Map of Palestine (Al Jazeera)

At its core, the Arab-Israeli conflict takes place over place, which is expressed - in official discourses, including agreements or initiatives - with the word “land.” It is the word that was frequently repeated in the approaches included in the various negotiations under the principle of “land for peace,” or talk about “the land that was occupied in the 1967 war,” or the disagreement in the arduous Egyptian-Israeli negotiations over the “definition letter L” attached to a word that embodies the place. So the question arises: Is it “lands” or “land”.

In the struggle over place, other elements are employed: history, mythology, religious texts and their interpretations, and politics. For some, any of these elements is higher and takes on more weight than the place, but all of these weights that are higher than the weight of the place are, in reality, nothing but misleading, a deviation from the essence, or a blindness to it. For private purposes that are crooked, bad, false, or criminal, or even all of these together.

Geographic lie

Perhaps those who carry out this misinformation, deviation, or obfuscation realize the truth, but they employ these elements in mobilization and mobilization, or they serve as fuel that is poured on the fire of conflict, or an excuse that some people cannot be convinced except by it, and do not engage in the conflict except according to it. They only comply with its conditions.

Even when recalling religious texts and their interpretations, or history and its events and facts, the place rears its head strongly and imposes its presence, neither denied nor excluded. Rather, it is what determines the flow of history and politics itself in many cases, places and positions, without ambiguity or doubt.

However, there are those who want to put the conflict in a religious angle, seeing it as a purely religious conflict between Muslims and Jews, citing ancient events mentioned in the Qur’anic text and in the Torah through its talk about “the Gentiles” and the possibility of expropriating their land, money, honor, and blood. In this, myths are also invoked, and what the historical chronicles reported with scandalous selection and bias.

The places found in religious texts were designated in their ancient times and referred to the people who inhabited them in ancient centuries, and yet they are interpreted. To serve a new perception or ideology, modern or contemporary, intended to seize land as a religious or historical right.

As a result of religious interpretations and invocation of history, “imagined geography” serves Israel’s ambitions. It was basically based on a geographical myth, namely, “a land without a people, for a people without a land,” which is nothing more than a hypothetical matter or a sick imagination. At the time of launching this slogan, the land of Palestine was teeming with its inhabitants, and the Jews themselves had their own geography in the countries that had long been lost. Their lives are distributed across the continents of the Old World, or to which they migrated in the New World.

Allegations and interpretations

The slogan “Israel from the Nile to the Euphrates,” which many provide evidence that it is a strategy that carries plans and policies, is not just a flashy slogan that appealed to some or just passing propaganda talk, but rather a kind of “imagined geography” that wears a doctrinal guise, through claims carried by religious interpretations. Its proponents imagine that what humans attribute to God - or even what may come from heaven - is capable of being restored to existence, and to permanent modification that makes it sufficient and capable to be integrated into certain strategies, separate from the reason for its descent, its contexts, or even the possibilities of its realization according to current conditions.

On the other hand, the resistance, along with many of the Palestinian people, speaks of restoring “historic Palestine,” under the slogan “liberation from the river to the sea,” and it is a place that already exists in reality, specific and well-known, despite the change of most of the Arabic names of villages, towns, and cities after the establishment of Israel. In 1948 - to Hebrew names, but when it appears in the public Palestinian debate now, it appears as an imaginary issue, as the future is imagined with all its capabilities and conditions that achieve what these people aspire to.

Even talk about the “two-state solution” is not devoid of an imagined geography, which may sometimes slide from this “imagined” to the “imagined.” So where is the geography that can accommodate talk about a “Palestinian state” alongside Israel? Will it be two separate regions? That is, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, or are they connected through a long tunnel? Or through a border strip that heads from the West Bank in the Negev Desert to the Egyptian border, then turns north along it until it reaches the Gaza Strip, crossing more than two hundred and fifty kilometers?

Here the question arises: Are all those who talk about the “two-state solution” aware of the imagined geographical dimension of this option or scenario? Or are they just busy filling the void resulting from the inability to offer effective solutions, with fleeting words that they do not know their purpose on the ground?

Pretexts and arguments

As a result of the war on the Gaza Strip, the authority of the place jumped to the top. This is an issue that cannot be ignored or denied. Rather, it will remain one of the basic and ongoing effects of this war. Many places in Gaza, neighborhoods and streets, have changed their features. Houses were demolished and became ruins, land was swept away and became barren, and the features of neighborhoods, streets, and squares were lost and became a thing of the past.

Reconstructing Gaza will not return everything exactly to how it was before, just like any other demolished homes in cities or the countryside, even without war, will change. From here, the old places will inhabit people’s imaginations, be embedded in people’s memories, and when they are restored, they will come filled with nostalgia, and perhaps sadness, so that the moral or emotional influence of the place will continue, even if the “reconstruction” makes it more beautiful, durable, or coordinated than it was.

Of course, this is the least loss that geography inflicts on the people of Gaza, but the heaviest is the radical change that may occur to the place, which here includes the entire place, if the Gazans are forcibly displaced, or Israel gains control of only a part of them, or is able to cut off land and add it. To the "Gaza envelope".

But things do not go in one direction. The exact opposite can happen, when the resistance in Gaza is able to create a different geography around the Strip, making the Gaza Strip - where the Israeli settlements are located - in constant range of resistance fire.

This forces Israel to make adjustments to the place there, which means that while the wheel of fighting was going on, the geographical imagination of the Israelis was also thinking in multiple directions.

The geography that was present in the Israeli pretexts and the Palestinian arguments throughout the long days that took place, and which is present in the ongoing war through the topography and coordinates on the basis of which rockets and artillery shells are launched, will be present later in the event of any settlement that follows the cessation of fighting, and it is present all the time, either concrete or imagined. Do not leave the heads and souls.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.