Cartographic ignorance and territorial misrepresentation: The 1967 redrawing of Israel’s national map

Abstract

Shortly after the June 1967 War, in which Israel seized vast territories beyond its borders, the Israeli government removed Israel’s internationally recognised border (the Green Line) from all official maps of the state. Since then, Israeli maps misrepresent the state’s sovereign territory and the occupied territories as one territorial unit. This article examines the changing of Israel’s national map by drawing on agnotology, the study of the production of ignorance, and critical settler colonial cartography scholarship. It first demonstrates that the misleading map has detrimentally eroded the legibility of the state’s territory for Israelis and impeded their ability to comprehend its geography, to argue that spatial ignorance may substantiate settler colonial endeavours. The article then turns to charting the ‘geography of ignorance’ that has underwritten the governmental decision to change the map. It argues that as government ministers resorted to dissembling their obliviousness to evade their complicity in an act of cartographic duplicity, they were misguided by their own cartographic misapprehensions. Ignorant of the ‘logo effect’ of national maps, they were unaware that by changing the map they were amalgamating Israel’s colonial expansionism into the spatiality of Israel’s nationhood. Since the deliberate inducing of ignorance is unruly, and the ramifications of such endeavours can easily escape the intentions and understandings of its propagators, agnotology research should account for how those who conspire to hamper the knowledge of others may be led astray by their own ignorance.

Introduction

In September 2017, an Israeli collector of Judaica items received a request to borrow one of his items from a community near the Israeli city of Modi’in. Wishing to understand the precise location of this community, he turned to the mapping department of the Israeli government and asked for a map of the region, a map which marks the Green Line. The Green Line (the 1949 armistice line) is Israel’s internationally recognised border, separating Israeli sovereign territory from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip which have been under Israeli occupation since 1967. The collector therefore wished to find out if this community was within Israeli jurisdiction or on occupied land and subject to military law. The mapping department, however, refused to provide the map, stating that the requested information – the Green Line – was ‘top secret’ (Berger, 2018). Indeed, as of 1967, the Green Line has been removed from official maps of the State of Israel.

While the refusal of the mapping department to provide the requested map was not wholly unexpected, rendering maps that demarcate the Green Line as ‘top secret’ is anything but obvious. It is not only that the Green Line is the internationally recognised border of the state and serves as a legal and administrative boundary for Israel, but detailed maps that mark the Green Line are readily available from other sources, including maps issued by commercial cartographers, the United Nations and other governments. The Green Line even appears on Google Maps. This secrecy may be understood as aimed at blurring Israel’s control of territory beyond its internationally recognised borders. As demonstrated at length by prior research, by cartographically representing the occupied territory as part of Israeli sovereign territory, the removal of the Green Line from official maps has been demarking, as well as facilitating, the Israeli settler colonial endeavour (Agha, 2020; Bier, 2017; Falah, 2021; Leuenberger and Schnell, 2010; Wallach, 2011). Nevertheless, such a substantial modification of the official map of the state could not be expected to go unnoticed. Indeed, the decision to remove the Green Line from the Israeli map, which the Israeli government passed in November of 1967, drew attention to Israel’s territorial expansions (Bier, 2017).

Not only are maps which mark the Green Line treated by Israel as confidential, but the governmental decision to change the map and the protocols of the deliberations leading to it were similarly treated as state secrets. Given that the classified data (the Green Line), the government’s actions (the decision to change the map) and the (colonialist) motivations were all perfectly apparent, what was it that the government was trying to hide? How may we understand the shrouding of such a conspicuous decision under layers of concealment? This article offers a close reading of the 1967 government protocols, which were only made public in 2022 following the elapsing of the state-imposed embargo (Akevot Institute, 2022), to explore what the Israeli government attempted to suppress. While removing the Green Line from Israel’s map has been shown as driven by its colonial propensities, little attention has been given to this cartographic misrepresentation of the state’s territory on the national map as a decision of deliberate deception, as a government deciding to withhold geographic data to mislead the public. Drawing on agnotology scholarship, the study of the production of ignorance, and critical cartography research in the context of settler states, this article maps the ‘geography of ignorance’ (Proctor, 2008: 26) through which this deliberate falsification of a national map has been navigated. It explores the ignorance which subtended the shaping of the map and that which it has inculcated.

Commencing with the latter, the first section situates the 1967 decision to change the map of Israel in the context of Israeli cartography and the production of geographic cognition by colonial states more generally. Colonial powers are predicated on rendering the terrain governable by securing the colonisers’ spatial epistemic ascendency (Benton, 2006). This is not to claim that colonial mapping does not also induce geographic ignorance among the settler population. Such ignorance, however, which is mainly geared towards binding settler identity to the land and fostering colonial dispossession, is predicated on the cartographic erasure of indigenous presence (Leshem, 2013; Martin, 2012; Stel, 2016; Tzfadia et al., 2020). Indeed, as of the state’s establishment in 1948, Israeli mapmaking had been geared to effectively obliterate all traces of Palestine from the map (Azaryahu and Golan, 2001; Kadman, 2015; Masalha, 2015). Yet, the geographic ignorance that the removal of the Green Line from the map has engendered is not akin to practices of inducing spatial obliviousness and the breeding of settler forgetfulness that typify colonial endeavours in two respects. First, by failing to indicate that Israel has been holding vast areas under military occupation, it has rendered generations of Israelis ignorant of the fundamental geopolitical reality of their state (Bar-Gal, 1993; Ben-Amos, 2023; Fleishman and Salomon, 2008; Zelikovich, 2006). Second, and no less consequentially, since the official map of Israel fails to indicate where Israeli territory ends and the occupied territory begins, the ability of Israelis to accurately comprehend the quotidian spatiality of the region under Israeli control has been curtailed. Following maps issued by the state, Israelis repeatedly find themselves inadvertently navigating outside Israel and into Palestinian cities and towns in the occupied territory, with detrimental consequences at times (Carroll and Black, 2000; Eglash, 2016). Thus, while fostering this type of settler territorial obliviousness may have proven to be an effective technique for securing colonial control, it has dangerously hampered the legibility of the terrain for the settler population.

