Author Thomas Suárez presents peace framework for the Palestine-Israel crisis

Multi-talented London-based historical researcher and cartographer Thomas Suárez says that since Gaza has been made uninhabitable by Israeli forces by indiscriminately razing the occupied area to the ground, any peace plan must involve allowing the survivors to return to their original homes in Israel, as well as rebuilding infrastructure for those who are originally from Gaza, by the countries responsible for the mess.

His contention is that the residents of Gaza are not refugees and therefore the place is not a large refugee camp, but a place of internment where people thrown out from their original homes were housed after Israel expanded its occupation over the past several decades. Most Gazans have their roots across Israel, and so they must be rehabilitated in the places they had come from. Suárez, a dual citizen of the US and Italy, notes that those who are originally from Gaza must be housed in the place that now lies in ruins thanks to the relentless Israeli onslaught following the October 7 attack, after it is rebuilt. “The responsibility for rebuilding their towns and homes falls primarily on Israel and the Western forces,” asserts the author, who has been a resident of the West Bank. His major works on Palestine include Palestine Hijacked: How Zionism Forged an Apartheid State from River to Sea (2022), Wall: Palestinian Oral Histories (2019), and State of Terror: How Terrorism Created Modern Israel (2016).

Suárez, 74, whose next book is titled Palestine Mapped: From the River to the Sea in Early Geographic Thought and will hit the stands over the next few months, says, “Gaza was deliberately made uninhabitable. So what do you do? Who are the people in Gaza? Most of them are in Gaza because they are not Jewish. They were ethnically cleansed from other parts of what is now Israel. We call these refugee camps, but no, they are internment camps… it does give Israel a lot of favour to call these people refugees (who are typically people housed in a new area because of earthquake and so on). They have the right to go home wherever that home is, in what is now controlled by Israel. For those who are Gazan locals, who wish to stay there, it is primarily the responsibility of Israel, the United States and the rest of the West to rebuild Gaza, to rebuild it for them. Everybody else has the right to go home because they have the right intrinsically, and the countries that have caused this massive damage have to offer massive reparations.”

About his visits and stay nearly over 15 years ago in the occupied areas of Israel, the author, who is also a highly accomplished violinist, says, “You have read about the tragedy. But once you go there and see the situation for yourself, you can’t let go of it.”

About his 2016 book State of Terror, renowned Israel-born historian Ilan Pappé had said that it was “the first comprehensive and structured analysis of the violence and terror employed by the Zionist movement and later the state of Israel against the people of Palestine.”

To write the book after his visit to occupied areas, under inspiration from Palestinian academic Dr Ghada Karmi, he pored through British archives, “from the beginning of the British mandate to the end of the British mandate”. He adds, “There was a lot of material there that has never been even looked at. That was what had eventually led to my book in 2016, State of Terror. This one, Palestine Hijacked, is an expansion of that… Nobody had examined that material to the extent I had had,” Suárez says, handing me over the book at a café in London’s Belsize Park area, not far from his home.

He goes on, “Long before I started writing about Palestine, I have done some books on cartography, and now in my new book, the two worlds have joined. This book digs deep into the mapping of the Holy Land. Early last year, the idea came up about the mapping of the region, not through those eyes (of the genre of books already out there), but through the uses and abuses… it starts with the Greeks and the Romans, the Byzantine Empire all the way to the 21st century.”

He explains, “The ultimate point of it is to show that Zionism is not as a Jewish invention but as a Christian invention, beginning with the Reformation of Martin Luther in the 16th century. As it appears through maps, we have this idea that Zionists came up with the idea of Zionism. No. What it looks like, to me, is that Theodore Herzl, who was the founder of the political ideology, whether it is good or bad, of creating a colony in Palestine. But it wasn’t working because nobody was interested. Just after he died, the Zionists that took over started thinking, what are we doing wrong that we can’t sell this idea? Ah, the Christians have been solving this problem for centuries… the Jews have to go home in order for the Christ to return.”

The author gives us a glimpse into his forthcoming book: “For example, I explain how a mid-sixth-century map of the Levant, a mosaic embedded in the floor of a Byzantine church, was used by Israel to divert attention from the illegality of its excavations in East Jerusalem. It claimed to be digging in search of a feature depicted on the Madaba map (of a city in Jordan), turning its crimes into a ‘feel-good’ story.”

Suárez says that Herzl put his ideas in his book The Jewish State, and after his death, the proponents felt that Herzl got the marketing wrong. “We are going to sell this idea with a great mystique around it. Herzl was more straightforward although I don’t like it… When the Christians started moving to Palestine, they had this idea that Jews have to return to the Holy Land in order for the Christ to return (which they thought was imminent), but the Jews were not immediately interested in it… The actual movement of Zionism was repackaged according to the Christian idea. In my way, it has been so successful and the Western governments had to go with it,” emphasises the author.

Suárez collected secret intelligence reports, military and diplomatic correspondence, and the terrorists’ own records boasting of their successes to write his books on Palestine.

A Juilliard-trained violinist and composer, his works on cartography include Early Mapping of Southeast Asia; Early Mapping of the Pacific; Shedding the Veil: Mapping the European Discovery of America and the World. Suárez earned fame also by helping Scotland Yard crack a major theft of antiquities from the National Library of Spain.

He was a former member of the Baltimore and American Symphony Orchestras. According to his website, Suárez has held principal positions with the ballet orchestra at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House, with the Spoleto Festival dei Due Mondi in Italy, and has frequently toured Japan. He was also a faculty member of Palestine’s National Conservatory of Music in Jerusalem.

Suárez has often come under attack from certain groups over his books, and he has countered them with archival materials.

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