The map is not the Territories

I’m a big believer in a two-state Israel-Palestine solution on 1967 borders. And I think it’s important that Israelis acknowledge the reality of Palestinian dispossession. But this map Andrew Sullivan picks up from Juan Cole is ridiculously tendentious:

I don’t know who produced this thing, but it’s got the entire Negev Desert listed as “Palestinian” land in 1946, which somehow suddenly turns “Jewish” in 1947. How is that supposed to happen? What does this map claim to be representing? Is it Jewish/Palestinian-owned land? But the Negev isn’t “owned” by anyone, any more than the Sahara is; it’s empty desert. Is it Jewish/Palestinian-controlled land? But the Negev was controlled by British forces in 1946.

The same weird ambiguity plagues the entire representation; there are vast tracts of land in there that were just empty desert at the time, but are represented as Palestinian in 1946 (giving the impression they were privately owned by Palestinians) and then turn Jewish later (clearly meaning Jewish-controlled territory in the military/political sense). And you can’t tell from the map where the boundaries are between land that’s privately owned and land that’s empty. The general point is correct, Jews have taken a lot of land away from Palestinians, but the map is methodologically incoherent in a way that’s clearly designed to exaggerate the effect for propaganda purposes. Juan Cole, certainly, should know better.