The article then turns to exploring the epistemic landscape that had underwritten the decision to change the Israeli map. Agnotology research draws on Beck’s (2009) differentiation between three types of ignorance: the unknown unknowns, the genuine ignorance of the actors; the unknown knowns, knowledge which the actors are unaware that they possess; and the known unknowns, the wilful, deliberate and the professed ignorance. According to Croissant (2014), studies of planned agnotology situate the inculcating of ignorance primarily in the third domain, of the known unknowns, showing that those who conspire to curtail the comprehension of others tend to limit their knowledge and feign ignorance. Stel (2016) further argues that actors feign ignorance to evade being held accountable for their misdoings. Identifying what policymakers acknowledge and where they assume obliviousness can hence guide us towards the responsibilities they are attempting to prevaricate.

By tracing the feigning of ignorance in the deliberations, the second section shows that while ministers openly acknowledged that removing the Green Line from the map would allow Israel to keep hold of the seized territories, they pretended to be ignorant that the map they were considering was deceptive. Ministers, therefore, did not try to hide their colonial aspirations: they attempted to evade being held accountable for conspiring to commit an act of duplicity. Critical cartography research has long argued that maps are never objective representations of space; mapmaking is always entangled in the exercise of power (Daston and Galison, 1992; Harley, 1990; Monmonier, 1996; Wood and Fels, 1986). National maps, in particular, reflect and regulate state projects through their homogenising of territorial spaces and carefully curated omissions (Harley and Laxton, 2001). However, by issuing a national map that gravely misrepresents the state’s borders, ministers ventured well beyond such cartographic manoeuvrings. Rather, they were betraying what Carrard (2018) calls the ‘cartographic contract’: the implied commitment of those who plot maps not to knowingly provide misleading cartographic information. This analysis may further explain why the government censored its decision. By suppressing these documents, it sought plausible deniability for knowingly providing a fraudulent map. Hence, ministers resorted to feigning ignorance and censorship to circumvent accusations that they conspired to deceive the public.

The third and final section further delves into the protocols to highlight where the full consequences of this decision had escaped the government and sharply diverged from ministers’ stated intentions. Drawing on McGoey’s (2019) observation that ignorance does not solely plague the socially disadvantaged but often no less inflicts those in power, it identifies unintentional cartographic misperceptions and obliviousnesses in the deliberations. The analysis hence demonstrates that this act of inducing spatial unknowing was immersed in ministers’ genuine ignorance, leading them astray. Concurrently, the deliberations reveal that ministers also failed to acknowledge what they did know and refrained from drawing on the knowledge which was at their disposal. With Beck’s typology of agnosis in mind, we should therefore not assume that knowledge suppression is necessarily confined to the domain of the fabricated ignorance of the known unknowns alone. Studies of planned agnoses should be wary of presupposing that such intrigues are the machinery of masterminds who fully control the epistemic realm. Since the production of ignorance crosses into the land of the unaccounted-for knowledge of the unknown knowns and that of the actual ignorance of the unknown unknowns, we should factor the working of ignorance production across all three domains.

Misrepresentation: Propagating geographic ignorance

Maps were historically perceived as confidential knowledge and were accordingly treated as closely guarded secrets by the ruling elites (Boorstin, 1983; Mukerji, 1983). In modern times, however, the shrouding of maps in secrecy is associated with autocratic regimes and runs counter to the ethos of good governance. States, therefore, go to great lengths to demonstrate the accuracy, objectivity, and reliability of the maps they produce (Neocleous, 2003). Still, maps are not simple graphic devices for representing the terrain; they are invariably instruments of power (Crampton and Krygier, 2018; Daston and Galison, 1992; Harley, 1990, 2009; Monmonier, 1996; Pickles, 2011; Wood and Fels, 1986). As territorial maps are instruments of political power, cartography does more than represent the world; it is embroiled in the formation of what it assumes to depict: territories, borders, national spaces. Cartography, which is an instrument of material and epistemic domination, is always necessarily violent. By rationalising space and rendering territories legible, divisible and governable, maps have been at the core of colonial expansion and domination (Benton, 2006). For the European imperial forces, maps have accordingly made way for the establishment of territorial claims while shaping territorial imaginations (Kitchin and Dodge, 2007). National maps reflect and regulate state projects, not only in their emphasis on borders but also through their carefully curated omissions and homogenising of territorial spaces (Harley and Laxton, 2001). As they are cardinal to the shaping of national identities, maps further engender emotive attachments to the nation and territory (Rossetto and Lo Presti, 2022). National maps further naturalise the space of the nation. By obscuring the historical arbitrariness of territorial divisions, they obfuscate the violent and often coercive power exercised to set borders and which is deployed to retain them (Neocleous, 2003).

