Sullivan's Fun with "Historical" Maps
That record makes Sullivan’s descent into one-sided commentary on matters related to Israel all the more disappointing. (Sullivan has attributed his anti-Israel turn to his opposition to the Gaza war, though—as a regular reader of his blog—I can’t recall his ever explaining exactly what Israel should have done in late 2008 to stop the barrage of Hamas rockets to Israel’s south.) The virulence of Sullivan’s attacks on Israel received a harsh, personal attack from Leon Wieseltier but also temperate critiques from Jon Chait and Jeffrey Goldberg. Yet rather than take the Chait and Goldberg criticisms to heart, Sullivan has doubled down on his anti-Israel fanaticism.
The most recent occasion came when Sullivan posted—without either a citation or a link—a map allegedly showing “Palestinian loss of land, 1946 to 2000.” Here’s the map.
To call the map deceptive would be an understatement. Sullivan’s criteria for what constitutes “Palestinian land” changes from slide to slide; on each occasion, the shift places Israel in the most unfavorable light possible. For instance, in the 1946 map, Sullivan portrays all of the Negev (geographically huge, by Israeli standards, but sparse in terms of people) as"Palestinian land." In the second slide, one year later, only a sliver of the Negev is “Palestinian land.”
Yet between the two maps, nothing actually had changed: in both 1946 and 1947, the entire land was under the political control of the British mandate, and large portions of the Negev weren’t owned by anyone (Jewish or Palestinian), since the “land” was desert. (How Sullivan also determined that in 1946, Jews owned none of the land in the current West Bank, as the map suggests, is unclear.) Yet having a starting-point map listing the maximum amount of Palestinian land is critical for Sullivan, so all of the Negev becomes “Palestinian land” in 1946.
Similarly, from 1949-1967, the map lists West Bank and Gaza as"Palestinian land," even though both were occupied at the time (by Jordan and Egypt). Ownership can’t be the criteria here, since land in Israel owned by Palestinians (such as in the Galilee) isn’t listed as “Palestinian land.” Yet in the post-1967 map, the Sullivan map shifts the criteria: now, only land under Palestinian political control is identified as"Palestinian land." Applying that framework to the 1949-1967 map would have yielded no Palestinian land, as seen in this map.
And, of course, the map sequence contained no mention that the 1947 partition plan was rejected by the Arabs.
Sullivan’s map was, appropriately, labeled as “malicious nonsense” by Jeffrey Goldberg, who also noted that “Andrew does not tell us the source of these maps.” Sullivan dismissed the first point by suggesting that Goldberg was making “another claim to authoritah [sic],” though he declined to explain why he had posted a map that used different criteria in each slide for what constituted “Palestinian land.”
Sullivan also claimed that Goldberg hadn’t engaged in “fact-checking,” since, he now suggested, his post hadprovided a citation. What was this citation?"(Map via Juan Cole.)" From which of the thousands of people named “Juan Cole” did Sullivan obtain his criteria-shifting slides? What was the context for the slides? Sullivan’s post didn’t say: it contained neither reference to a specific item (as would be required for an academic publication) nor a link (as is standard in blog citations). Indeed, Sullivan seemed to concede that in writing, link-less “map via Juan Cole,” he hadn’t provided a source by responding to Goldberg’s criticism by actually including a link in his follow-up post. And yet he accused Goldberg of “spluttering” when Goldberg accurately faulted him for not listing a source.
To see Sullivan double down on his defense of posting a propaganda map is disappointing, if not surprising. To see him lash out at even his moderate critics on Israel is, alas, expected.