“It’s fitting that maps should be the medium for the recovery of this lost world since they were so instrumental in its loss” (232).
“In fact, the mapping of Palestine is a paradigm of the history of map making; but since it’s also the object of counter mapping encounter counter mapping, and an obsessive subject of map art, it makes a uniquely trenchant example around which to review the arguments of this book” (232).
“It’s so characteristic of the history of mapmaking that this land, so highly revered by the faithful of three religions, was seriously mapped only to serve the military needs of modern imperialist states, the military needs and the ensuing colonial needs for establishing policeable borders” (237).
“It was a question of remapping the landscape into a literally delirious simulacrum of one that hadn’t existed… for millennia…That is, the desire to call Nablus “Shechem” amounts to the desire to… erase… Nearly two millennia of history… I don’t know how else to think about such a desire except as a kind of delirium” (239).
“That is, the Survey and its counter-mappers co-constructed the geo-body of Israel using the precise mechanism described by Thongchai back in the first chapter: map it, iconize it, deny its history” (240).
