and settler-colonial expansion remain bereft of detail. Flattened, beige, stripped of history, users are not prompted to question the blurry spaces; their cursor moves on, moves over, sweeping not over blurred territory, but rich histories, displaced communities, ruins, atrocities, attempts at revival and the memories that make the spaces and places sites of attachment. In response, online counter-maps provide a unique form of memory work and in Palestine-Israel, the ‘inability to encompass everything’ (Hoskins, 2018: 5) that digital media makes visible is turned on its head. Less frustrating, it sparks the drive for recognition and discussion. Counter-maps work to address the ‘everything’ that has not been encompassed, to reinsert it and repopulate the grids with the names, places, spaces and communities that have been erased in the pre- and current digital era. In doing so, the digital counter-maps discussed in this article are part of a longer tradition dating back to the Enlightenment, for as John Pickles concludes in his analysis of the history of spaces, ‘the counter-mappings we seek have been with us all along’ (Pickles, 2004: 184).

Which brings us to a question at the heart of this article: what makes a counter-map counter? A key feature is the re/insertion of erased names (of places, as much as families) that makes cartographical remembrance a form of resistance. Here, digital memory work follows Caswell’s (2021) radical, liberatory break: the colonial and settler-colonial maps are ‘dismantled’, ‘rebuilt’, ‘unsettling’ (pp. 106–107) accepted ideas about what the Palestinian land- and cityscape is and has been. In doing so, the counter-maps work to realize their ‘counterhegemonic potential’ (Craib, 2017: 54). When mainstream maps visually and textually strip sites of colonial and settler-colonial violence, the space and places are rendered opaque, at best, or subject to an alternative reading of history, at worst. Counter-maps offer an augmented reading of the landscape, cartographically and topologically, as well as a counter-narrative that reinserts historical details that would otherwise be disconnected from the space, confined to books and the archive.

Complicating stories, preserving memory

We could not project on houses when Palestinians had so little access to Jerusalem. It would have to be online. It would have to be available to all Palestinians, wherever they may be, without having to get permits or pass checkpoints or feel like they have to justify their right to be in the space. (Naaman et al., 2022: 113)

In recent years, counter-maps have offered insights into the archives, human rights issues, displacement, planning and military threats, and immersive in situ and virtual tours. Each vital, they include Palestine Open Maps (2018), iReturn (formerly iNakba) (2014), Tracking the Urbicide in Gaza by beirut urban lab (2024) and Palestine Today by Visualizing Palestine, to name but a few. The choice of Jerusalem, We Are Here, is perhaps an unusual one given that it is an early addition. Released in 2016, it combines documentary film, archives, testimonies, photography and maps, while focusing on a specific neighbourhood, Katamon/قطمون. It is this blend of sources that draws our attention, particularly when considering the questions, ‘what makes a map counter?’ and ‘how do counter-maps constitute memory work?’.

As we join the Palestinian-American author, Mona Hajjar Halaby, Palestinian linguist and translator Anwar Ben Badis, and Dorit Naaman on a walking tour of Katamon/قطمون, we are told that the Palestinian history of West Jerusalem is being erased. Starting at the Regent Cinema, the user launches the street view that includes short, in-frame films, a brief text explaining the history of the cinema, and testimonies pinned to Mona, Anwar and Dorit, who stand smiling on the pavement. In the background, children shout, and birds sing, lending an acoustic authenticity that immerses the viewer in the stories and the environment. While the visual format varies from the aerial view of online maps, this is not the only singular aspect: rather, the eye is drawn to who is centred and whose voice guides the viewer. In this case, the narration is by Palestinian participants whose families were expelled from Katamon/قطمون in 1948. Created by Dorit, in collaboration with Marina Parisinou, Muna Dajani, Anwar, Mona and Livia Alexander, the project has memory work at its heart.

