Mapping My Return: A Palestinian Memoir

Salman Abu Sitta was born in 1937 on his family’s land in the Beersheba district, in the south of Palestine, and was ten years old when the Nakba took it. This is the memoir of what he did about it.

The first part is a child’s view of a country that was about to end: the family’s holdings, the school his father built, the pattern of life in the Beersheba sub-district, and then the flight to Gaza. What follows is a life assembled in exile — a student in Nasser’s Egypt, a young man in London in the 1960s, an engineer and academic raising a family in Canada, with spells in Kuwait. It is, as the publisher notes, the only memoir in English by a Palestinian who grew up in the Beersheba district before 1948.

The thread that holds it together is the work he is known for. Abu Sitta, an engineer, spent decades on the cartography of his homeland and on the research behind the right of return, producing the maps that place the depopulated villages where they actually stood — work published as the Atlas of Palestine, 1917–1966. It is the reason a claim of return can be made in coordinates rather than in sentiment, and it underpins the argument he makes here: that the right of return has to be written into any settlement that is going to be just or to last.

About the author

Salman Abu Sitta is an engineer by training and the founder of the Palestine Land Society. He is the author of the Atlas of Palestine, 1917–1966 and of the register of the villages depopulated in 1948 that much subsequent mapping — including this archive’s — rests on. Edward Said described him as an extraordinary engineer and scholar.

Details

• The American University in Cairo Press, first published 2015–16 — ISBN 9789774167300 (332 pages)
• Reissued with a new afterword, May 2025 — ISBN 9781649034359 (360 pages); ebook 9781617977077
• Illustrated with photographs and four maps

Where to find it

• In print from AUC Press, and orderable through any independent bookshop.
• Held by many university libraries.