Salman Abu Sitta

Salman Abu Sitta was born in 1937 at Ma’in Abu Sitta, in the Beersheba district of Mandatory Palestine, and was a child when his family was driven out in 1948. He trained as an engineer — a degree from Cairo University’s Faculty of Engineering in 1958, then a doctorate in civil engineering from University College London — and practised for years before turning that training on the question of his own displacement.

The instruments of his work are maps. Abu Sitta founded the Palestine Land Society in London, a body devoted to documenting the land and people of Palestine, and out of it produced two reference works that changed how the Nakba can be argued about. The Palestinian Nakba 1948: The Register of Depopulated Localities in Palestine appeared in 1998, the fiftieth anniversary year, listing the destroyed and emptied places one by one. The Atlas of Palestine 1917–1966, published by the society in December 2010, assembles Mandate survey sheets, land registers, and village data into a cartographic record of the country as it was administered before and after its partition.

The argument the maps carry is a practical one. Against the claim that return is a fantasy because the country has been rebuilt over, Abu Sitta’s mapping sets out what was where — whose land, in what parcel, under what registered title — and asks what present use has been made of it. His public debates with Israeli figures including Uri Avnery, who called him perhaps the world’s foremost expert on the Nakba, turned on exactly that question. His memoir Mapping My Return: A Palestinian Memoir was published in 2016 by the American University in Cairo Press.

Selected works

• The Palestinian Nakba 1948: The Register of Depopulated Localities in Palestine (1998)
• Atlas of Palestine 1917–1966 (Palestine Land Society, 2010)
• Mapping My Return: A Palestinian Memoir (2016)

Sources

• Palestine Land Society
• Salman Abu Sitta — Wikipedia