Heritage and Remembrance in Palestinian/Israeli Online Mapping

This study considers how online mapping tools, such as Palestine Online Mapping, and Jerusalem, We Are Here, present cartographical mnemonics that reinscribe erased place names and narratives of heritage, memory, and loss. A large body of literature explores the significance of maps as an archive of political and geographical change, yet fewer studies consider how online maps present spaces of memory contestation and renegotiation. The power of maps can be attributed partly to the trust we place in them: our dependence on the sheets of landscape, combined with a faith in the science of mapping, often enables the question of whose map we are viewing, to escape. The cost of this is steep and the unquestioning glance overlooks how maps have been (and continue to be) intrinsic to colonisation, dispossession, and erasure. Drawing on ideas around memoricide [1], urbicide [2], and mnemonic bridging [3], the study puts forward that the combination of the topographic, cadastral, and archival enables the past to nudge the present, re-inserting place names or filling villages that have become ‘voids’ on mainstream maps. By examining how Palestine Online Mapping, and Jerusalem, We Are Here layers the past over the present, the study concludes that their maps constitute cartographical memory work: by reading the names of the depopulated sites, learning the dates and the scale of displacement from the villages and towns, users subtly counter the erasure of the sites that occurs in maps, such as GoogleMaps.