Prolegomenon to a pedestrian cartography of mixed legal jurisdictions: the case of Israel/Palestine.

• Author: Drummond, Susan

The relationship between cartography and law provides a unique focus through which to examine mixed legal jurisdictions. Through an exploration of the various uses of law, cartography, and nation building, the author postulates that mixed legal jurisdictions are created through the subtle incorporation of the originally unfamiliar "Other". In Canada, European settlers asserted sovereignty through the mapping and naming of territory in ways that did not accord with traditional Aboriginal patterns of usage or conceptualizations of space. The eventual creation of a legal middle ground between these peoples, as articulated by Richard White, is the basis of the author's analysis of Israel/Palestine. From the middle ground of mutual understanding, which is an alternative to the use of force, there is a potential for alternative cartographies and legal traditions to emerge.

The centrality of the Holy Land in all three monotheistic religions has led to a proliferation of maps of that region, all of which communicate information that surpasses the mere physical description of the place. Both maps and laws are sources of authority that seek to orient an individual's intellectual perception of reality. Modern cartography recognizes that it is an ethnocentric projection to assume that there is a single conceptualization of space through which all others must be assessed. The author theorizes that certain silences in maps parallel silences in law, and that the contemporary focus on both is an attempt to promote social justice by attending to those who are ignored or marginalized by both of these disciplines.

Maps depict the physical borders of modern states, as well as the borders of legal jurisdictions. In defining these boundaries, the power creating the map superimposes a system of measurement that is the basis of future property transactions. The system selected is inextricably linked to specific conceptions of governance, society, and control. The result of these linkages is that maps are literally a reflection of the power that created them. The middle ground between those with the power to create official maps and those without such power emerges by reading alternative maps in combination with other historical maps. The author suggests that this process requires subjective attention to the content of both official and alternative maps, in an effort to create a mutual understanding that is impossible when focusing solely on ideas such as "historical accuracy" and "correctness".

Le lien entre cartographie et droit fournit une approche unique a la comparaison des juridictions de droits mixtes. L'exploration des differents emplois du droit, de la cartographie et de la construction etatique sert de base au postulat de l'auteure selon lequel les juridictions de droits mixtes sont le fruit de la subtile integration d'un > originellement inconnu. Au Canada, les colonisateurs europeens firent respecter leur souverainete sur le territoire en le renommant et le delimitant d'une mamere tout a fait etrangere aux conceptions de l'espace et coutumes autochtones traditionnelles. Partant de l'exemple de la creation subsequente d'un terrain d'entente juridique entre ces peuples, tel que decrit par Richard White, l'anteum etend son analyse au cas israelo-paiestinien. A partir d'un terrain d'entente caracterise par la comprehension mutuelle, une alternative a l'emploi de la force, il est possible de voir apparaitre des cartographies et traditions juridiques alternatives.

La situation centrale de la Terre Sainte pour les trois religions monotheistes a mene a la proliferation des cartes de la region, communiquant toutes des informations qui depassent la simple description de l'espace physique. Les cartes comme le droit sont des sources d'autorite qua cherchent a influencer la perception intellectuelle qu'un individu a de la realite. Les cartographes modernes reconnaissent que penser qu'une seule conception de l'espace dicte toutes les autres releve de la projection ethnocentrique. L'auteure avance l'idee que certains mutismes cartographiques font echo a des mutismes juridiques et que l'interet que nous portons a ces vides est une tentative d'encourager la justice sociale en nous preoccupant de ceux qui sont ignores ou marginalises par ces deux disciplines.

Les cartes tracent les frontieres physiques entre les pays modernes, ainsi que les frontieres juridictionnelles. En definissant ces frontieres, les autorites a l'origine d'une carte y superposent un systeme de mesures qua constituera la base de transactions foncieres futures. Le systeme choisi est inextricablement lie a des conceptions specifiques de ce que sont le gouvernement la societe et le controle. Il en resulte que les cartes sont litteralement le reflet direct du pouvoir qui les a ereees. Le terrain d'entente entre ceux qui ont le pouvoir de dessiner les cartes officielles et ceux qui n'ont pas ce pouvoir apparait lorsqu'on se penche sur les cartes alternatives, en combinaison avec d'autres cartes historiques. L'anteure soumet que ce processus necessite une attention subjective au trace des cartes officielles et non officielles, afin de parvenir a une entente mutuelle autrement impossible si l'on ne s'attarde qu'a des principes tels l'> et la >.