While all state maps are censored and entail omissions and falsifications in the name of ‘national security’ (King, 1996), Derek Gregory (1994) argues that modern mapmaking is driven by what he terms ‘cartographic anxiety’: an apprehension that the unknowability of the world induces. For Gregory, then, cartography is a response to this neurosis, a resorting to systematic orders of representation to tame an unknown geographic reality through reason and recognition. As explained by Painter (2008: 346), mapping is ‘a way of knowing that seeks systematically to draw more and more of the strange, the complex, the Other, and the presently unknown into the ambit of Reason’. Thus, even in their deceptive and misleading capacity, maps operate through the relief which knowability offers, illusive and misleading as it may be. Cartographic representation necessarily misrepresents, obscures and misleads, but it is driven by the desire to command knowing and to master spatial comprehension. However, the censoring of the Green Line from the Israeli map is not akin to excluding sensitive details and hampered the legibility of Israeli territory in key respects.

Since the 1948 formation of the State of Israel amalgamated national territorialisation with settler colonial practices, Israeli cartography had made way for binding Israeli identity to the land and excluding the Palestinian population (Mbembe, 2003). Indeed, Israeli mapmaking has been instrumental to the corporal and representational eradication of the Palestinians from the territory while imprinting Jewish national identity onto the land. Most notably, Israeli cartography had been vital to the execution and sustaining of the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of most of the Palestinian population from the state’s territory, which commenced in 1948 and has continued since (Bier, 2017). Prior to 1967, the spectre of the Palestinian refugee had driven the vigorous eradication of her material and representational traces from the territory. The systematic demolishing of the vacated Palestinian villages was hence accompanied by the cartographic erasure of all semblance of this mass expulsion (Kadman, 2015) and through the replacing of the Palestinian place names with Hebrew toponomy (Azaryahu and Golan, 2001). According to Farid (2009: 60), the Israeli map should hence be seen as ‘a spatial geometry of [Palestinian] oppression’ and constitutes what Masalha (2015) calls ‘memoricide’. As of 1967, these cartographic practices extended onto the occupied territory. This was most evident in the effacing of the cleansing of Syrian and Palestinian populations from seized territory from the map, and the denotation of the ‘Syrian plateau’ and the West Bank as the ‘Golan Heights’ and ‘Judea and Samaria’ respectively (Ram, 2015).

Geared to incorporate the rest of Mandatory Palestine into Israel while abolishing the prospect of Palestinian independence, the 1967 erasure of the Green Line from the map of the state complies with such Israeli mapmaking practices. However, when examined from the perspective of cartographic epistemology, this act of erasure is revealed as demonstrably distinct in its hampering of spatial knowledge. It further fails to comply with settler colonial cartography more generally. Colonial control has been underpinned by depriving spatial knowledge, rendering national and quotidian space illegible and unpredictable for the subjugated population (Handel, 2010; Winter, 2016). It rests on securing settlers’ ascendancy over the colonised in their respective access to spatial knowledge and on procuring incongruences between their corresponding abilities to render space legible and accessible. There is no doubt that the purging of Palestinian communities and placenames from the map has hindered the geographic cognition of the land in some respects. Yet, censoring the Green Line has compromised the knowability of the territory in ways which have proven to be highly consequential, if not utterly disadvantageous, for Israelis.

Omitting the Green Line from the state’s map has deprived it of the most quintessential element of national maps: a demarcation of its territorial borders. Moreover, the map’s failure to distinguish between Israeli territory and the occupied territories has also induced what Stoler (2011) calls ‘colonial aphasia’ for Israelis. Indeed, prior research has shown that the map has hampered the geopolitical cognition of the Israeli citizenry (Bar-Gal, 1993; Ben-Amos, 2023; Fleishman and Salomon, 2008; Zelikovich, 2006). For instance, Fleishman and Salomon (2008) found that most Jewish-Israeli university students did not know where the Green Line was or even what it was. Their study has led them to conclude that among these students, there was ‘a great deal of ignorance with regard to the Green Line and even the meaning of the term “border”’ (p. 1027). These studies explain the findings of repeated public surveys: the majority of the Jewish Israeli citizenry, as much as 73% of this public, are utterly oblivious to the fact that Israel has been maintaining a military occupation (Israel Democracy Institute, 2017; Tuchfeld, 2016; Yahav, 2011).

Israel is not unique in this regard. Maps shape the territorial contours of the national community even when these encompass colonial enterprises. As Immerwahr (2016) demonstrates, while the imperialism of the United States features highly in both scholarly and political debates, its contemporary colonialism and the contours of the ‘Greater United States’ – which includes the USA Overseas Territories – are not only rarely acknowledged, but is entirely unknown to most Americans. Spatial representations, particularly logo maps (Anderson, 2006), play an essential part in this colonial unknowing. For Immerwahr, the fact that the United States’ overseas territories do not appear on the national map of the United States hence obscures its contemporary colonialism. As the national maps of the United Kingdom, France and the Netherlands similarly omit their colonial ‘territorial residues’ (O’Neill, 2004), they likewise obfuscate these nations’ control over such territories for much of their respective political communities (Stergiou, 2015; Straathof, 2019). Yet, unlike these relics of colonialism, which are obscured through their exclusion from national maps, the Israeli maps obfuscates the state’s settler colonial enterprise through its cartographic inclusion. Thus, the map does not conceal that Israel continues to control the occupied territory; rather, incorporating the occupied territory into the logo map of Israel conceals this control as an occupation.

