The content of Palestine and Syria is important in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as it provides a rich history of the Palestinian state as a legitimate and autonomous polity before Israeli colonial intervention. Since its publication in 1912, the afterlife of this travel guide has stretched from the inception of the hundred years’ war on Palestine (as argued by Khalidi in The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine) to the current day occupation of historical Palestine in retaliation in part to the terrorist attacks of October 7th, 2023. The value of such an ordinary book grows when the legitimacy of a state and its peoples’ humanity is threatened, through asserting the existence of a pre-colonial state predating the establishment of Israel, disproving Zionist activist coined term/attributed to Israel Zangwill’s description of the region as “a land without people for a people without a land” (coined, not original to Zangwill. Previously used by some Christian advocates for a Jewish return to Palestine). The existence of Palestine and Syria poses a threat to the Israeli settler projects in that it confirms the existence of a population indigenous to the land. Comparable to efforts to demonize indigenous people and authenticate their subjection to colonialism across time and place, Israel in dehumanizing and villainizing Palestinians follows a familiar behavior of colonial powers. The afterlife of Baedeker’s Palestine and Syria continues to challenge Zionist and anti-Palestinian rhetoric through its collection of maps, details on regional culture, and documentation of a people.
Palestine and Syria’s second edition was published with the help of Dr. Immanuel Benzinger of Tubingen in efforts to keep the guide as up to date as possible and inform its usefulness. Of course, all attempts to keep printed information up to date are doomed to become dated. The fluctuating nature of Palestine and Syria, like any region, is constantly evolving and changing. For example, the maps with drawn borders of Palestine contradict the borders of the Picot-Sykes agreement and the borders of the state of Israel. The map below and to the left showing the colonies of Palestine details the city of Yaffa (or Jaffa, Yafa), a Levantine port city and capital of a subdistrict of the same name, now within the borders of Israel’s Tel-aviv. As of May 1948, a majority of the Palestinian population was displaced by Israeli military forces during the Nakba. Today, Jaffa is located within Tel-aviv. In the map on the right printed in 1923, we can see a plan of Jaffa composed of the old city in the southern sub district and Tel-Aviv in the northern area.
Left: map of Jaffa, F. Palmer, 1923 via the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Jewish National and University Library
Right: map of Jaffa, Palestine and Syria
While some might argue the map of Jaffa displayed in Palestine and Syria is outdated and no longer accurate, to have a plan of the region predating the state of Israel is valuable in what it shows us about how colonialization changes borders and forcibly displaces indigenous populations. Similarly to the loss of Native American territory to the U.S., as shown below, efforts of colonization must be remembered and considered in how they impact indigenous populations,
from American Indian Land Loss Post European Invasion timeline | Timetoast
(another helpful visual: Interactive map: Loss of Indian land)
As of December 2024, Senator Tom Cotton introduced a bill to rename the occupied West Bank as Judea and Samaria in U.S. documents. While Senator Cotton proclaimed that the Jewish people’s legal and historic claim to historical Palestine is a biblical right, if enacted the bill would erase the “existence of Palestinians” as put by Rashid Tlaib. Whether or not this bill is passed, books like Palestine and Syria are essential to keep the history and humanity of Palestine alive despite efforts to erase them. The genocide of Palestinians and the destruction that has ensued requires readers and writers around the world to save, spread and document information of Palestine’s history and devastation by Israeli colonial forces. The afterlives of books like Palestine and Syria documenting the existence and the legitimacy of a people victim to colonial efforts must be considered with great care and exist as tangible, material copies as digitized versions of these books can’t be relied on to always be at our disposal. Free, online databases like InternetArchive, while important to the fabric of our online social learning culture, are susceptible to breaching efforts and hackers accessing users’ personal information. Palestine and Syria’s afterlife lives on in scanned, digitized copies uploaded across libraries and online databases alike, but we must take safeguard in preserving our physical copies given the unreliable nature of accessibility information on the internet.
Bibliography
“Jaffa.” Palestine Open
Maps,palopenmaps.org/en/maps/jaffa?basemap=9&overlay=pal1940&color=status&togg
les=places%7Cyear#14.00,34.7509,32.0474. Accessed 9 Dec. 2024.
Khalidi, Rashid. The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonial Conquest
and Resistance. Profile Books, 2020.
“The Story of Jaffa.” Palestine, Today: Explore How Palestine Has Been Transformed since
the Nakba, today.visualizingpalestine.org/jaffa/. Accessed 9 Dec. 2024.
“US Senator Introduces Bill to Redefine Occupied West Bank as ‘Judea and Samaria.’” Middle
East Eye, www.middleeasteye.net/news/us-senator-introduces-bill-redefine-occupied-west-
bank- judea-and-samaria. Accessed 9 Dec. 2024.
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