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CNN Saturday Morning News

Mideast Maps Underline Political Positions

Aired January 05, 2002 - 09:26   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
MARTIN SAVIDGE, CNN ANCHOR: The Middle East has always been a headache for mapmakers. Competing religious and political interests make it difficult to create an impartial graphic picture of the region.

CNN's Jerrold Kessel explains.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JERROLD KESSEL, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): What people see in maps depends largely on what the mapmakers put into maps. That seems clear from this exhibit at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, the Holy Land on the map.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Everybody is drawing what is important in his eyes. If you see it is drawn by a Christian, he will put the church very big and our temples and our synagogues are very small. And if you see a map that is drawn by Jewish people, of course our things will be very big and the others will be very small.

KESSEL: Translate that concept to the more prosaic but very real battle for sovereignty and independence in the Holy Land today.

TALLAH MANSOUR, AUTHOR: The Palestinians, when they publish their maps, there is no Israel whatsoever. Israel is not mentioned, Tel Aviv is not existing. They have Jaffa only. And the Israelis turn Jaffa into an annex of Tel Aviv, while Jaffa is some 2,000 or 4,000 years earlier.

KESSEL: When Israel withdrew unilaterally from its occupation of south Lebanon, U.N. monitors used colonial-period maps to verify the border line exactly as it had been drawn on the ground early in the 20th century. A projected Israeli-Syrian peace collapsed over different readings of the old border maps between the two countries, a matter of a few hundred meters, barely distinguishable on their maps.

Between Israel and the Palestinians, however, one reason there are still no borders is because their conflict revolves around the same map on the same territory. The contours of the land in dispute considered sacrosanct, but the border yet to be sanctified. The Palestinian leader makes his own symbol of the land with his own very special way of folding his kafir (ph) headdress into the shape of the land. YOSSI BEILIN, FORMER ISRAELI PEACE NEGOTIATOR: What we have here is a very artificial line which reflects both the point in time of the cease-fire in '49.

KESSEL: It's a rare map that hangs in the office of Yossi Beilin, one of the very few Israeli politicians who relies on a map that has a clear borderline, the so-called Green Line, drawn on maps before the 1967 war, since when Israel has had control over the whole of the land, a map which, in a way, symbolizes the Israeli occupation of the West Bank beyond the Green Line.

BEILIN: Once we have these, the new border will resemble very much the old border of '67. And since people will have to search then for the old '67 lines, perhaps they will come to my office and find it here.

If we have an agreed-upon map which says exactly where the new border will pass, including swaps, we solve at least 50 percent of the problem.

KESSEL: But maps as terms of reference can create problems. When the Palestinians and Israelis were still actually at the negotiating table, Khalil Tufakji was the Palestinians' map expert. But since peacemaking has given way to confrontation, he has been without his maps, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon having ordered their confiscation as part of his crackdown on Palestinian political activity within Jerusalem.

And allied to that, says Tufakji, Sharon's attempt to reshape the relation between Jerusalem and the West Bank.

KHALIL TUFAKJI, PALESTINIAN GEOGRAPHER: He started to create his map on the field, on the ground, it's mean the reality on the ground. Now when you see the checkpoint here at Kalandia (ph), this is the aim of his plan. The West Bank will be divided for three cantons, so the Palestinian, if they want to come from north to the middle to the south, they came under Israel control.

So this reality, when you transfer it to the map, you can see the future of West Bank.

KESSEL: For the past 15 months, as battle lines have taken precedence over negotiating border lines, even those agreed maps concluded in previous peace negotiations, which provided the Palestinians control of sections of the West Bank, the darkly shaded areas, sometimes maps no longer reflect the situation on the ground, Israeli troops regularly taking up positions inside those Palestinian areas.

(on camera): The use or misuse of maps to put a stamp on the land to attempt to resolve this conflict may actually, some believe, be less critical than the words that are meant to shape the map.

(voice-over): That certainly seems accurate with regard to the seminal U.N. Security Council resolution 242, which pointed the way to the land for peace formula, about the land Israel occupied in the wake of the 1967 war, but which ambiguously in the resolution referred to territories, or the territories, from which Israel is called on to withdraw.

(on camera): An ambiguity that also clouded the last attempt to make peace at Camp David 18 months ago.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Maps alone can't solve this conflict. It's gone beyond maps, in that -- to that extent, we're too interlaced, interlinked. But as I say, it's the wording. The maps were not ultimately the downfall of the peace process, it was the wording of the maps.

KESSEL: Disagreement at Camp David over the holiest site in Jerusalem to both sides, the same site, but called differently, by Jews, their ancient Temple Mount, by Palestinians, the Haram al- Sharif, the Noble Sanctuary, President Clinton's attempted brokerage broken by the inability to bridge the gap between the Palestinian demand for full sovereignty over the area designated on the map, Israel insisting it retain at least the foundations below, what's unseen beneath the map.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What went wrong a year ago and why we are now at war and not at peace, I think it's fair to say that it wasn't maps that did it. They could have carved up this land. They did succeed. President Clinton brought them together on the lines on the map. Everything was worked out. And then they exploded over the wording of this clause, not about what was above the surface, what was beneath the surface. Because beneath the surface, of course, is where your heart is.

KESSEL: Small wonder that legend is the key to understanding the narrative of the map, but also pointing to the peril in using maps, which themselves often contain a hidden agenda.

Jerrold Kessel, CNN, Jerusalem.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

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