In her reflection on the origins of the project, Dorit explains that it began with a map hand-drawn in 1951 by Hala Sakakini, whose family had been expelled from Katamon/قطمون in 1948. Having read several memoirs about the neighbourhood, Dorit took up residence and walked the streets of Katamon/قطمون, seeing the area anew:

I would imagine recent building additions and temporary structures removed and I could name the people whose gardens and houses I was walking by. Katamon was populated in my mind with the architects, educators, doctors and intellectuals who shared the public and private spaces. (JWAH, 2016)

The documentary engages in memory work in two ways: first, it draws on testimonies and archival material to offer a deeper reading of the neighbourhood unpacking its history from the perspective of its displaced residents. Second, it preserves Palestinian memories of the area, embedding them in a digital archive that extends access to former residents, diaspora communities and users with an interest in the history of Katamon/قطمون. As the project reinforces connections between space, place and remembrance, it calls to mind Nina Fischer’s (2015) definition of memory work as work that ‘fills in “absences” [. . .] emphasizing the existence of networks of memory even when some of the connections are frail, blocked, or broken’ (p. 233). The memory work practised by JWAH is a radical act of repair that works to restore the history of the community, as well as the connection between the exiled descendants and their ancestral homes.

The project has navigated several changes since the original conversation between Mona and Dorit, addressing challenges that included who to interview and who could return to the neighbourhood. Initially, Dorit hoped to work with the Palestinian rightful owners of the houses, including the families who were expelled in 1948 and were not allowed to return. The team also planned to work with the Israeli families who had lived in the same homes since 1948 and make short films with both parties (Naaman et al., 2022: 109). Once completed, the films would be projected onto the houses at night, with the intention ‘to complicate the story of the neighbourhood and the houses’ (Naaman et al., 2022: 109) and engage with locals and visitors to the neighbourhood. The change in direction could be seen as a challenge surmounted, but a closer reading reveals the subtle memory work practised by the project creators. While this article focuses on the platform itself, disregarding the creators is like disregarding cartographers; for good or ill, maps are shaped by individuals with goals, ideas, biases and empathies. This is no less the case here, as the team recognized the importance of inclusion and access. Screening on site, though a startling concept, would perpetuate the marginalization that the project seeks to disrupt. Instead, a new path was chosen, one that is sensitive to the needs of those being remembered and those who are engaged in remembrance today. JWAH’s online reorientation recentred the narratives and voices of the displaced, creating a digitally unmoored memory work that can ‘assemble new, or recover previously banished, narratives and memories as they collect images, stories, and documentation [. . .] “Unmoored” memorials can then counter narratives directly, challenging and subverting the state representations’ (Simon and Zucker, 2020: 6). By ‘unmooring’ the site the project creators initiated a radical breakage (Caswell, 2021) that works around the restrictions on access, while drawing attention to them by creating alternative pathways to engagement.

After a few shifts and adjustments, the final project draws on approximately 24 families and individuals, 15 short films and 12 audio files. The digitization of the project was symbolic, emphasizing the value of online maps and the access that they provide, including visually, auditory and the sense of being in place, even when it cannot be reached physically. Digital mapping offers a moment of circumvention and in JWAH, it is also a commentary on the impact of the occupation on movement and exile. The platform is innovative, unexpected and a moving blend of film, mapping, streetview and archival footage. We enter through two portals: English (narrated by Mona) or Arabic (narrated by Anwar), and our POV is of a cinema screen, Mona and Anwar seated in the row ahead, the back of their heads peeking over the red velvet seats. Anwar tells us that we are in the Regent Cinema, ‘one of the first cinemas in Jerusalem’ (JWAH, 2016). Mona responds that ‘it used to be known as The Orient, and then The Regent’ (JWAH, 2016), while on screen, the words ‘Lev Smadar Theater, 2016’ tell us its current name. The couple continue to trade stories in gentle murmurs: stories that transform the site from one of multiple names to one of personal anecdotes. Mona shares how her grandmother watched movies there. Anwar tells how his grandfather’s first date with his grandmother was at The Regent; Mona coos, and we are reminded of Yair Wallach’s (2011) words, that maps are also of emotions, of love and lives (p. 361).

Eventually, Dorit joins Anwar and Mona, and silence falls as the screen plays images of The Regent in the 1940s, which was then run by Ferdinand ‘Nando’ Schtakleff, a spry fellow who carries a tripod and hops on and off walls. He loved to film and screen films, we are told, and when his family went on summer vacation, he took the tripod along. What starts as quaint shots of toddlers pootling and beach visits soon descends into the chaos of war: the 1948 War and Operation Yevusi that struck Katamon/قطمون. The floral gardens are replaced with devastated buildings; the toddlers with people running in different directions, and birdsong with sirens. Nando, we are told, is expelled, along with Palestinian Arabs, Armenians, Greeks and other non-Jewish citizens of Palestine. The short introductory film can be skipped, but it brings weight to the map: a face to the displaced, a place and name to the new site and new name.

