Restoring Palestine: 2000 Years of Mapping

Historically, Palestine has been, and still is, the center of the world’s attention.
Many foreign invaders came and left, the Romans, the Greeks and the Crusaders. The People of the Land remained essentially the same. Some may have changed their religion and language, but they maintained their bond to the land, immortalized in their worship places, shrines and sacred land features.

Invaders left few traces of their presence. The people of the land absorbed them and they remained entrenched in the land. There are few countries in the world that had been subject to so many invasions. They were all gone, except, for now, the Zionist invasion. That is because we have not yet seen the coming end of this violent history. Like all unnatural events, epidemics and historical aberrations, it will no doubt vanish.
With this long trail of invaders, Palestine became the most well-documented country in the world. It surpasses many capitals of Europe. Unlike other histories, Palestine was inflicted with the largest and longest campaign of misinformation, forgery and deception. This forgery and deception are still going on today, only with more sophisticated but spurious scholarship and shady ideology, assisted by well-oiled lobby campaigns.

Palestine is the homeland of Jesus Christ. On its soil he walked, in its villages he dwelt. Because of him, Palestine was immortalized as the Holy Land. This is how it was shown in the Roman history.
 

With the departure of the Romans, Byzantine Christian Palestine recorded the early history of Christianity. We are indebted to a Palestinian Bishop, known by his Hellenistic name, Eusebius of Caesarea, Palestinae (260-339 AD). He was baptized and ordained at Caesarea in about 313 AD. He is credited with writing an account of the first centuries of Christianity.
His most important work, used in our study, is the Onomasticon. It was compiled as a directory of place names, or "gazetteer", for pilgrims traveling to Jerusalem. It also provided historical geographers with contemporary knowledge of 4th-century Palestine. His text was converted to maps like this: We made a full study of the Bishop’s book. By comparison of names in his book with our modern Atlas of Palestine, we identified at least 139 village names and 50 place names, known to us today.  Here are their Byzantine names with the phonetically similar modern names in the same locations. Those same names existed 17 centuries ago.
 

As I said, the heritage of Byzantine Christian Palestine does not end with books. It is ingrained in the popular daily practice and worship. We have recorded, in our modern atlas, about 4,300 historical and religious sites. When the people became Muslims, they converted many of these sites to shrines or maqams and kept reverence to the same places of worship.

I have personal experience of this. In my village land, Al Ma’in, we have a maqam known as Sheikh Nuran, where women went to seek blessing. In 1995, I visited there and found that the Israelis demolished part of it. I saw through the broken window a Byzantine cross!. Research led me to find that this site was the monastery of St Hilarion, a Palestinian monk of the 4th century.

Three hundred years later, in the spring of  637, Caliphah Umar Ibn Al Khattab arrived in Jerusalem and delivered the famous pact, known as the Umariyya Covenant  العهدة العمرية, to its Patriarch Sophronius. It was not a strange encounter. They had been neighbors and had been frequent trading partners.   
With the spread of Islam, most Palestinians became Muslims but they never let go of their land-related places of reverence.
 

From 637 to 1917, for thirteen centuries, Palestine was ruled by Muslim rulers, with the exception of the Crusaders’ brief period.
In 1517, Palestine came under the Ottoman Muslim rule. In their rule of 400 years, they left us a well-documented legacy of land records, laws, habits and customs and remarkable beautiful architecture, especially in 250 buildings in Jerusalem.
 
Of these records, we have the Dafteri Mufassel, the Ottoman Tax Register, for the year 1596, which lists all villages in Greater Syria, which is today Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Transjordan.
We listed 997 villages in the area of Palestine, divided into Liwa (District), Nahiya (sub-district) and village. For each village, we have an estimate of the village population, their millet (religion), what crops and plants they grow and what tax they owed.
  On this basis, we created this Map.
 

It is a remarkable record. We could identify the same names of modern Palestine with slight phonetic Turkish accented variations.

The vast Muslim state, which extended to most of the known world, came under a new threat. Europe returned to the Arab East after 700 years since the Crusades.

