Layers as epistemic and political devices in mobile locative media; the case of iNakba in Israel/Palestine

ABSTRACT

At the centre of this article is iNakba, a digital navigational application created by a Tel Aviv-based NGO in 2014. The app superimposes a layer of ruined Palestinian localities destroyed following the 1948 war, on top of the established and hegemonic Israeli geographical representation. At the end of this war and with the formation of the State of Israel, the presence of these localities was eradicated from both the territory and Israeli maps. The iNakba app uses Google maps and Waze as platforms for allowing users to find these localities and navigate towards them in order to increase knowledge about the repressed geographical past of the territory and bring about a political change. By examining iNakba from a media practice perspective, and by comparing it to a printed map published almost seven decades earlier and in very different circumstances, we highlight the unique role of layers in constructing and deconstructing cartographical knowledge. Layers, we argue, allow new potentialities for the representation and imagination of space, specifically, problematizing the eradication of Palestinian localities from the map and suggesting to re-imagine the territory as comprising the two histories and the two peoples. More broadly, the article suggests to understand layers as both a technical and political device.

KEYWORDS:

• Locative mobile media
• cartography
• layers
• media practice
• Israel/Palestine

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. See Uri Ram’s Israeli Nationalism: Social Conflicts and the Politics of Knowledge and Nur Masalha’s The Zionist Bible: Biblical Precedent, Colonialism and the Erasure of Memory.

2. Locative media, spatial media, cybercartography, map hacking, maps 2.0, GIS 2.0, ubiquitous cartography, wikimapping, crowdsourced cartography, citizen cartography, volunteered geographic information, hybrid spaces, digiplace, net locality, and augmented reality (see Kitchin, Lauriault, and Wilson 2017, 12).

3. The Balfour Declaration was perceived by Arab leadership as an act of betrayal because the United Kingdom had previously agreed, in the McMahon–Hussein Correspondence (a series of letters from July 1915 to March 1916), that they would honour Arab Independence in the Middle East if the local population helped the British and revolted against the Ottomans. However, after driving the Ottoman Empire out of the area, the United Kingdom and France signed the Sykes–Picot Agreement, dividing control over the area between them.

4. See: Miska oral history as articulated during a tour conducted by Zochrot with the refugees of the village. https://www.zochrot.org/en/video/50408

5. One example of this duality is the Nakba Bill proposed by the right-wing party leader Yisrael Beiteinu and approved by the Knesset (Israel’s parliament) in March 2011. The bill criminalizes any public memorial of the Nakba and targets state-funded Israeli institutions that choose to commemorate Nakba Day. On the one hand, this bill represents the government’s effort to silence this memory while, on the other hand, it shows Israelis have not forgotten the Nakba.

6. In this regard see Palestine Open Maps, a project launched in 2018 by Visualizing Palestine (https://palopenmaps.org)

7. For Zochrot’s online map, see https://zochrot.org/en/site/nakbaMap and for Zochrot’s printed map in Hebrew, see https://zochrot.org/en/article/54772

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Norma Musih

Norma Musih is a post-doctoral research fellow at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev focusing on visual culture and digital media. Drawing from her curatorial work and activist engagement, in her research, she traces a link between images, technologies, and imaginations to suggest practices for training a political imagination in Israel/Palestine.

Eran Fisher

Eran Fisher is an Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology, Political Science and Communication, the Open University of Israel. He studies technology and society, with a special interest in digital media, digital work and capitalism, big data and algorithms, and media history. His books include Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age (Palgrave, 2010), Internet and Emotions (Routledge, 2014; co-edited with Tova Benski), and Reconsidering Value and Labour in the Digital Age (Palgrave, 2015; co-edited with Christian Fuchs).