The removal of the Green Line from the map of Israel, however, induced another type of spatial ignorance, one which is perhaps even more consequential for Israelis. Territorial maps, to state the obvious, do not only shape the nation’s image and educate citizens about the state’s borders; they are, most plainly, a tool for orienting oneself in space and navigating through the terrain. By failing to indicate the Green Line, the map of Israel provides no means for avoiding entering the occupied territory by mistake. Indeed, Israelis regularly find themselves accidentally entering Palestinian towns and cities in the West Bank. In 2014, for instance, the Israeli army recorded more than 570 incidents in which Israelis mistakenly strayed into Palestinian areas; around 550 cases were recorded in the following year (Cohen, 2016). While most such incidents amounted to mere inconveniences, some cases, particularly during periods of heightened tension, have proven fatal (Carroll and Black, 2000; Eglash, 2016). The army has installed warning signs, added speed bumps to the roads leading to Palestinian cities, and introduced notifications to navigation apps to try and stop Israelis from inadvertently finding themselves inside Palestinian regions (Cohen, 2017). Still, these precautionary measures failed to stop Israelis from unintentionally entering Palestinian cities, and more recent data show that such incidents continue to occur weekly (Eglash, 2018; TOI Staff, 2022). The persistence of these occurrences and the inefficacy of the substitute means for demarcating space demonstrate the primacy of maps in shaping spatial perceptions. The removal of the Green Line has thus eroded the map’s use value in the plainest terms: as an instrument for navigating the terrain.

The cartographic anomaly of Israel’s national map has long been apparent, and has been demarking, as well as facilitating, the Israeli settler colonial endeavour (Agha, 2020; Bier, 2017; Falah, 2021; Leuenberger and Schnell, 2010; Wallach, 2011). Yet, the government files pertaining to the decision to remove the Green Line from official Israeli maps, which was passed in 1967, were sealed at the time, and were only made public in 2022 (Akevot Institute, 2022). The following sections offer a close reading of these files, focusing on the protocols of the government deliberations which have guided this decision. By mapping the ‘geography of ignorance’ (Proctor, 2008: 26) which has underwritten this decision, I chart the epistemic landscape through which this act of cartographic misrepresentation has been navigated. I first demonstrate that government ministers resorted to feigning their ignorance to prevaricate their complicity in an act of cartographic duplicity and to evade accounting for the ramifications of their decision, before exposing how their genuine knowledge deficits and misapprehensions have led ministers astray, steering them away from their stated intentions.

The known unknowns: Feigning cartographic ignorance

In the June 1967 War, the Israeli military launched a surprise attack, invading Egypt, Jordan and Syria. By the time the fighting subsided, the territories which were at the hands of Israel amounted to more than four times the size of Israel’s sovereign territory and included East Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Syrian Plateau (the Golan Heights) and the Sinai Peninsula. It is therefore tempting to see the War as implementing Israel’s long-awaited settler colonial ambitions in retrospect. While there is no doubt that some within the Israeli political and military establishment had clear expansionist ambitions going into war, this was not the predominant view. Historians therefore argue that rather than an expression of Israel’s expansionist tendencies, the apprehending of territory in the war of 1967 had turned Israel into what Gershom Gorenberg (2006) calls an ‘accidental empire’. Israel’s coalition government, which was formed going into war, was the largest government in Israel’s history and was particularly ill-suited for contending with the region’s new geopolitical reality at that crucial moment. Headed by the hesitant and ailing Levi Eshkol of the Labor Party, this was an ideologically divided coalition which was plagued by fierce personal rivalries, and brought together representatives from across the Zionist spectrum, from the nationalistic right to the socialist left. At the end of the war, the fate of one region alone was in consensus and shortly after the war Israel annexed East Jerusalem (Mattar, 1983). ¹ There was, however, little agreement among the ministers as for how to proceed, and what Israel should do with the rest of the territories.

This was not the first time Israel had faced such a decision. Eleven years prior, following the Suez Crisis of 1957, the Israeli army took over the Gaza Strip and much of the Sinai Peninsula, which Israel agreed to hand back to Egypt in return for an American promise to advance a peace agreement between Israel and the Arab States. This proposition failed to materialise in the following years. Wary not to repeat past mistakes, in September 1967, the government decided against voluntarily retreating from occupied regions (Gazit, 2000). But the views within the government regarding what Israel should do next ranged vastly. The nationalistic ministers advocated for the Israeli annexation of the newly seized territories. The socialists, by contrast, opposed the extending of Israeli territory and argued that Israel should retain these lands only as bargaining chips until reaching a peace agreement with the Arab states. Other ministers held mixed views, treasuring some regions (such as the Jordan Rift, the Golan Heights or the Etzion Block) for ideological, economic, strategic or sentimental reasons while having little concern towards others (De-Malach, 2015). ² Unable to firmly steer the government, Eshkol settled on refraining from determining the long-term status of the occupied territories, leaving them under the (ostensibly temporary) administrative control of the military (Gorenberg, 2006).

Against this backdrop, Yigal Allon, a decorated general who became a leading politician in Eshkol’s party (De- Malach, 2015), tabled the proposition to change the state map in October 1967. Prior to its passing, the proposition was first debated in a meeting of the Ministerial Committee on National Security Affairs (the Security Cabinet, herein: the cabinet), on 18 October, and then again in the next cabinet meeting on 12 November. ³ Entitled ‘Depiction of borders on the map of the country’, it proposed that the map of Israel would no longer show the armistice line (the Green Line), Israel’s internationally recognised border, which was set in 1949, and instead would solely mark the ceasefire line of the 1967 War (Akevot Institute, 2022). Allon presented his proposal to change the map as reflecting the position that the government has reached, arguing that removing the Green Line from the map, and representing the entire region under Israeli control – including Israel’s sovereign territory and the territories under military rule – as one territorial unit, would allow Israel to withstand international pressure to immediately retreat. In his opening statement, he argues that ‘[p]roducing a new map with the armistice line’ might be ‘interpreted as if we still view these lines as an eventual possibility’ (SoI, 1967: 14). ⁴ The changed map was hence designed to give the government time to compile a sustainable long-term plan. And indeed, in their weighing of Allon’s proposal, and by offering different argumentations for or against the proposition, ministers deliberated whether removing the Green Line would indeed serve this purpose. While doing so, however, they express diverging appreciations of what maps are and what they do.

