The Trans-Arabian pipeline, which transported Saudi oil from Dhahran in the Persian Gulf to the port of Zaharani in Lebanon, passing along its 1,214 kilometer way through Jordan and Syria, was haunted by the Arab-Israeli conflict throughout its years of operation and even before. Constructed in 1949-50, its owners carefully chose its route so as to circumvent Palestine/Israel. But in the 1967 war, Israel occupied the Golan Heights, where 40 km of the pipeline were laid down, and consequently became a transit state of this American-Saudi oil exporting endeavor together with Syria, Lebanon and Jordan. This paper explores the Tapline project by focusing on its cross-border and cartographic dimensions from surveying its route in 1949-1950 to Tapline’s involvement in the 1960s in Syrian-Israeli disputes over the location of their shared Armistice Line (and also in Syrian-Lebanese disputes over the location of their boundary in close proximity to Israel), and concluding with the 1967 war and Israeli cooperation with this Trans-Arab project, on the one hand, and Palestinian response to this cooperation on the other hand. By focusing on Tapline, the paper demonstrates the gap between the image of Arab-Israeli borders (particularly Syrian-Israeli borders) as sealed and impregnable in theory and their permeability in practice.

Historically, maps have been used as tools to dispossess the colonized, to establish sovereign control over territories, and to engineer states. National maps may serve as logos that create imaginary commitment to a nation state, but they are also a crucial part of a range of scientific and engineering knowledges and practices that are necessary for state building. Since the Oslo Accords in 1993 Palestinians have been seeking to build a state. Surveying and mapping are a crucial part for planning for a future national territory under their sovereign control. Various Palestinian governmental and non-governmental organizations have surveyed the land, demarcated boundaries and mapped the land in order to create the scientific know-how to increase their power for negotiating a final status agreement with the Israelis and in order to create an independent state. However, lack of standardization, diverging cartographic coding systems, the inability of one governing body to reinforce its mandate, and the continued lack of Palestinian sovereignty and control over large parts of the West Bank impede the map making and state building process. Science Studies and critical cartography are used to understand how cartographic representations produced by a range of Palestinian organizations serve as powerful tools to make knowledge-claims, and communicate various social, historical and political concerns, and how claims to factual knowledge becomes a rhetorically effective tool in disputed regions.

During the pan-Arab movement of mid-twentieth century, governments across the Arab world funded mapping projects that cartographically constructed a geographical entity called the “Arab Homeland” (al-watan al-arabe). I argue that the creation of this territory was not random or unintentional, but an important part of a larger pan-Arab discourse that sought to assert Arab control and unity across a large-scale geographic area that included the state that most non-Arab governments recognize as Israel. Maps of the Arab Homeland are ubiquitous across the Arab world, and though these maps vary slightly depending on where and when the map was produced, several consistent themes and messages are embedded in these maps regardless of their place or time of production. Informed by a critical cartographic perspective that stresses how maps work to create places and place-specific identities, instead of merely reflecting or representing some geographic reality, I analyzed official state cartographic discourses of the Arab Homeland from a broad sample of school and general reference atlases published in nine different Arab states during the height of the pan-Arab movement in the mid-twentieth century. Focusing specifically on borders and place names, my analysis highlights the politics and fluidity of mapping the Arab Homeland as well as the geopolitics of the Arab-Israel conflict. Perhaps unsurprisingly, my examination shows that all maps of the Arab Homeland use the place names Palestine (philistine) and al-Quds instead of the more Judeo-Christian place names of Israel and Jerusalem. Likewise, the borders of the Arab Homeland usually show Palestine as a united and contiguous entity that includes the territories of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. However, there are also notable differences in how some maps depict the Arab Homeland. For example, a few maps include the West Bank or all of Palestine as part of Jordan. I conclude that the Arab Homeland was constructed greatly in reaction to the establishment and growth of Israel, but I also propose that these maps demonstrate that geography had an important role in the pan-Arab movement of the mid-twentieth century and thus, there is a need for scholars to further examine the role of geography and territory in the pan-Arab movement.