EDWARD SAID: AMERICA'S LAST TABOO

Zionization is so thorough that not a single map has been published or shown on television that would risk revealing to Americans the network of Israeli garrisons, settlements, routes and barricades which crisscross Gaza and the West Bank. Blotted out completely is the system of Areas A, B and C, which perpetuates military occupation of 40 per cent of Gaza and 60 per cent of the West Bank, in keeping with the Oslo ‘accords’. The censorship of geography, in this most geographical of conflicts, creates an imaginative void—once deliberately fostered, but now more or less automatic—in which all images of the conflict are decontextualized. The result is not just the preposterous belief that a Palestinian attack on Israel is under way, but a dehumanization of Palestinians to the level of beasts virtually without sentience or motive.