This era was ushered by Napoleon’s Campaign in Egypt in 1798. Napoleon came to discover the world of Islam (even he declared himself as an Imam), and to discover his way to India. Three years before his campaign, Count Volney. travelled to Syria and Egypt and wrote a detailed book on the situation there, a kind of intelligence report, which was obligatory reading for Napoleon officers.  Although Napoleon’s campaign lasted only three years, it had a profound effect on the Arab East. He had with him 79 scholars who produced the famous Le Description de l’Egypt in 18 volumes.
 

 
One achievement stands out, A young surveyor by the name of Colonel Pierre Jacotin (1764-1829), produced the first scientifically charted map of Palestine’s coast.
  A flurry of activity followed. Travelers, priests, officers, surveyors, spies and artists descended upon Palestine, Syria and Egypt, drawing the landscape, writing books and charting maps.
   
The Germans were very active cartographers of Palestine. The maps by Van de Velde and Kiepert were very well known. Here is one Map named Palestina, dated 1864. It had on it the names of Palestine towns and villages with Crusaders' names underneath.

The French came back. The French scholar Victor Guerin visited Palestine in about 1860s and wrote 7 volumes about Palestinian villages and created maps.

If all these works were nostalgic memoirs of the Orient or reminisces of the Crusaders, they were the embers of a new colonial movement of another kind, which brought death and destruction to Palestine in the 20th century.

Here, a word of explanation about this movement is necessary.

This movement started in Russia, encouraged at one time by Napoleon, fed, raised and developed in England.

In the age of Emancipation, equal national citizenship rights for every citizen were affirmed.  But European Jews faced a dilemma. Russian Jews, in particular, escaping the Russian pogroms, wanted to immigrate to Western Europe and the USA but a small number of Jews wanted to keep the Ghetto bond and build a bigger ghetto (a nation) for them in another place, other than their home countries.

Support for this desire came from the Restoration Movement, known today as Christian- Evangelists, a Zionist movement, which wanted to ship European Jews to Palestine, disguised as a call to repatriate them to their “ancestral home”.

Lord Palmerston, a dominant figure in British foreign policy in the mid-19th century, championed the initiative. He envisioned Jews as an advance Western post to break the Ottoman Empire and serve British interests.  Seventy-five years later, Balfour formulated this same plan in the infamous Balfour Declaration.

These religious ideas bonded well with British colonial interests. It needed direct action. Hence, the Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF), under the patronage of Queen Victoria, was established in 1865. The ostensible aim was the geographical study of the Bible. In real terms, it had clear military objectives; seizing the Arab East from the hands of the Ottoman Empire.

The project named the Survey of Western Palestine was the most detailed study of Palestine until WWI.
Although the Survey was organized by PEF, a scholarly society, it was directed and financed by the British War Office and carried out by British Army Survey officers. Its maps were instrumental in Allenby’s Campaign to conquer Palestine in 1917.
The product of the Survey was 26 maps and 12 volumes about Palestine’s topography, archaeology, fauna and flora and special volumes about Jerusalem.
Because of the immense importance of this survey, we spent two decades studying the original documents of the Survey as they came from Palestine. We retrieved, by contract with PEF, the original field reports and maps. We made considerable corrections to the names and places in Arabic and English, added new data not published before and found 4000 new names over the reported 9000 names.

This work is now published as the Atlas of Palestine 1871- 1877, in 600 large pages.

 
This is the Atlas of Arab Palestine. There was not a single Jewish colony in Arab Palestine. We have 13,000 Palestinian Arab names to prove it. Palestine was NOT an empty land. 
The area covered from Litany River to Wadi Gaza.

 

The Akka Trace.

 

Atlas pages before and after. Index of 13,000 names in English and Arabic.

      

As you read through the pages of the British Survey you cannot help notice the spirit of the Crusades permeated the whole survey. The opening page of the first Memoir was adorned with the image of a Crusade Soldier.

 

It was not only an image. The PEF Memoirs are full of details about Crusader ruins, dates, names and the description of derelict places. It seems that their search was chasing the trail of the Crusaders’ failed attempt to conquer Palestine, an attempt to revive dead objects and dead memories.
If there was any doubt about the purpose of the Survey, the PEF President, the Archbishop of York, William Thompson, clarified the matter in his inaugural speech to the foundation. He said,

“This country of Palestine belongs to you and to me. It is essentially ours. … it is the land to which we may look upon, with as true patriotism as we do to this dear old England, which we love so much”.

