FALASTEEN · The complete table of contents

Contents

الفهرس

A room of the archive

The Land

الأرض

A traverse view

The Roads

الطرق

The Atlas answers one question very well: where were they? Four hundred and twenty-six mapped village sites, each at a source-verified coordinate. What a map cannot do is put you on the ground and move you, and that is how anyone who lives in a country actually knows it — not as a plane of dots, but as a sequence. If you are travelling from Jerusalem to Ramallah, you pass these places, in this order.

So this is the same land read as a road. Each route below is a real journey between two real places, with the stops in the order a traveller meets them, the distance between them, and one line on what each one is now. Where a stop has a record in this archive it is linked; where it has none it is still listed, marked plainly, and linked to nothing.

Roads
3
Stops
39
Stops with a record
30

  1. A road you can travel today

    13 km

    end to end, in a straight line

    11 stops · 9 with a record

    Jerusalem to Ramallah

    من القدس إلى رام الله

    Just under thirteen kilometres in a straight line, up the spine of the northern Jerusalem hills. You pass Sheikh Jarrah, Shu'fat, Beit Hanina, ar-Ram, Qalandiya and Kufr 'Aqab before al-Bireh runs into Ramallah. Every one of those places is still there, and most of the road is now something to be got through rather than travelled.

    The distance has not changed since 1967. Everything else about the journey has.

    Travel this road

  2. A road that no longer exists as it was

    88 km

    end to end, in a straight line

    12 stops · 11 with a record · 10 depopulated

    Haifa to Jaffa

    من حيفا إلى يافا

    Eighty-eight kilometres down the coast, from the Carmel headland to the Jaffa harbour, along the road and railway that carried Palestine's citrus to the ports. Three of its villages held the road for four months in 1948 and were taken during a truce; the rest were emptied around them.

    Every stop on this route between the two cities was a Palestinian village in 1947. None of them has its people today.

    Travel this road

  3. A road that no longer exists as it was

    53 km

    end to end, in a straight line

    16 stops · 10 with a record · 10 depopulated

    Jaffa to Jerusalem

    من يافا إلى القدس

    The old road from the sea to the holy city: out of Jaffa across the citrus plain to Ramle, up through the Latrun gap, into the defile at Bab al-Wad, and along the ridge to Jerusalem. Almost every place on it was emptied in 1948 or destroyed in 1967. This is the Atlas's depopulated villages put back into the order a traveller met them.

    Eleven of the fourteen stops between the two cities were villages. Ten of the eleven were emptied. One was not.

    Travel this road