In rationalising his proposal, Allon admits that ‘we know that the ceasefire line does not necessarily correspond to a political border’ (SoI, 1967: 14), but explains that removing the Green Line from the map would demonstrate the government’s resolution. Foreign Minister Abba Eban similarly calls the changed map a ‘formative document’ (SoI, 1967: 15). Menachem Begin likewise agrees, ‘we should not indicate with lines or with any other indication that we have come this far and that we may be willing to withdraw’ (SoI, 1967: 19). Changing the map is therefore presented as a declarative step, an indication of intentions. Yet, as other ministers express their affirmation of this explanation, the deliberations take an unexpected turn. Minister Sasson, for instance, says,

some countries know that we have conquered this or that territory, but they cannot imagine the size of those regions. If we give them a map which indicates the areas under military control, they will see how small Israel was and how vast these territories are. (SoI, 1967: 16)

Haim Moshe Shapira similarly argues, ‘we should not remind others that [the Green Line] exists’ (SoI, 1967: 20). Begin again continues by stating that including anything but the ceasefire line ‘would clearly show the world how we have extended our territory’, and that ‘we should not reveal to the world what the Arabs call “Israel’s expansionist inclinations”’ (SoI, 1967: 19). The corresponding arguments presented by Sasson, Begin and Shapira do not reflect their sharing of a political approach. Quite the contrary, while Begin famously advocated for an Israeli annexation of the occupied territories, Shapira and Sasson opposed such expansionist aspirations. Most notably, Sasson was a vocal proponent of Israel reaching an agreement with its neighbouring countries that would allow establishing a Palestinian state in the occupied territories (Sasson, 2004). Still, the three men remarkably imply that foreign leaders are ignorant of the extent of Israel’s invasions and would need to resort to a map issued by Israel to notice them. But more importantly, in their concurring with Allon, and in what may seem at first as a slight variation, they offer, in fact, a completely different rationalisation to the one Allon formulated. Instead of seeing the map as indicative, as Allon and Eben suggested, and hence as denoting the government’s political intents, they pose the map as an instrument for concealing those very same objectives.

Such inconsistencies and contradicting argumentations typify much of the discussion which ensued. This blunder demonstrates most clearly that this was not an earnest deliberation of the pros and cons of Allon’s proposal. While it was clear from the start that most ministers were keen to approve the map, this meandering reveal that they were, in some respect, perturbed by it. They understood this map was not innocuous, it was not mere cartographic adjustment to the changed political circumstances, and that the map they were asked to approve was misleading. They were hence mindful that the proposed map bluntly breaches what Carrard (2018) calls the ‘cartographic contract’ – the implicit commitment by those who design maps not to mislead. National maps, as Wood (2010) reminds us, are never objective representations; they are always political constructs deliberately shaped to serve political agendas. Still, the illusiveness which different territorial maps resort to diverges in range and scale. Attending to the Israeli case, Wood (2010) accordingly describes the vanishing of Palestine from the map by eliminating Israel’s 1949 boundaries as ‘a piece of legerdemain’ (p. 242). ‘How else to think about this’, he asks, ‘but as cartographic hocus-pocus?’ (Wood, 2010). The awareness that the map they were asked to approve was far from innocuous did not sit comfortably with all ministers. Accordingly, the diverging argumentations they resorted to were, in many respects, different rhetorical strategies for settling this quandary.

Perhaps trying to pre-empt ministers’ discomfort, Allon offers another type of argumentation in his opening statement. He poses that printing maps which indicate the Green Line ‘would fail to represent the political reality’ (SoI, 1967: 14). Since Allon knew that the war has not changed Israel’s borders, this claim suggests that the reality he was referring to was, in fact, the government’s decision not to relinquish the seized territories. However, the concluding sentence of his opening statement shows that he cannot refute the predicament he is attempting to negate: ‘My proposal is therefore simple: to take a snapshot of the true and recognised reality, as it is’ (SoI, 1967: 14). Notably, he first classifies the removal of the armistice line as ‘taking a snapshot’, arguing that it is merely an objective representation. Yet, he further fines the need to stress the reality it supposedly captures as both ‘real’ and ‘recognised’ and then seals it with the ‘as it is’ to infer that it was all self-evident. This sentence, which is nothing but recursive reiterations, suggests that even Allon recognises that his proposal is far from ‘plain’ or ‘simple’ as he suggests. Prime minister Eshkol quickly called him out, saying that ‘the recognised reality’ he refers to is only recognised by Israel (SoI, 1967: 14). Yet Allon would not stand corrected. Resorting to yet another convoluted reverberation, he insists: ‘We would mark the ceasefire line on the map and call it “the ceasefire line.” We would not define it as the border of the State of Israel yet, but write in Hebrew and English and any other language “the ceasefire line”’ (SoI, 1967). Allon’s passionate defence of the proposition, however, does not fend against reckoning with this dissemblance. His above-quoted warning that failing to change the map ‘might also be interpreted as if we were to view these lines as an eventual possibility’ (SoI, 1967), would have made little sense had Allon truly believed his argumentation that the map he proposes is nothing more than a mere ‘snapshot of reality’. Had it genuinely been a simple cartographic representation of the changed circumstances, the new map would not have lent itself to alternate interpretations, and it would have made little difference in how others might perceive it.

