The Tablet, an international Catholic news weekly based in the United Kingdom, has succeeded in getting HarperCollins, the publisher of the Middle East Atlas, to withdraw from sale the offending texts because they omitted the state of Israel from the maps.
The company is a subsidiary of NewsCorp and has been selling the atlas because it was “developed specifically for schools in the Middle East.” The Atlas, according to the company, provides “in-depth coverage of the region and its issues.”
HarperCollins went on to point out that the goal of the Atlas was to help students understand the “relationship between the social and physical environment, the region’s challenges [and] its socio-economic development.”
HarperCollins UK on Wednesday issued a statement on their Facebook page apologizing: “HarperCollins regrets the omission of the name Israel from their Collins Middle East Atlas. This product has now been removed from sale in all territories and all remaining stock will be pulped. HarperCollins sincerely apologizes for this omission and for any offense it caused.”
On the Amazon website, reviewers were for the most part outraged with the obvious omission of Israel. One reviewer stated: Since May 18, 1948, Israel has existed as a nation. Harper Collins has no excuse for ignoring this wonderful country and national heritage of Judaism. SHAME be upon them for attempting to write Israel out of existence! May they face boycott of all HC publications and may their writers seek another publishing house based on this intentional act of literary extermination.
Everyone wants to know if the omission was an accident. According to Collins Bartholomew, a subsidiary of HarperCollins, they told The Tablet that including Israel would have been “unacceptable” in atlases intended for use in the Middle East. They deleted Israel to satisfy “local preferences.”
Dr Jane Clements, director of the Council of Christians and Jews, told The Tablet that “maps that excluded Israel risked causing confusion and de-legitimising the nation in the eyes of the students who used the atlases.”
