Literally wiping Israel off the map

Would it shock you to know that JetBlue Airlines, a favorite of so many, has an in-flight map of Israel but without the Golan Heights? Instead, they represent that part of the country as being assigned solely to the Palestinian territories. Not only that, but the print font for the Palestinian areas is actually larger and more pronounced than the letters that read “Israel.”  

This disclosure was broadcast on N12, Israeli television, during their evening news program just a week ago. Apparently, the discovery was made by an Israeli woman while flying from Miami to San Diego, as she tried to show another passenger where Israel was located on her personal screen. Incredulous, by what she saw, she stated, “The label was prominently displayed in a way that didn’t seem innocent, showing the borders to be incorrect.”

Hodaya Knafo, the Israeli woman in question, found this particularly disturbing, especially on the heels of the events which have taken place over this past year. Making the obvious connection to October 7th, she couldn’t help but feel that this may be just another indication of the sharp rise of antisemitism which has emerged since then.

But JetBlue is not alone in this massive oversight of portraying an accurate picture when it comes to the map of Israel. 

As far back as 2005, MapQuest also made its own changes to the map of the Jewish homeland when it left out the borders, distinguishing the territories from the green line of Israel. “By leaving out these borders, MapQuest made a virtual Israeli annexation of the West Bank and Gaza, territories,” land which rightly still belonged to Israel, completely distorting the Biblical land of Israel for what appears to be a future political aspiration. 

Even after a flood of emails were received by the company, they never revised their map nor endeavored to fix the error. Now, in the year 2024, when Google Maps, along with other navigational services have dwarfed the company’s usefulness, the issue seems mostly irrelevant. 

Fast forward to 2015, when the American television network, MSNBC was forced to apologize for using the wrong map of Israel. It was during a live broadcast that two anchors showed “a series of maps entitled, “Palestinian loss of land 1946 – present.” One map showed Palestinian sovereignty in 1946, when the British still controlled the area until such time as 1948 when Israel became a state. Other maps, using the color green to denote Palestinian territory, failed to take into consideration the U.N. Partition Plan as well as land won in ensuing wars. 

Although there was an attempt to apologize for the blunder, the explanation given by the two anchors added insult to injury when they said, “You’ve got this one tiny piece of land which is basically the Jews and the Palestinians – the Jews and the Muslims both believe that God gave them the land. It’s that one piece of land for two peoples. That’s what the conflict has been all about for a very long time.” In other words, it’s just too complex to get right, because each has their own claim to the land, so we can’t really be at fault for messing up. 

It was during that same year, that HarperCollins, the well-known publishing house somehow made their own blunder when their Middle-East atlas showed Jordan and Gaza but completely omitted Israel. More egregious than the mistake of the MSNBC maps, Israel was not anywhere to be seen on their version.  

Although apologizing for the blatant omission, along with their promise “to destroy all remaining copies,” it’s clear that someone, with a political agenda, decided to annihilate the existence of the Jewish homeland, at least in print, perhaps hoping that no one would pay attention, but when you delete a geographic territory where nearly ten million people reside, someone is bound to notice. 

You may ask why would someone do that. “Bartholomew, the subsidiary of HarperCollins that published the atlas, was quoted by the international Catholic newspaper, The Tablet, as saying that including Israel would have been "unacceptable" to the company's customers.” Ironically, “HarperCollins Publishers is a subsidiary of News Corp, whose executive chairman, media mogul Rupert Murdoch, is famously pro-Israel.”

So, the omission was actually admitted, being made as a result of political considerations and the personal sensitivities of their targeted readers who might have taken offense by actually seeing the existence of a Jewish homeland amidst Arab countries. What nerve!

These are only a few, among others, where the State of Israel has been partially or completely erased from the map. There is the case of the world map on the walls of the Manchester Airport which neglected to show the country of Israel, replacing it with Palestine. Noticed by an Israeli passenger, the UKLFI (UK Lawyers for Israel) was contacted, which immediately notified the managing director of the airport who “responded quickly and thanked the UKLFI for bringing this matter to their attention. He wrote, “This map appears to have been subject to graffiti.” We are arranging for its immediate and permanent removal.” 

The excuse was that “the label ‘Israel’ may have been blacked out and the ‘Palestine’ label inserted onto the map.”

But was that really what happened or is there a concerted effort being made by anti-Israel advocates to literally wipe Israel off the map – at least as it relates to cartography, the art and science of map making?

Has the military intifada spilled over into a print intifada where deliberate geographic misrepresentations of the land of Israel, are being made as an aspirational precursor to the actual physical removal of the Jewish inhabitants who live there? If so, their first act of business is one of denial, refusing to accept the existence of a Jewish ancestral homeland, because it serves as a constant reminder that God chose this people to be the conduit of His laws and truths to all humanity. 

So, excluding Israel, from the map of world nations, will not change this calling or thwart the plans of the Almighty who also chose the location for the land upon which they live. That is an irrevocable covenant which cannot be circumvented by a dishonest and unscrupulous mapmaker.  

Whether you like it or not, Israel is here to stay, and no one can change that, regardless of it being visible on a map. But no one should ever make the mistake that the omission will be disregarded, because the hope of trying to make Israel disappear will always be noticed and called out by those who understand the importance of her full destiny!