Presenting the map as an accurate depiction of reality nevertheless resonates with other ministers, and many of them are eager to adopt the escape route Allon offers from the cartographic aporia with which they had to contend. As ministers seize on his explanation, this portrayal becomes the leitmotif of the deliberations. Ministers repeatedly parrot Allon by stating that the map he proposes would merely reflect present conditions and would allow an accurate ‘snapshot’, a ‘factual representation’ or a ‘photograph’ of reality. This latter term is particularly indicative since a photograph seems to infer an uncontested and highly accurate capture of reality (while perhaps revealing this generation’s obliviousness to photography’s susceptiveness to manipulations).

Not all ministers, however, were happy to support Allon’s proposition. It should come as little surprise that the most vocal opposition came from Moshe Dayan, given the long and highly publicised personal enmities between the two retired military commanders (Gorenberg, 2006). Dayan submits an alternative suggestion: that instead of deleting the Green Line, the new map would also mark the ceasefire line and the pre-1948 British Mandate line. It is not that Dayan had any reservations regarding the government’s decision to keep hold of occupied territory; quite the contrary, and much like Begin, Dayan was a vocal supporter of Israeli expansionism (De-Malach, 2015). Yet he argued that marking the Mandate border on the map would grant Israel’s position legitimacy, since this border, which encompasses Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and thus demonstrates this region’s cohesiveness, was internationally recognised prior to 1948 (SoI, 1967: 18). Dayan’s turn to history prompts one of the ministers to taunt him: ‘Why not also have a map of the Twelve Tribes’ (SoI, 1967: 18). This comment elicits others to facetiously equate Israel’s pre-war map with maps of the ancient world: of Israelites conquest of Canaan, of the kingdom of King David, or the Crusades of the Middle Ages (yet carefully evading any mention of Palestinian history on the land). Ministers hence justify their support for changing the map by relegating what has only just transpired to history. This is already evident in the wording of the proposition, which states that maps which mark the armistice line would be labelled as historical maps (SoI, 1967: 21). Much like the labelling of the map as ‘indicative’, or by arguing that the changed map is a ‘photograph’, ministers harnessed the march of history to contend with their cartographic unease by diminishing the weight of their decision and to represent their resolution to change the map as inevitable. The lengths to which ministers went to profess the map’s authenticity expose most clearly that they recognise that the map they are promoting is a misrepresentation, and it is this recognition that they felt compelled to refute time and again.

One fleeting moment in the deliberations brings this all to light. Famously, shortly after the War, Eshkol formulated the dilemma that Israel was facing after occupying the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. When asked, ‘What are we going to do with a million Arabs?’ he responded by saying: ‘I get it. You want the dowry, but you don’t like the bride!’ (Gordon, 2008: 1). Through this analogy, Eshkol reflected on the approach among the Israeli political leadership: while they coveted the occupied land, they had little interest in integrating the Palestinians living on this territory into the Israeli polity. Amid the cabinet deliberations, Eshkol offers a second, and much less known, analogy: ‘I agree that [this map] poses a dilemma. Everyone knows why the bride walks down the aisle, but one should not talk of it’ (SoI, 1967: 27). This second allegory does not only reveal Eshkol’s fondness for matrimonial analogies, but also demonstrates his willingness to express, albeit allegorically, what others refrained from admitting: that the deceptiveness of the map was a sordid secret and was hence needed to be concealed. To fend against acknowledging their partaking in a cartographic deception, ministers dissembled obliviousness, professed their innocence and feigned ignorance. Much of the deliberations hence reveal themselves as a variety of exercises of self-deception. Yet as ministers were devising this cartographic duplicity, they were misled by the limits of their own understanding. They hence ventured into the realm of genuine ignorance.

The unknown unknowns: Going amiss in the land of cartographic ignorance

Ministers’ cartographic ignorance is most evidently exposed in their blindness to the repercussions of their decision and in their failure to see how the map they approve would lead them away from their explicit intentions. Let us start with the latter. As noted above, government ministers were sharply divided in their views on the fate of the regions attained by War. While a few ministers, like Begin and Dayan, openly advocated for extending Israeli territory over the entire occupied region, not all ministers ascribed to this position. Some argued that Israel should use these areas as bargaining chips and envisioned them as offering Israel leverage in future peace negotiations with the Arab world. Most ministers, however, positioned themselves between these views and wanted Israel to annex only some territory. Allon most clearly ascribed to the latter view. Like many others in the Labor party, prior to the War, he wanted to see Israel extend its territory over the entire region of Mandatory Palestine. Once the War subsided, however, Allon had a change of heart. He was concerned that incorporating the Palestinians living in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip into Israel would irreversibly transform the state’s demographic composition, jeopardising its Jewish majority (De-Malach, 2015; Gorenberg, 2006). These demographic concerns led him to devise the Allon Plan, which he had already presented to the government a month after the War. The Allon Plan submitted that in addition to East Jerusalem, Israel would annex the Golan Heights and the Jordan Rift (the most eastern part of the West Bank) while refraining from annexing the most densely populated areas. Allon accordingly advocated for an Israeli withdrawal from much of the occupied territory and envisioned establishing an independent Palestinian political entity in these regions (Tzur, 1982). As Christine Leuenberger (2016: 4) argues, by emphasising borders, national maps have the gift of ‘turning the territorial shape into a recognisable logo, and thus creating the imagined community of a nation’. The incongruence between the territorial future of Israel, which Allon envisioned in his Plan, and the long-term effects of the map he proposed reveal that he was not aware that national maps shape how nations come to view their state’s territory. Allon was therefore utterly oblivious that this map would subvert the feasibility of the plan he was promoting and that it would facilitate the perpetuation of Israeli control over the occupied Palestinian population for decades to come. Thus, he failed to calculate the ‘logo effect’ of the map.