This was hardly different from the speech given by Pope Urban II (27 November 1095) 800 years earlier, exhorting the quarrelling Lords of Europe to wage the Crusaders’ war. He said,

“Set out on the road to the Holy Sepulchre [in Jerusalem], take the land from that wicked people, and make it your own”.

Who were those wicked people? They were the people of the land, the Palestinians. The Survey made a thorough research of dead objects, but it failed to mention anything worthy about the living people, the people of the land who created 13,000 names, who lived in 2000 human settlements. It is clear by now the Survey was a prelude to the colonization of Palestine.

The British invaded Palestine in the spring of 1917. They failed twice to take Gaza, although they bombed it with poison Gaza canisters.

They tried another route.

I have a personal connection to this story. The British took a diversion, starting from my own land, Al Ma’in Abu Sitta, map  and marched all night through the wadi, attacked Beersheba unexpectedly and took it on the night of 31 October 1917.

Forty-eight hours later, Balfour issued his infamous Declaration.

On 9 December 1917, Allenby victoriously entered Jerusalem on foot.

 

That was two months after the infamous Balfour Declaration and 730 years to the day after Salah Ad Din Al Ayoubi liberated Jerusalem from the hands of the Crusader Lord Balian of Ibelin.

With this long history of Palestine, it boggles the mind how the West accepted the myth that Palestine is a Land without People.
After all the extensive surveys by the British, the French and the Germans, how can they accept the Zionist claim that Palestine was empty?
Look at this shameful travesty.

The Zionist Commission submitted THIS map to the 1919 Versailles Peace conference.

 

They called Palestine: an Empty Land, grazing land with roaming shepherds who took their sheep and went away.
With this kind of map, the League of Nations adopted the Balfour Declaration and gave Britain the Mandate over Palestine to establish “National Home for the Jews”.
When the Zionist Herbert Samuel, the first British High Commissioner, entered Palestine in July 1920, he found a different Palestine: a rich fertile country, it has a variety of seasons and variety of terrains, coast, mountain and valley.

 

In our Atlas of Palestine 1917- 1966.

 

we recorded full details of Palestine during the Mandate, during Al-Nakba and after.
This is Palestine, the fertile land with:
2177 wells, 3241 cisterns, 1713 springs, 75 water tanks, 424 water towers.
There were 1113 towns and villages in Palestine.

  

Under the British 185 Jewish colonies were planted. Where were they planted?
Let us look back at PEF Survey at the end of the 19th century.

  

The black dots are villages shown on the British PEF survey. You can see how densely populated Palestine was, especially in the hilly areas and the north. But there were widely spaced villages on the sandy dunes on the coast.
The Zionists had these maps. That is where they planted colonies, under British rule. Marj ibn Amer was another Zionist colony area, in the land shamefully sold by Sursouk family.
All these colonies were the staging points for the Haganah to conquer Palestine.
In 1948, 120,000 Zionist militia, in 9 brigades, in 31 military operations, conquered 78% of Palestine.

See the areas conquered at each date, the columns show the number of refugees expelled and the number of villages depopulated.
Two-thirds of the Palestinian people were expelled from 675 cities and villages.
This could not have happened without massacres. We recorded 156 massacres and atrocities in this period. Here is one in Burayr.

 

Here is another in Tantoura.

 

Here are the civilian captives in Ramleh in July 1948.

 

All the survivors were taken to concentration camps and forced labour camps. We recorded 17 forced labour camps, of those 5 were reported by the Red Cross.
We examined the pattern of these massacres, their date, region and location, Israeli brigade and their correlation with the expulsion of inhabitants.
Here is the pattern of massacres in the north of Palestine and the depopulated villages as a result.

 
The conclusion is damning. Massacres were a weapon of ethnic cleansing.
All these war crimes you have seen occurred BEFORE 15 My, before Israel was declared a state, under the nose of the British and before any Arab regular soldier entered Palestine. This was the Zionist invasion of Palestine.
When Palestine was emptied of its people, a whole new campaign of looting, plunder and destruction followed.
In a mass frenzy, new Jewish settlers, who just came from Europe from a smuggler’s ship, looted and plundered 500,000 houses, businesses, offices, banks and companies.
Then destruction started. The old quarter of Tiberias, 3500 years old was destroyed. So were old parts of Jaffa and Haifa.