After the film we have two options: three virtual walking tours with Mona, Anwar and Dorit. Tour 1 starts at the home of Fu’ad and Badriya Dajani, and passes by the houses of the former mayor, Mustafa Al-Khalidi, and ends at the St Simeon Monastery; Tour 2 opens at the home of Shawkat Abdul Razak Assali, and takes in the homes of the Sakakini and Semiramis families, and ends at the Monastery, too, and finally Tour 3, which commences at the home of the Stephan family, passes through the Lepers’ Hospital, the site of Count Folke Bernadotte’s assassination in 1948 by the LEHI, and ends at the Monastery, also.

By way of an example of how the virtual tour unfolds, in Tour 2, we visit the Assali house. We are informed via a text box that Shawkat Abdul Razak Assali was a textile importer, and he built the house in the early 1930s for his wife, Widad Quli, and their children, Samira, Siham, Abed, Nahla and Yassar. To find out more, we select the info box and information unfolds detailing who lived there, a collection of archival pictures of the house and family, and a 3-minute conversation between Shawkat’s daughter, Nahla, and his grandson, Anees Assali, who have returned to the present-day house. In the short film, Nahla enters the building and shares personal details of the space: she waves an arm towards the separate entrance for family and guests, smiles as she enters the room that she was born in and brushes her fingers affectionally on the door knocker that she would strike as a child. While our focus is on Nahla, the presence of Anees is significant, recalling Fischer’s (2015) ‘absences’, where the connection between Nahla, who was born in the house, and Anees, physically ‘situates the Second Generation within larger family history, emphasizing the existence of networks of memory even when some of the connections are frail, blocked, or broken’ (p. 233). As we leave the grandmother and grandson words also depart, but the sentiment remains, our parting image of Nahla standing outside the property, her head shaking, left to right, briefly. Amid the testimonies, soundscapes and info boxes, the moment of silent, embodied incredulity cuts through. No words, no translation is needed, Nahla’s body language revealing the dissonance of the house behind her that is ‘an archive of fond memories’ (Tuan, 2001 [1977]: 154) and a site of profound loss.

In addition to the virtual tour, there is an interactive street and aerial map of Katamon/قطمون, called ‘Remapping Jerusalem’. Like POM, there is a legend for quick reference: red for ‘identified building’, dark grey for ‘built before 1948’ and light grey for ‘built after 1948’. Users can also toggle between 2014, 1948 (a black and white aerial shot), and 1938, 1934, and 1933, with the 1930s overlaid with an archive map view. Where POM offers resources and archival overlays, JWAH takes it further with the addition of memories, senses, stories and personal layers that recentre the people who were displaced. By doing so, it piques our senses, historical curiosity and empathy as we connect not only to the streets and buildings, but the lives lived therein, the hobbies, habits, and ultimately, the memories made and left behind.

Counter-mapping as radical memory work

Given the array of resources, JWAH presents an intriguing point from which to interrogate counter-mapping and memory work. Its richness is notable, but the question of how memory makes the work needs to be untangled. Michelle Caswell’s (2021) Urgent Archives offers a starting point, as she unpacks the importance of not just memory work, but radical and liberatory memory work. Key to this is the remarkable possibility offered by Caswell’s (2021) radical and liberatory memory work, that demands ‘a radical break and repair, a simultaneous dismantling and a rebuilding, a foundational theoretical shift in support of radical temporal, affective, and material claims’ (p. 107), a break that is ‘slow and urgent, messy, and strategic. It is imperfect, uncomfortable work’ (p. 108). Similarly, the transgenerational aspect inspires a reflection on ownership and participation in immersive memories, particularly in the digital era. In the early 2000s, Alison Landsberg observed an accelerated opening of cultural memory. We are, she wrote, no longer ‘exclusive owners’ of our memories; they ‘do not “naturally” belong to anyone [. . .] [making] it increasingly possible for people to take on memories of events not “naturally” their own’ (Landsberg, 2004: 19).

