From the River to the Sea in Early Geographic Thought
Is This A State-Backed Bank Robbery?
Thomas Suárez, Hardback, 200 pages, ISBN: 781623716158, Interlink Foundation, 2025
Tom Suarez is one of the most meticulous and careful researchers on Palestine and Zionism although he is relatively unknown. His first book, which the Zionists did their best to prevent being publicised, disrupting his speaking tours, The State of Terror was a majestic tour de force of the Zionist terrorism that created the Israeli state and their strategies for the future ethnic cleansing of Palestine
Suarez’s second book, ‘Palestine Hijacked – How Zionism Forged an Apartheid State from the River to the Sea’ was another tour de force. As Ilan Pape wrote, Suarez showed how
The use of terror was deliberate and sustained, carried out or supported by the same leaders who then established and led the Israeli state. We are still living this history: The book proves that Israel’s regime of Apartheid against the Palestinians and the continued expropriation of their country are not the result of complex historical circumstances, but the intended, singular goal of Zionism since its beginning.
It is not surprising that Suarez’s latest book is in the tradition of his previous books even if it concentrates mainly on the visual rather than the verbal. Palestine Mapped guides the reader through the Greek and Roman concepts of Palestine, the various medieval Mediterranean civilizations and the European Christian “Holy Land” mapping that has dominated since the Reformation and continues to inform modern political thought. This isn’t simply a book about cartography or map making but how notions of the ‘Holy Land’ and Palestine informed the maps and visual representations that were produced..
A beautifully illustrated book on the mapping of the river to the sea might seem a luxury disconnect given that Palestinians are being massacred daily. Suárez is very much aware of this. He explains in his Introduction why the ongoing genocide in fact makes the topic all the more relevant. Perhaps key to this is the subtitle’s final word, geographic thought.
Much of the West’s fanatical support for Israel is rooted in Evangelical messianism, the psychosis (to use the author’s word) that the Israeli state is the place in the Biblical Genesis, “placing it apart from the realm of all other earthly nations and securing wide Christian devotion.”
Suarez argues that this collective elite and religious mindset is powered by our own geographic wiring, and that the book is intended in part as an antidote to what he calls the “mapping of the Holy Land” narrative.
Since the book is organised roughly chronologically, its real-world relevancy is borne out mostly in the final chapter — though the Israeli state’s manipulation of ancient maps is already demonstrated with the sixth century ‘Madaba’ map.
The book begins with the earliest extant mapping of the Levant, that of the Greeks and Romans, then devotes two chapters to the medieval period. The first addresses mapping by Europeans in which Palestine is a focus: those from the distance of the Church, and that of on-the-scene Pilgrims.
The second addresses mapping in which Palestine was not the focus, but through which the mapping — and Western perception — of Palestine nonetheless evolved: sea charts, advanced world maps, Ptolemy’s Geography, and what the author calls ‘Arabic’ mapping, a term used in place of the usual ‘Islamic’ mapping of academia, which he considers to be flawed terminology.
The book then arrives at what is described as the pivotal year of 1500. Three revolutions of the period are said to influence Palestine’s future: Europeans’ dramatically widened world view, the advent of printing, and above all, Lutheranism.
The future stage is set during that century, and Suárez gives short shrift to the years 1600-1800, other than to establish the rise of proto-Zionist ideology.
European mapping of Palestine during that period is said to be stuck in a time warp, Biblically oriented no matter the variety of renderings, in stark contrast to Europe’s mapping of the rest of the world, which was a quest for the latest, the most accurate. It is, however, here that today’s manipulation of geographic thought is first addressed, because a 1714 work of one Adriaan Reland is cited today to erase Palestinians (for which Reland is said to be blameless).
The final, long chapter begins at the year 1800, at which simmering Christian Zionist ideology takes active form with the confluence of Christian millennialism, Western imperialism, and advanced mapping techniques.
The end of the century brings of course Theodor Herzl and the advent of Political Zionism. Suárez cites both Herzl’s 1896 Der Judenstaat and a map from his 1897 newsletter, Die Welt, to argue that Herzl failed to understand the opportunity Christian Evangelicalism offered his project. I’m not so sure that this is true. One of his main supporters was William Hechler, the Chaplain at Britain’s Vienna Embassy, where Herzl was living.
Hechler believed firmly that the Jews must be enabled to resettle in Palestine in order to hasten the second coming of Christ. He was constantly looking forward to a fulfilment of Biblical prophecy along these lines. He presented a memorandum to Lord Salisbury, the British Prime Minister, urging him to take up the cause of the Jewish return to Palestine even before he had met Herzl or read the “Jewish State”.
Hechler had been a tutor to the Grand Duke of Baden, and he introduced Herzl to him and also to the ex-Kaiser Wilhelm II. He also accompanied Herzl to Palestine where he met Kaiser Wilhelm II in Jerusalem.
Herzl had an instructive meeting with the Grand Duke April 23 1896 in Karlsruhe and he noted in his diaries that Grand Duke
‘took my project for building a state with the utmost earnestness. His chief misgiving was that if he supported the cause, people might accuse him of anti-Semitism’.
As Francis Nicosia, the Raul Hilberg Professor of Holocaust Studies at Vermont University observed:
‘whereas today non-Jewish criticism of Zionism or the State of Israel is often dismissed as motivated by a deeper anti-Semitism, in Herzl’s day an opposite non-Jewish reaction, one of support for the Zionist idea, might have resulted in a similar reaction.’
With Herzl’s death, Zionism continued to receive the enthusiastic endorsement of Christian Zionism and its millenarian supporters. Prominent supporters included Arthur James Balfour who combined anti-Semitism and Zionism effortlessly.
The 1947 UN Partition map receives its due attention: the author deconstructs it as a scam intended to produce the opposite result.
Suarez analyses the manipulation of geographic thought employed by Israel’s propagandists and argues that the ‘pro-Palestine’ community defeats itself by engaging with this propaganda on its own terms.
Put in its crudest form, when Zionists say ‘there was never such a place as Palestine’, we respond with an old map in which the entire land is called ‘Palestine’, or other such ‘evidence’.
Suárez argues that this is a mistake, a trap, the result of cultural conditioning:
we are geographically hard-wired to accept [that] the ancient origins of a place-name has the power to grant or deny personhood today, to justify the expulsion of anyone to whom that geographic name is or is not attached.
This is a heavily cross-disciplinary work, and it is hard to imagine anyone with Suárez’s background in the Palestinian issue who is so experienced in the history of cartography. It strikes me that this might be a book that can bring the Palestinian issue to a wider audience: Everyone, it seems, loves old maps, and perhaps this book is the perfect Trojan Horse gift for acquaintances who believe they are fair-minded but can’t quite make the break from Israel.
The reader is disarmed by the earlier ‘apolitical’ part of the book, gradually drawn into cultural conditioning addressed in the middle part, and already long engrossed when encountering the final chapter. But it is also a cautionary work for those long active in the issue of Palestinian liberation, who, as with all aspects of the issue, often disempower themselves by responding to Israel’s propaganda on its own terms.
Tony Greenstein