 

The most dramatic is the destruction of villages in which Jesus Christ walked and lived, as they are immortalized by Eusebius in 313 AD.

This is a great crime against human heritage, against everything sacred to civilized human beings.
The destruction was systematic, planned and carefully executed over a long period, without any military necessity. Jewish orgs.

Now Palestine became empty.  Who took over their land? Two parties.
The new provisional govt of Israel and the Jewish National Fund. JNF is an international Jewish organization, registered in 53 countries, as charity, to serve the Environment !. In 1950, It immediately seized the land of 372 villages and planted 120 parks on them to hide the debris of the destroyed houses.

Palestinians became refugees,
What is the name of this tragedy? AL-NAKBA. 8 million today are refugees.

We recorded that the aftermath of Al-Nakba fully. What happened to these villages, who lives on them today, which colonization co took over their land, what are the remaining features of the villages.

This is in The Return Journey Atlas

IT IS NOT POSSIBLE  in this short talk to review the long history of Palestine. Instead, I highlighted some major stations since the time of Jesus Christ till the painful times in which we live today.
But this short review is enough to show us the rich and recorded history of Palestine.
It is a wonderful, astonishing record. It is much more than a general map of the country as a whole. It is a record of the smallest villages, of possibly 500 people in olden times, where people lived peacefully for centuries until the Zionist invasion destroyed their life.
Here is an example of one village: Ma’lul.

Ma’lul today is destroyed 2000. 1948 Nakba., 1871 late Ottoman.1596, 313 where Jesus walked, named Naahlol.
Now that we have these records, what shall we do with them?
The answer is clear RESTORING PALESTINE of course.
Restoring Palestine is a sacred duty. It is legal by all articles of international law. And it is doable.  We will illustrate that.
First, we have to chart the map of the Future Palestine. What does it look like?
Three elements should be examined.

 

1. The people
2. The land
3. The applicable laws
The land and the law are sufficiently documented.
It is the population that we need to examine carefully.
They consist of: the remaining Palestinians in Israel and the refugees who have the Right to Return. Then there is the existing settler Jewish population.
The Palestinians now are 13 million. Half of them are on Palestine soil. A similar number of Jews are there.
Two-thirds of Palestinians are refugees. We have enough data on both. 
The question now is this:
If the international law is solidly behind the Right of Return
And if the Palestinians have never dropped their Right of Return
Can they physically return?
The Europeans tell me: How can you do that without creating a Jewish Nakba?
That is an immoral or perhaps a racist question. If a burglar shoots his way into your house and kills your father and throws your mother out of her house, then brings his cousins into your house, should you give him your house and you remain in a refugee camp?   
The answer is clearly NO.
Nevertheless, I am going to show you that this question is unnecessary.

Present Palestinian Population Distribution in Palestine
Present occupants of Village lands

The maps show that, excluding the Beer Sheba district, there are 246 Palestinian village lands which have no Jews today and 272 village lands which have few Jews, less than 5000 Jews in total. These village lands are shown green. Beer Sheba district is practically empty save for repopulated Palestinian cities.

Jewish land during the Mandate is shown in blue and it is today fully populated.

Cities whether mixed or not are shown in brown. Unlike depopulated Palestinian villages, which were totally destroyed by Israel, destruction in cities was limited to old quarters. Cities have expanded due to the influx of immigrants. Many still retain a sizable number of Palestinians.