However, even ministers who express a dissenting view and refuse to be carried away with the majority opinion expose their realms of ignorance. Dayan, for example, insists on opposing Allon’s proposal by stating: ‘What you are actually proposing is to represent the ceasefire line as a political border. How are you going to get away with that?’ (SoI, 1967: 22). This, however, does not bestow on Dayan the advantage of foresight, as is revealed, most evidently, when he continues by criticising the equivocal position of this government as for what to do with the areas now under Israel’s control. Expressing what, in retrospect, proves to be a surprising level of naivety, Dayan predicts that while the ministers may decide on the map whichever way they please, they would not escape resolving the political decision they have been evading. ‘A map does not replace having a political plan’, he argues, ‘you will see that within a year you will all agree with me’ (SoI, 1967: 14). In his prediction, Dayan errs twice: not only would Israel’s reluctance to settle the status of the occupied territories prove highly resilient for many decades, but he also underestimates maps’ capacity to stand for a political plan, and to shape political realities.

Amid the flawed predictions and misperceptions, some of the ministers’ words prove to offer what, in retrospect, has proven to be remarkably insightful commentary, even if their actual meaning was lost on them. Intervening in a heated exchange between Dayan and the other ministers, Eban offers a middle ground, suggesting that the map would indicate the Green Line, but ‘perhaps [the map] should write armistice line 1949-1967, like a person who had lived and died’ (SoI, 1967: 17). Eban does not jest, and later he earnestly raised this option again, word for word (SoI, 1967: 24). While this proposal gains little traction among his fellow ministers, and would not eventually be adopted by the cabinet, Eban provides a lucid premonition. For in the map he suggests, the Green Line appears as a living dead: retained only to be denoted as that which has passed away, much like the memorialised decedent. Indeed, the Green Line, with time, delineated the realm in which the configuration of biopolitical and sovereign power would render the occupied Palestinians to what Achille Mbembe (2003: 40) identified as ‘death-worlds’. A realm of necropower, in which, according to Mbembe, ‘vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead’.

However, such rare instances of clairvoyance were drowned in the cartographic obliviousness that dominated much of the deliberations. This is most evident in ministers’ neglecting of the practical repercussions of the changed map. Pointing to the elephant in the room, minister Bentov reminds the cabinet of a fact that seemed to escape the rest: that maps are primarily a navigation tool. He reminds the other ministers that a map that fails to indicate the distinction between Israel’s sovereign territory and the areas under military rule would prove inadequate for finding one’s way through the land’s quotidian geography. How are citizens supposed to avoid entering a militarily controlled area, Bentov asks, if the map their government issues fails to provide this information? (SoI, 1967: 24). Bentov’s warning, as detailed above, has proven to be gravely accurate. But even this concern for the citizens does not shake other ministers’ resolve. As they rush to approve the map, they are not only wilfully negating the political significance of all maps (and national maps in particular), but they even ignore the most fundamental functionality of maps to the detriment of their own public.

Ministers’ eagerness to cement Israel’s territorial expansion by way of the map thus impels them to sacrifice their construing of maps and thus deprive the map of much of its utility. Their deliberations neglect a reckoning with the most rudimentary understanding of what maps are and what they are used for. Thus, we should not assume that the architects of deliberate manufacturing of unknowing can carefully navigate through the markedly treacherous landscape of knowledge deprivation. Rather, as the limits of Ministers’ comprehension have led their judgements well away from what they envisioned, this plot to erode public access to data has been shown to be guided by its instigators’ cognition deficits.

While it was clear that Allon’s proposition enjoyed broad support from the onset, the deliberations stretched over two consecutive cabinet meetings. These lengthy deliberations were taking place as the state was emerging from war that reshaped the region and Israel’s international relations, and other matters, matters that one could safely assume were no less urgent, demanded the cabinet’s attention. Nevertheless, ministers seemed reluctant to pass the resolution and insisted on reiterating slight variations of the same argumentations time and again. This lengthy and repetitive debate exposes most clearly ministers’ discomfort with the map put in front of them. Eventually, shifting the discussion to the titling of the map offers a pathway out of the repetitiveness that typified much of the deliberations. But here, too, there is no simple solution. As Allon explains, the map cannot be entitled ‘State of Israel’ as it does not correspond to the state’s sovereign territory. Others suggest titling it ‘Land of Israel’. ‘Now that we are referring to a map along the ceasefire lines’, explains the Minister of Postal Services, ‘it would be justified and accurate’ (SoI, 1967: 23). But Justice Minister objects: ‘This is not the entire Land of Israel, Transjordan [the Jordanian Kingdom] is also part of the Land of Israel’ (SoI, 1967: 23). Indeed, the territoriality of ‘Land of Israel’, which is a biblical concept, is shifty and may range from Palestine of the British Mandate to much more expansive regions engulfing Jordanian, Lebanese and Syrian territory (Gorenberg, 2006). Perhaps fearing that a map entitled ‘Land of Israel’ may delimit this concept or that this title might lend itself to seeing it as a theological rather than a political map, they discarded this suggestion. The ministers eventually settled on titling the map ‘Israel’ while adding a subtitle which reads ‘Map of Ceasefire Lines’.

