On the other hand, couldn't gerrymandering just as easily be used to usurp power from specific demographics? Like: cut up a neighborhood that is overwhelmingly liberal/conservative and merge the pieces with surrounding conservative/liberal districts.
If you are the party in power looking to redistrict an area where your base is the majority (provided you aren't talking about a HUGE majority like 3 or 4-to-1, which is very rare), it's in your interest to redistrict the opposition into one district so as to make the other districts monolithic bastions of incumbency, rather than dilute them and promote any kind of vulnerability.
This is, as I understand it, how it's usually done. At least, I'm pretty sure that's what happened in a few of the examples cited; the Murtha PA district that turned Republican was actually set up by Republicans to isolate union voters.
I realize this might sound like I'm contradicting my initial statement, but I think it makes sense if you consider both parties complicit in redistricting; it really is in the interests of both parties to promote incumbency.
Assuming you're okay with segregationist politics (which is in and of itself a can of worms), giving "the black people" a "Black seat" might sound okay, but in practise it either promotes social silos, or is a complete disaster. Look at the Illinois seat where they lumped all the "Hispanics" together. In reality the two communities are quite distinct - one mostly Puerto-Rican, the other mostly Mexican - with each having different concerns.
I think the Puerto Ricans and Mexicans would agree the current situation is preferable to the 7-digit Chicago Latino community simply not being represented in Congress.
Say they get split and the Mexicans get put in a solidly Blue district with Limousine Liberals from Evanston and Hyde Park. They get to elect a Democrat and they may even bring more bodies to the polls than the suburbanites, but who do you really think is going to play kingmaker here?
Thinking about fair representation and gerrymandered districts and all made me recall something I read about recently in my studies: Cumulative Voting Rights. It's one of the methods in use for stockholders to elect directors, and essentially the way it works is that each share of stock grants you a number of votes equal to the number of positions to be filled, and you can spread your votes out or concentrate them at your discretion. The N people who get the largest number of votes get the positions. The math essentially works out so that the person with 60% of the votes can only guarantee control over 60% of the seats; I'm not sure how well it would extrapolate in practice to voting for representatives, but it's an interesting idea.
That's how it's done in a number of civil law nations, and is what I'm proposing.
Also, yes, I know that Palestine's primary problems are not the geographical ones, but the geography REALLY DOESN'T HELP.
Palestine is so fucked up as a direct result of specific Israeli policy decisions that I would submit it is impossible to tell how much of the problem is those decisions and how much is based on other factors.