The Palestinian village lands which have more than 30,000 Jews are shown dotted.
They are few and are naturally adjacent to Jewish areas.
Where is the Jewish concentration?
Dark blue circles
So if we now repopulate Palestinian villages' red points by the return of the refugees, we do not find any appreciable problem.
From the above, it is clear there is no demographic problem in the return of refugees.
In addition, there are no legal, geographical and historical reasons to prevent return except one major obstacle. That is Zionist racist policies and Apartheid.
Jewish Israeli Population Distribution Sect 0
Jews live in 924 localities with a total population of 5,509,778 (2008) within the armistice line of 1949. The distribution of those localities is revealing. Only 14 of those localities have a population of over 100,000 and 12 have a population between 50 and 100,000, and 29 localities between 20 and 50,000. That means that 87% percent of Jews live in 55 localities or five percent of the total number of localities. The area they occupy is 1400 km2 or 6% of Israel’s area. It is interesting to observe that this area where the majority live now is almost the same area they lived in during the British Mandate.
The remaining settlements are very small. For example, the kibbutz and moshav population is 390,542 living in 638 settlements excluding the Beer Sheba district. The original purpose of these small settlements was actually to hold and set roots in the refugees’ land to prevent their return. The original kibbutz consisted of 30-50 soldiers in a fortified military post who act as farmers in peacetime and act as garrison base in unsettled times. The kibbutz and moshav’s contribution to agriculture does not exceed 1.5 percent of Israel's GDP, while at the same time they consume 70 percent of water.
End of Sect 0
Is our analysis correct? How come we did not know before, that most of the refugee land is still empty?
Nobody was ever told that. In fact, the Israelis denied it vehemently.
Land use:

 

But the Israelis knew that, at least 25 years ago, since Oslo. They made a study in 1995 by 250 Israeli experts, entitled Israel 2020.
Thus, it is possible to implement the return of the refugees without major displacement to the present occupants. 

Reconstruction of Destroyed Villages
The refugees would now return to their villages. They would find them destroyed.
What can we do about that?
First,  we know everything about them. Here is one case, Qula in Ramleh District.
Locating Qula:
First, we identify Qula from our database. Locating on map:
• 1948— 250k, 100k, 20k
• after 1948: 1955 20k, 1960 100k, 2000 50k.


Where are the refugees from Qula?

They are mostly in Jordan. We know in which camp they are now. We know the route of Return.

But there is a human side to this story, like every story of millions of other Palestinians.

A family named Qalalwa lives in Muzdar camp in Jordan. The grandfather tells his children about their home in Qula.  This is the virtual return route of Qalalwa family.
 
Here is the aerial photo of their village. They find their house destroyed.

The granddaughter Arwa is graduating as a young Architect. She participated in our annual competition for the reconstruction of destroyed villages and got a prize. Her first job is to rebuild her family house in Qula and reconstruct the whole village.

We repeated that for many other villages and will continue to do that.

The cost of repatriation can be estimated from this table:
 
The monetary amount needed is relatively small and can be offset by compensation to which the Palestinians are entitled since Al-Nakba.

Reconstruction of destroyed villages can be carried out by Palestinian engineers and labor quite easily since many of them have built larger projects in the Gulf.

It is worth noting the cost of reconstruction is a small fraction of the US aid to Israel. Moreover, this cost of construction will be incurred only once, not annually as in the case of aid to Israel.

UNRWA, with its predominantly Palestinian staff, should be able to supervise the repatriation. It takes 6 to 8 years.

The only condition, for this plan to succeed, a non-negotiable condition, a compulsory condition, is that
occupation, racism, Apartheid or discrimination or any such ideology or practice must be totally abolished.

Conclusion:
So here we are.
We charted some stations on the historical record of Palestine in 2000 years. Few European capitals today can match this record.

Yet Palestine was described as a Land without People, by those same people who charted and studied every corner of it.

Their aim was clear. To declare that its people were Natives, unworthy, unimportant, and they should be wiped out, either physically, or politically and culturally.

The first milestone of the destruction of Palestine was the advent of the British survey of Palestine. The actual destruction started with the Balfour Declaration in 1917. In the thirty years of the Mandate, Israel was founded.  

Israel committed the historical crime of Al-Nakba. Palestine has not seen anything like it in its 4000year history.
 
To achieve that and keep at it till today, the Zionists waged ten kinds of different wars against the Palestinians:
Military, historical, geographical, archaeological, religious, political, legal, economic, defamation and deception campaigns. No colonial power had to wage so many different wars on defenseless people.
They did not succeed, at least not fully. Palestinians today are 13 million, half of them are on Palestine soil.  They plan for their future in their homeland, Palestine.
They have not forgotten. They have not surrendered.  They have not given up.
Palestine will rise from the ashes.
 
This child will return home.
 

END