Cabinet ministers applauded this solution. Trimming the map’s label to ‘Israel’ (rather than ‘State of Israel’) appeared to be simple and concise: sufficiently indicative, leaving no room for misunderstandings, yet ambiguous enough to evade being interpreted as deliberately misleading. They could finally reach a consensus, and the relief felt around the table was palpable. Indeed, this title accurately encapsulated their denials, negating the implications of their decision. They further saw the subtitle as offering an antidote to the reproach they anticipated. Calling it a ‘remedy’, Minister Galili argued that it would clarify ‘that it is not a map of the state’s borders, it is [a map of] the ceasefire lines. This should take the sting out of it all’ (SoI, 1967: 28). Ministers suggested that by way of this subtitle, the map they have agreed to publish equates to other specialise, single-purpose maps, ‘much like there is a “map of oil drillings” or a “map of water resources”’ as Dayan put it (SoI, 1967: 26). By adding this subtitle, ministers could ignore the fact that a national map is a map like no other map.

As the ambiguity of the label reflected their vacillations, ministers were quick to agree to this solution. Yet, by way of this title, the Israeli government inadvertently embedded the states’ settler colonial formations into the spatial representation of the nation and explicitly embedded Israel’s settler colonialism into the most distinct device of political self-representation: the national map. Ministers, nevertheless, showed little awareness that by labelling the map ‘Israel’, they were shifting the meaning of what ‘Israel’ signified. Thus, they were oblivious to the fact that not only the map they approved blurred the distinction between the Israeli state and Israel’s settler colonial frontier, and that it irreversibly amalgamated the spatiality of Israeli nationhood with settler colonial expansionism, but that this title further consolidated Israel’s territorial anomaly into the state’s identity.

Conclusion

By unravelling the entanglements of knowing and unknowing, deception and misconceptions, denial and ignorance, the analysis here charted the epistemic terrain which had shaped the map of Israel. It explicated the rationales and justificatory strategies which have led to the erasure of the Green Line from the map and the incorporation of the occupied territories into the official cartographic representation of the state through the protocols of the cabinet deliberations from 1967. It exposed the discursive strategies, rationales, fallacies and deceptions which have led the Israeli government to negate one of the basic foundations of modern statehood: a map delineating the state’s sovereign territory. The analysis of the protocols presented here exposed that the redrawing of the map of Israel diverges from prevalent cartographic tendencies which typify the making of national maps in one crucial respect. If the utility of mapping has often rationalised, and hence also eclipsed, the subordination of peoples and lands, here we see that the map is in many respects stripped of its instrumentalisation and was emptied of much of its cartographic usefulness, since this erasure eroded the map’s use value, substantially curtailing its utility as an instrument for navigating the geography of the land. Thus, as the ministers rushed to reconfigure the map, what they were willing to leave by the wayside was the map itself and the spatial legibility it promised. The map of Israel, therefore, demonstrates that the prioritisation of colonial considerations may lead to the propagation of geographic ignorance even when such ignorance has proven to be injurious to the state’s population. Through this case study, I argue that colonial domination is not necessarily predicated on the occupying power’s privileged access to geographic knowledge over that of the colonised; spatial obliviousness can no less prove instrumental in sustaining colonial control. It further demonstrated that territorial maps that offer ambiguity and vagueness and maps that impede cartographic literacy can nonetheless prove to be effective as instruments of domination. In the case at hand, this unknowing fostered Israelis’ ignorance of the expansionist intentionality of their state and made way for their becoming oblivious colonisers.

This article further offered insights into the study of the planned production of cartographic ignorance. As Taussig (1999) argues, knowing not to know is quintessential for social actors. Indeed, agnotology research has proven that ignorance might prove as an asset for governing entities. The elusive nature of ignorance, however, has meant that deciphering between intentional and unintentional unknowing continues to pose a significant challenge for studies of agnotology (McGoey, 2012; Smithson, 2008). Reading these deliberations from this perspective revealed how maps and mapmaking were misarticulated by those sitting around that table. This did not only highlight the cartographic misconceptions that underlaid this consequential decision, but also exposed how the repercussions of their decision often escaped cabinet ministers. While support for the proposition among ministers was propelled by an eagerness to solidify Israel’s hold over occupied lands, this decision cannot be construed as a simple and direct manifestation of Israeli expansionist aspirations. The rhetorical acrobatics exposed in the protocols show that more than attempting to hide its expansionist motivations, the cabinet was primarily evading a reckoning with its act of deception. As they were feigning ignorance to spare themselves the admission that they are conspiring to commit an act of cartographic misrepresentation, their knowledge deficits and misconceptions have led them away from their own intentions. While the ministers were keen to secure Israeli hold over occupied lands in the immediate term, many of them, and Allon who introduced the proposal to change the map most distinctly, were strongly opposed to sustaining the occupation indefinitely. They were hence utterly unaware that by deciding on a map which encompasses the occupied territories, their decision has paved the way to cementing this control for many decades. The cabinet ministers similarly miscomprehended the repercussions of entitling this map ‘Israel’, and that by doing so, they have unwittingly amalgamated the Israeli settler colonial endeavour with Israel’s national project. They were therefore genuinely ignorant of the effects of maps on cartographic consciousness and that the territorial contours a national map portray shape how nations come to see themselves.

Ignorance production is unruly. As it is steeped in the miscalculations and misconceptions of its propagators, its effects often escape the intentions of its makers, who find themselves subsumed by the limits of their knowledge. This is not to claim that such ignorance should absolve policymakers from being held accountable for their actions. Quite the contrary, since venturing into the treacherous terrain of the calculated dissemination of misinformation renders one particularly susceptible to being misled by their ignorance, the onus is all the more heavy on those who conspire to inculcate knowledge deprivations. Policymakers in such cases should therefore bear a heightened responsibility for the repercussions of their decisions, be they intended or unintended. Still, we should not assume that those who conspire to sow knowledge deprivation in others are fully in command of the epistemic field in which they operate. In its study of the deliberate production of ignorance, agnotology therefore must account for the genuine obliviousness and misperceptions of those who propagate knowledge deficits.