The idea that memories ‘do not “naturally” belong to anyone’ is interesting on two levels: first, we can wonder whether this is a phenomenon that emerged with mass culture, or if transgenerational memories, passed on via oral narratives, have always opened cultural memories to generations of families and communities (and thereafter extended their ownership, too). Second, can all memories be accessed and embraced by anyone? That is, must we be able to relate to the memory to engage with it (and do we need to?)? In her consideration of the performation of place and placelessness in the work of Forensic Architecture, Silvana Mandolessi (2021) distinguishes between memory as a connective process, in which we ‘as individuals or collectively, establish a significant link with the past’ and ‘[i]n the absence of such a significant relationship, there is no memory but just raw data’. (p. 628). Mandolessi’s argument resonates with digital memory, where access is broader, immersion heightened, yet the extent to which digital memory work offers more opportunities for ownership, connection, and memory-carrying is uncertain.

Part of this uncertainty is rooted in how we construct connections to places. As Tuan’s understanding of our attachment to names, places and communities shows, it is about identity, shared history and belonging, as well as topophilia and topolypi, all of which is shaped as much by external forces as it is by our family connections and emotional bonds. In her chapter, ‘On Names, Labels, and Colonial Amnesia’, Christiane Ndedi Essombe (2023) unpacks the connection between colonial practices of naming, labelling, renaming and Othering, and the enduring colonial matrix of power. Of the many urgent points in the study, one connects with the context of Palestine-Israel: the pain of being defined through the framework of colonial (and in this case, settler-colonial, too) frameworks over the course of several centuries (Ndedi Essombe, 2023: 56). While the colonial and settler-colonial regimes in Palestine-Israel have not lasted centuries, the pace of destruction and displacement has been brisk. By late 1948, 418 villages and a dozen cities (in total, 531 localities [Abu Sitta, 1999]) had been depopulated, and in many cases their houses blown up or bulldozed by Zionist forces (Falah, 2004; Khalidi, 1992; Masalha, 2008). In their place, new urban and nature spaces have been constructed. Adopting the settler-colonial framework and applying it to digital cartographical tools reveals not only imposed names, but a narrative detached from historical events, as both the landscape and accompanying map offers a vista of serenity that has for many visitors become the norm.

The case of Tantura, today known as the Dor Beach Resort, is one example of many to be found on GoogleMaps. Once opened, the platform informs the users that the resort and surrounding space is ‘laid-back’, ‘family friendly’ and ‘the best beach in Israel’. Images shared by visitors are a succession of sunsets, gentle waves and coastal flora. So far, so idyllic – an appraisal that is possible due to the opportunity offered by online maps, which have opened the cartographical space for us to see more, learn more, from afar. However, like Hoskins’ concerns about digital memory, digital maps bring some, but not all the details. Dor Beach is not just ‘very quiet’: it is the site of a massacre, by the Alexandroni Brigade, on 22–23 May 1948, after the 1500 inhabitants of the village had surrendered. During the attack, approximately 230 villagers, mostly young men, were shot and buried in mass graves along the coastline (Pappé, 2001). The beach itself, now home to colourful plastic chairs, parasols and ponies treading the surf, was the site of summary executions of the villagers (Pappé, 2001), as well as the homes, shops and alleyways in the village.

Over the years, the Tantura massacre has been subject to both silencing and debate (Fahoum and Dubnov, 2023; Pappé, 2004). Against this backdrop, maps and counter-maps have played roles in erasing or remembering the village and its history. In the case of GoogleMaps, the history of the site is obscured if not hidden entirely. At best, this means that users are unaware of the massacre that took place; at worst, this continues a narrative that in extreme cases, frames the Nakba not as settler-colonial violence, but as ‘a miracle’ (Confino, 2015: 51). At Tantura, as at other sites of violence in Palestine-Israel, it is not only the reproducibility of the past that is in peril (Hoskins, 2018: 5), but also the producibility of the present.