1. Insomnia II. The Middle Ground III. The Swollen Details of the Mundane IV. Logical Minimalizations V. The Maps that Are Not Made VI. Names VII. Space and Place VIII. The Map as an Assertion of Sovereignty IX. Cadastral Topography and Sovereignty X. Cartographic Intimation XI. Inventing a Present and a Future XII. History and Memory I. Insomnia

   Immersed as I have been over the last several years in research on Israel/Palestine, I am by now familiar with a recurring preface written on the occasion of a book's publication, or introductory remarks spoken as a book gets published, with the author scrambling to incorporate developments that occurred since the manuscript was sent to the printer. These comments are typically written in a final preface. The writers take stock and try to reassess what they thought they knew at the time with what they know now. This checking of recent events against the narrative that they generated is part of the process of assessing history. They hope that their prior sense-making has had sufficient time-durable generality that what was prefigured in their rendering has framed what is relevant for the future. They evince an awareness of how previous endeavors have misread the cues about something that appeared innocuous but was really a tinderbox, or something that sounded ominous and grave yet was really only a death rattle. Time, though under one apprehension objectively measurable in discrete, uniform units, seems to profess something else as well--a story to be told, a judgment to be called.

   These authors, in their prefaces, place recent developments within the context of their account. They take stock of time. The story--whichever story in the Middle East, in the Holy Land, or in the human heart and soul that they have focused upon-the story that they put to paper at a particular moment in history was part of a deeper, longer, ongoing story, whose unfolding could not fully, and with absolute certainty, be anticipated when the sense-making began. History, though we are participants in it because we are alive (and sometimes because we are dying or dead), (1) appears to have stories to tell of its own.

   For these writers, struggling to put the original story to paper was simultaneously an effort, humble as most writing is, to shape the outcome of the story. In the context of these particular narratives, writing is a struggle to gather the explosively fractured bits and pieces of the past and rearrange them in such a manner that a compelling, though yet inchoate, sense of injustice might be rendered. Thus rendered, the story embodies an aspiration that its details might be accounted for in the general sweep and jumble of the contemporary moment; thus accounted for, that truth and justice might one day be enthroned.

   I begin writing today, similarly lacking certainty about where the future will go from here, from the vantage point of a current news article in the Globe and Mail entitled "Jerusalem's sacred hill a flashpoint for conflict: Concerns about extremist attacks, collapse of mosque have authorities on high alert":

   In an Israeli police station at the Jaffa Gate into the Old City, in front of television screens picking up images from 280 cameras scattered across the densely populated heart of Jerusalem, a 24-hour watch goes on for stirrings of apocalypse.... Israel's security chiefs are wrestling with two nightmare scenarios they say are increasingly realistic--an attack on the mosques by Jewish extremists trying to stop Israel's planned withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, and a collapse of parts of the structurally shaky mosque compound onto thousands of Muslim worshippers. Muslims would almost certainly blame either catastrophe on the Israeli government and transform its conflict with the Arabs into a full-blown religious war. (2) This is the dread-filled atmosphere surrounding the summit of Mount Moriah, the exposed and sheltered rock that has been named the navel of the world in several world religions. (3) From that place comes an alarm, sounded by Avi Dichter, the director of Shin Bet, Israel's secret service. In light of what the agency describes as a threat to Israel's existence, Dichter alerts us that "everyone should be losing sleep." (4)

   Everyone should be losing sleep? Everyone?! The world is a much larger place than the scratch of rock upon which Abraham is said to have offered up his son Isaac to the God of the Abrahamic religions; (5) larger than the swatch of land and desert and sea that makes up Israel/Palestine; and larger than the lands that make up the Middle East. Other traumas, ancient and open-wounded, abound in places near and far. Other Gods have touched the earth in...