The Drastic Erasure of Palestine: Between Maps, Silence, and the Politics of Invisibility
- CERES
- May 6
- 6 min read
Júlia Saraiva
The history of Palestine, particularly in the Gaza Strip, is being rewritten not only by bombs but also by narratives. What we are witnessing today is not merely a war—it is a multifaceted process of territorial, symbolic, and political erasure. Perhaps most alarming is that this erasure occurs simultaneously on two levels: on the ground and in global perception.
The Cartography of Disappearance
There is an analytical element that is often overlooked: maps. Geopolitics has always been, at its core, a struggle over spatial representation, and in the Palestinian case, this becomes brutally evident.
Over the past decades, maps of Palestine have been progressively redrawn through occupations, settlements, and military zones. More recently, the intensification of operations in Gaza and the expansion of areas of control and restriction reinforce a pattern of territorial reconfiguration that goes beyond immediate security logic. It is a process that reduces not only the available physical space but also the very viability of a functional Palestinian territory.
Satellite imagery analysis and reports from international organizations point to the systematic destruction of civilian infrastructure—including housing, hospitals, and agricultural areas. This pattern suggests not only a military strategy but a structural transformation of the territory: spaces are becoming progressively uninhabitable.
In this sense, the map ceases to be a neutral representation and becomes a political instrument. What cannot be inhabited eventually ceases to exist—at least as a viable political entity.
Genocide or Narrative Dispute?
The term “genocide” has become a field of discursive contestation. However, there is a growing body of institutional and academic analyses supporting this classification.
Reports from international bodies and human rights organizations point to practices that align with the criteria defined by the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, including large-scale killings, the imposition of unsustainable living conditions, and the destruction of essential social structures.
At the same time, there is significant resistance to formally adopting this classification, especially among state actors. This divergence reveals less a lack of evidence than a political dispute over the legal and strategic implications of the term.
Recognizing genocide is not merely symbolic—it entails concrete international responsibilities. That is precisely what is at stake in this debate.
The Smokescreen and the Struggle for International Attention
If the material destruction in Gaza is visible, narrative erasure operates more diffusely—and perhaps more effectively. In this context, the so-called “smokescreen” should not necessarily be understood as a formally coordinated strategy, but rather as a recurring effect of contemporary geopolitics: competition among crises for visibility.
Recent episodes of military escalation involving Israel and Iran, with direct or indirect participation from the United States, illustrate this phenomenon. The centrality of this new axis of tension in international news coverage shifts media focus, reconfiguring editorial priorities and, consequently, global public perception.
This shift is not trivial. Interstate conflicts—especially those involving regional and global powers—tend to receive greater attention from Western media than prolonged humanitarian crises. The result is a “narrative substitution” effect: while the risk of a broader regional war dominates headlines, the situation in Gaza becomes secondary, fragmented, and episodic.
For Israel, this rearrangement of international attention may have indirect strategic effects. Reduced media and diplomatic pressure creates a more permissive environment for the continuation of intensive military operations without the same level of international scrutiny seen in earlier stages of the conflict.
This phenomenon intersects with already identified issues in journalistic coverage, such as selective humanization of victims and the difficulty of sustaining long-term agendas in contexts of multiple simultaneous crises. In other words, it is not merely about misinformation, but about an informational system that structurally hierarchizes tragedies.
The “smokescreen,” therefore, is not only produced—it is incentivized by the very dynamics of the international and media systems.
The Failure of the Journalistic Agenda
Western media coverage plays a central role in this process of erasure. Recent studies indicate recurring patterns: the individualization of Israeli victims in contrast to the anonymization of Palestinians; the construction of false symmetry between parties with unequal capacities; and the constant questioning of the credibility of Palestinian sources.
These framings are not neutral. They shape public perception and directly influence the level of international mobilization. Moreover, the logic of agenda-setting contributes to a form of “attention fatigue”: prolonged conflicts tend to lose space to new crises, regardless of their ongoing severity.
The result is fragmented, episodic coverage, incapable of sustaining the focus necessary to grasp the structural dimension of the problem.
International Involvement and Diffuse Complicity
Another central element is the role of the international community, particularly Western powers.
Political, diplomatic, and military support for Israel raises questions of indirect responsibility. States that are signatories to the Genocide Convention have the obligation not only to refrain from committing such acts but also to prevent them.
In this context, the continued supply of weapons and strategic support, even in the face of consistent allegations of massive human rights violations, may be interpreted as a form of structural complicity.
At the same time, the involvement of other Middle Eastern countries increases the complexity of the conflict, whether through strategic alliances or the political instrumentalization of the Palestinian cause within broader regional disputes.
The conflict thus ceases to be merely a territorial issue and becomes part of a broader geopolitical chessboard.
Conclusion: Disappearance as a Political Project
The erasure of Palestine cannot be understood as a collateral effect of war—it increasingly appears as a structured political process, sustained both by the materiality of destruction and the immateriality of silence.
At the territorial level, there is a continuous erosion of the minimum conditions for existence: devastated cities, collapsed infrastructure, and displaced populations. At the narrative level, there is an asymmetrical struggle for the legitimacy of suffering, in which some lives are individualized while others remain statistics. At the international level, the selectivity of reactions reveals a system that not only fails to prevent humanitarian crises but, in certain contexts, tolerates them.
The combination of these factors produces something even deeper than physical destruction: the normalization of the unacceptable. When violence becomes routine and indignation intermittent, space opens for extreme processes to advance without proper international monitoring—especially when new crises capture global attention and reconfigure political and media priorities.
In this scenario, the risk is not only the disappearance of a territory but the progressive hollowing out of its political and moral relevance within the international system.
In light of this, the question that remains is not only what is happening, but how—and why—the world chooses to respond.
If international visibility is selective and indignation is conditioned, to what extent does global silence cease to be omission and become part of the very mechanism that allows this erasure to continue?
Curiosity: What Maps Do Not Show
There is an apparently banal but deeply revealing detail: many maps, globes, and educational materials representing the Middle East simply do not include Palestine as a state—or fail to identify it clearly.
This is not an abstract observation. I myself have, in my home, a map and a globe in which Palestine does not appear. Since noticing this, I have consciously paid attention: whenever I encounter a new map, I look for Palestine. Most of the time, it is not there—or it appears diluted, fragmented, almost invisible.
What might seem like a mere cartographic choice actually reveals something deeper: how erasure also manifests in the production and circulation of knowledge. These maps, widely commercialized in the West, are not neutral. They reproduce worldviews, legitimize certain geopolitical interpretations, and silence others.
In this sense, the erasure of Palestine does not occur only on the battlefield or in international diplomacy—it is also present on the walls of homes, in classrooms, and in everyday objects.
And perhaps it is precisely there that it becomes most dangerous: when it ceases to be perceived as absence and becomes naturalized as representation.
KEY REFERECES
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism.
Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings.
Said, Edward W. Orientalism.
Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life.
Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics.
Júlia Saraiva
Holds a degree in International Relations from UniLaSalle-RJ and is currently pursuing a postgraduate degree in Political Science and International Relations at FAAP. Her academic research focuses on U.S. and Middle Eastern policies, with an emphasis on the influence of lobbies, military strategies, and diplomatic relations in the region. She is a researcher at the Center for International Relations Studies (CERES) and works as a consultant in business internationalization.
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