It is on this point that the countering by counter-maps becomes evident. How the maps counter varies: the neighbourhood-specific approach of JWAH adopts a geographically restricted approach, one that peels the archival layers to reveal human stories, bringing memories and lives to the streets and buildings. Alternatively, the maps used by Forensic Architecture, a research agency based at Goldsmiths University, counter by providing evidence for present and past atrocities, from Tantura in 1948 through to Gaza in 2025. Commissioned by the Adalah Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights, the platform, Tantura: Executions and Mass Graves in Palestine (Forensic Architecture and the Adalah Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights, 2023) is reminiscent of JWAH: available in English and Arabic, the immersive site leads the user through the history of the village and the events that followed. Drawing on OSINT (open-source intelligence), situated testimony, ground truth, 3D modelling and cartographic regression, the platform takes the user through time, predating the massacre and post-dating to 2019. The background shifts through archival images, opening with an image of the fishing port from the perspective of the sea, small boats and fishermen at ease on the shoreline. Further down the page a 17-minute film is embedded, featuring testimonies and aerial footage of the area.

Moving on, we hover over Tantura, the monochrome aerial footage spanning the screen with eyewitness quotes over buildings and stretches of open land. ‘They dug a pit’, ‘they rounded up the men’ and ‘they dug a large hole’ spread across the map. The aerial view, once blurry and anonymous, pushes aside Rocheleau’s (2005) concerns about the ‘the iron grid of Descartes’ (p. 328) to become alive with the words of survivors, their testimonies overlaid on the land, a patchwork of spoken horrors. Scroll again. The mass graves, some recently identified by Forensic Architecture, are illuminated in white frames. The final stop is a collection of maps, each laid on top of the other to create the cartographic regression, which is sorted by year or theme (‘The Invasion’, ‘Mass Graves’ and ‘The Village’). Each theme offers an insight into village life, before and after the massacre: ‘The Village’ draws on ‘memory sketches’ to add family names and buildings (such as ‘the school’) that appear as the cursor hovers over the blocks. Drag the legend through from 1946 to 2019 and the memory sketches and testimonies remain, but the regression reveals rapid change: the urban space becomes sparse, sun loungers rise from the sand, and the memory sketches once attached to buildings become faint outlines marking what was but has since been razed and erased. Faint though the outlines are, the ruins provide vital mnemonics, ones that ‘must not be regarded in isolation but rather as entry points from which assembly of connections are traced’ (Weizman, 2017: 108). The structures have been destroyed, but aerial mapping directs the eye to their remains, while counter-map creators do the memory work that ensures the narratives of depopulation are known.

The counter-maps by iReturn, Palestine Open Maps, and the platforms discussed in this article, JWAH and Tantura: Executions and Mass Graves in Palestine demonstrate the diversity of digital counter-maps. There are shared traits: archives are drawn on, multimedia is used in different ways (here, written testimonies from decades past; there, former residents return to talk in situ), and the opportunity to travel virtually through time to chart the topographical changes. Still, each brings singularity to their radical memory work: JWAH manifests Tuan’s place attachment foregrounding feelings of loss, exile, and accounts of the lives ruptured during, and after, Operation Yevusi. Forensic Architecture, meanwhile, shares eyewitness accounts, memory sketches, breaks ‘the iron grid’, and – 77 years on – uncovers unidentified sites of mass graves. When viewed together through the lens of Massumi’s political aspects of affect, a distinction can be made between JWAH and Tantura: in the case of the former, the counter-map is a visually gentle, yet painful reminder of Operation Yevusi: the birdsong, walking-pace and soft light contrasting with the brutality of dispossession, exile, and the inequalities and restrictions enforced by the occupation. Tantura, on the other hand, does not trigger ‘stirrings’: the testimonies, images and sites give a stark, unforgiving shock that leaves the viewer flush with not only the ‘felt intensities of life’ (Massumi, 2015), but of death, displacement and erasure, too.

As the layers shift, counter-maps engage in radical digital memory work that includes the equally radical acts of witnessing, educating and unsilencing. Here, the word ‘radical’ does not rely on its common application (that is, something extraordinary or far out), but rather a breakage in line with Caswell’s (2021) understanding of liberatory memory work. Witnessing, educating (ourselves and others) and unsilencing (and uncovering) counters the dominant narrative by seeing and recognizing the past, present and future impact of cartographic lines. There is a second radical break, however: more than lines, the counter-maps are attentive to how they function as tangible barriers to the movement and access needed (and often denied) to live a life free from oppression. As well as the archives, we can include workplaces, hospitals, schools and universities, religious sites, humanitarian assistance and human rights, to name but a few. In doing so, the counter-maps reveal life in its entirety: the lives lived and yet be lived, as well as how they will be lived.

