Geographies of Silence: The ‘Missing Chain’ in the Writing of Palestine’s Historical Geography

Abstract

This paper provides a critical reading of (1) the ways in which Palestine’s cultural landscape and the indigenous people of Palestine have been represented in the eyes of Western and specifically European travelers and explorers in the 19th century; (2) how various such representations subsequently ‘filtered’ into Israeli geographical texts and writing, and were utilised by Israeli writers and others to (re) write a so-called ‘modern’, but distorted and incomplete historical geography of Palestine. The net result is that much of Palestine’s Arab landscape has been ‘de-historicised’, or as Keith Whitelam (1998 : 11) phrased it, has been ‘silenced’.