Johns Hopkins University wipes the Occupied Palestinian Territories off their COVID-19 map

29 March 2020|The Interregnum|Mohamed Elmaazi

A professor and researcher based in the Occupied Palestinian Territories call out Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Systems and Science Engineering for removing the OPT from their live COVID-19 dashboard.

Feature image via Johns Hopkins University/CSSE

A letter by a public health professor and a legal researcher, published in The Lancet medical journal, heavily criticises Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) for removing the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) from their live COVID-19 dashboard.

Engineers at Johns Hokpins CSSE designed an interactive database which boasts a user friendly dashboard, showing the number of globally confirmed cases of COVID-19, along with recoveries and deaths by country, and in some cases city and province.

The letter notes that there used to be a separate designation for Palestine, which CSSE then modified on their map to the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and then removed it altogether by merging it with Israel.

The letter was written by Rania Muharab of the Legal Research and Advocacy Department, Al-Haq and Professor Rita Giacaman of the Institute of Community and Public Health at Birzeit University, both in Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories.

It was published in The Lancet on 27 March 2020.

“Initially listing data recorded by the Palestinian Health Ministry in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip under its entry for Palestine, the dashboard separately listed cases confirmed by the Israeli Health Ministry”, the authors explain.

They then go on to note that on 10 March:

“CSSE replaced the entry for Palestine with oPt; on March 11, the oPt entry was removed and its figures merged with the entry for Israel.”

Muharab and Giacaman point out that the decision by the CSSE to remove OPT altogether and merge its figures with the entry for Israel is problematic for a number of reasons:

“International law does not recognise Israeli sovereignty over any part of the oPt and the Israeli Health Ministry does not record COVID-19 cases in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.”

“How, then, can we effectively monitor the spread of the pandemic in the oPt using the CSSE dashboard?” the authors ask.

If ever there was an example of how maps are inherently political constructs and reflect the reality of power dynamics this is it.

“The removal of the oPt from the CSSE dashboard goes against global scientific cooperation and solidarity, resulting in discrepancies with official data recorded by the Palestinian and Israeli Health Ministries. Consistency with international law and the need for impartial data on the spread of COVID-19 requires databases to list the oPt separately, as reflected in WHO practice. Instead, removing the oPt and merging it with Israel undermines the credibility of the CSSE dashboard.”

The authors note that the choice by the CSSE to use country designations from the US State Department “have legitimised the acquisition of territory by force and undermined Palestinian identity and rights in Jerusalem”.

Between 1947 and 1949 in a process which is today known as ethnic cleansing, Zionist militias  forcibly displaced between 750,000 to 850,000 Palestinians from their towns, villages and homes. They killed thousands of Palestinians were killed and destroyed at least 530 villages.

The settler-colonialist movement was mostly made up of first and second generation immigrants from Europe. Their ultimate objective was to create an ethno-religiously pure Jewish state. On 14 May 1948 a new state known as Israel was founded by the settler-colonialists upon the wreckage of Palestine. The areas known as Gaza and the West Bank (which includes east Jerusalem) is all that was left, though the process of Israeli expansion and ethnic cleansing continues to this very day.

In addition to discriminating against the non-Jewish  Palestinian  citizenry of Israel, granting superior rights and protections to its Jewish citizenry, the State of Israel continues to annex, occupy and ethnically cleanse what’s left of historic Palestine, namely the OPT.

The letter ends on a tone of regret noting that an institution with “historic ties” to the slave trade and which recently recognised that the land upon which the university rests was stolen form the indigenous Piscataway people:

“should continue its colonial violence against the indigenous Palestinian people by removing Palestine from the world map”