In the cities and at the sites of destroyed villages, the counter-maps recall the streets, businesses and cultural hubs pushing against the pace of urbicide. As Nurhan Abujidi (2014) reminds us, talking about spaces and places is as impactful to memory work as individual stories, since ‘registering urbicidal activities generate[s] a counter-narrative that reveals other perspectives, accounts and interpretations of city history [. . .] It is therefore a way to empower devastated communities and let their voices be heard’ (p. 3). Digital memory has the potential to thwart expectations and make ‘visible our inability to encompass everything’, but in the context of online counter-maps, memory is not entirely lost ‘to the hyperconnective illusion of an open access world’ (Hoskins, 2018: 5). Instead, the digital world offers a platform for memory work to bring into the light places, spaces and voices that have been renamed, erased and silenced.

Conclusion

This article has been concerned with the ways that digital counter-maps constitute cartographical memory work. It has also explored how countering takes place, including the impetus and impact of counter-maps. Underpinning the latter are the implications of countering. As radical resistance, the counter-maps are attentive to erased, marginalized and obscured narratives, communities and spaces. The counter-maps go further, still: as pedagogical, andragogical and research resources, they demonstrate the possibility for cartography to not only consolidate colonial and settler-colonial practices, but contrastingly decolonize ² and recentre spaces, places and memories that have been masked by aerial shots and new names. Online maps, like GoogleMaps, are becoming smarter, yet something is lost along the way: not all histories are recounted, not all places remembered equally (Abushama, 2024). Both Rocheleau’s (2005) and Hoskins’ (2018) warnings about the futility of capturing all the information ring true, and in the case of Palestine-Israel, as in other colonial contexts, this is not happenstance. Just as counter-maps cannot (and should not) be disentangled from radical resistance, so too are maps inextricably connected to politics and power.

Brian Harley (2011) and Meron Benvenisti (2000), reflecting on different cases, reach similar conclusions. For Harley (2011), maps are ‘slippery customers’ (p. 282) and we should be attuned not only to their layers, but also their deceptiveness, transparency, secrecy, censorship and contradictoriness. The role of politics is profound here: advancing Edward Said’s (1995) recognition of geography as a tool of war (pp. 25–26), Benvenisti (2000) adds that mapmaking is not ‘solely an instrument of war; it is an activity of supreme political significance [. . .] providing a basis for the mapmaker’s claims and for his social and symbolic values, while cloaking them in a guise of “scientific objectivity”’ (p. 13). Counter-maps, such as JWAH and the platforms by Forensic Architecture, show the significance of place, space and how the past is not over: it shapes the present, affectively, politically, socially and geographically. In doing so, they counter the cartographical violence of erasure that unfolds on official and mainstream maps, and carry out memory work via multiple mediums, including the voices that, as Dorit says, could soon be lost.

Looking to the near future, counter-map creators continue to reinsert erased sites and narratives from the archives and witness testimonies. Uncertainties remain, however, including how (and whether) mapmakers will chart the infrastructural and humanitarian devastation unfolding in Gaza. Spaces and places such as Al-Omari Mosque, the Church of St. Porphyrius and Gaza’s universities not only constitute mnemonic knots, but they are also spaces where community is realized, and religion and education provide the foundations for faith, solidarity and fulfilment. At the time of writing, a ceasefire is elusive, yet the subject of reconstruction is nudging into the discourse. Considering this, the question of how maps and urban planners will remember the 57,680 civilians killed (UN OCHA, 2025) cannot be overlooked. A notable feature of JWAH is its emphasis on family: the families who were exiled, the families who have been lost, and the families who have returned, even if for a day. Likewise, Tantura: Executions and Mass Graves in Palestine uses regressive mapping to shift the landscape, but not the family homes and names, providing a haunting reminder of the lives displaced. In both cases, the counter-maps demonstrate that naming, remembering and situating families on the map is radical memory work; the loss of entire family lines makes this urgent memory work. Mapping technology continues to evolve, and digital access and participation widens further. It would be optimistic to imagine that the slipperiness will diminish, but counter-maps offer a bulwark of accountability and remembrance in which memory work presents an active, cross-temporal tool.