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With photos worth 1,000 words, how about maps?

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A major American book publisher, deluged with criticism for leaving Israel off a map in its Middle East Atlas, has apologized and withdrawn the book from circulation. You don’t have to know the name of the publisher to know one thing for certain: it’s not the Palestinian Authority’s pub-lishing division. Because if it were, there would be no outcry, no apology, no withdrawal.

 After word of its outrageous omission of Israel leaked to the news media, a HarperCollins spokesman admitted that dropping Israel was a cynical marketing decision — Israel had been dumped in response to “local preferences” in the Gulf States.

While Gulf States governments pretend that Israel does not exist, as a way of saying that it should not exist, the staff at HarperCollins knows the difference between fantasy and reality, so they are withdrawing the book from circulation until it can be corrected. 

Something similar, involving another major publisher, occurred about a year ago. The Times of Israel reported that Scholastic, the publisher of children’s educational materials, left Israel off a map in one of the books in its popular “Geronimo Stilton” adventure series. This particular installment of the series involved the protagonist traveling to the Middle East, where the map showed the Kingdom of Jordan reaching all the way to the Mediterranean. Israel was nowhere to be seen. When the matter was called to the attention of Scholastic, it announced that the omission was “inadvertent” and it was “immediately stopping shipment on this title and revising the map.”

A map that was not in the news this week, but should be, has just been posted on the official Facebook page of Fatah, the largest faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). This map, too, has no Israel. Note that Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas is chairman of both Fatah and the PLO. There’s no way to claim this is the work of some rogue group.

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