The Survey of Palestine was the government department responsible for the survey and mapping of Palestine during the British mandate period.
The survey department was established in 1920 in Jaffa, and moved to the outskirts of Tel Aviv in 1931. It established the Palestine grid. In early 1948, the British Mandate appointed a temporary Director General of the Survey Department for the impending Jewish State; this became the Survey of Israel.[1]
The maps produced by the survey have been widely used in "Palestinian refugee cartography" by scholars documenting the 1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight;[2] notably in Salman Abu Sitta's Atlas of Palestine and Walid Khalidi's All That Remains.[2] [3] In 2019 the maps were used as the basis for Palestine Open Maps, supported by the Bassel Khartabil Free Culture Fellowship.[4]
Prior to the beginning of the Mandate for Palestine, the British had carried out two significant surveys of the region: the PEF Survey of Palestine between 1872 and 1880, and a series of small-scale maps developed by General Allenby's Royal Engineers for the 1915–18 Sinai and Palestine campaign. The Geographical Section of the War Office (G.S.G.S.), together with the Survey of Egypt, produced regional maps extending to Syria and Transjordan (scales 1:125,000, 1:250,000), copies of the PEF maps overprinted with revisions, and local maps, usually in the scale of 1:40,000.[5] [6]
Immediately following the start of the Occupied Enemy Territory Administration, the Zionist Organization began to pressure the British authorities to immediately begin the cadastral survey of the land, to facilitate Jewish land purchase in Palestine.[7] The Zionist Organization wanted to use the results of the survey work to identify land open for Jewish settlement and the strategies needed to acquire it, whether it was privately owned, state land or other types of land. The Survey was initially resisted by the Palestinian Arab population, who considered it to be an attempt to sell their land from underneath them, given the differences between Ottoman land laws, customary land law and the new system which required "absolute proof of ownership".[7]
The national triangulation framework had been completed by 1930, consisting of 105 major points and 20,000 lower-order points.[8] The 1:10,000 survey was completed in 1934, followed by the 1:2,500 property survey for Land Settlement; these surveys formed the basis for the published 1:20,000 and 1:100,000 topographical series.[9]
In 1940 the department no longer had responsibility for adjudicating land settlement claims, and began to focus fully on the survey work. The February 1940 Land Transfer Regulations had divided Palestine into three regions with different restrictions on land sales applying to each. In Zone "A," which included the hill-country of Judea as a whole, certain areas in the Jaffa sub-District, and in the Gaza District, and the northern part of the Beersheba sub-District, new agreements for sale of land other than to a Palestinian Arab were forbidden without the High Commissioner's permission. In Zone "B," which included the Jezreel Valley, eastern Galilee, a parcel of coastal plain south of Haifa, a region northeast of the Gaza District, and the southern part of the Beersheba sub-District, sale of land by a Palestinian Arab was forbidden except to a Palestinian Arab with similar exceptions. In the "free zone," which consisted of Haifa Bay, the coastal plain from Zikhron Ya'akov to Yibna, and the neighborhood of Jerusalem, there were no restrictions. The reason given for the regulations was that the Mandatory was required to "ensur[e] that the rights and positions of other sections of the population are not prejudiced," and an assertion that "such transfers of land must be restricted if Arab cultivators are to maintain their existing standard of life and a considerable landless Arab population is not soon to be created"[10]
By the 1947–1949 Palestine war, the Survey of Palestine had finalized topographical maps for all of the country except the southern Negev, although it had confirmed land title in less than 20% of the country, specifically in the areas of Jewish settlement. A cadastral survey was not carried out in the areas which would become the West Bank until after 1948; a situation which caused significant challenges in subsequent years.
The department grew significantly throughout the mandate period: it began with 46 professionals in 1921, of which 25 were recruited from outside Palestine, and by 1942 had 215 professionals, with only 11 recruited from outside Palestine. The Survey of Palestine printed 1,800 maps and plans in 1926, 19,000 in 1929, 64,000 in 1933 and 100,000 in 1939. There were two schools for training Palestinian and Arab surveyors, one in Jenin that operated for one year starting 1942, and the other in Nazareth that opened in 1944.[11]
In early 1948, temporary Directors General of the Survey Department were appointed for each of the proposed "Jewish State" and "Arab State" under the terms of the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine, and the pre-existing files and maps were to be shared.[12] However, during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, British lorries delivering the "Arab state" portion of their maps were diverted back to Tel Aviv. Today, the historical maps are held at the Survey of Israel, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development and Israeli Ministry of Defense archives.
In 1937, then Commissioner of Lands and Surveys, Lieutenant Colonel F. J. Salmon, described the importance of the department's work with respect to allowing land purchases:
In the Ottoman days, a title to a piece of land in Palestine was a very vague document. There was no survey, recording shape, area or position; the description was usually, to say the least of it, ambiguous, and the extent which was the gauge for taxation, was almost invariably falsified to save the pocket of the owner. Big blocks were, and in areas where there has been no land settlement, still are, shared by large numbers of owners who have no defined boundaries and who often alter the position of their plots from year to year… To purchase land from a title owner, or worse still, from an occupier who had no title, was a very uncertain business, and often still is. The difficulty, however, is now being solved, though very slowly, by Land Settlement… The claims are recorded and examined by Palestinian Assistant Settlement Officers, while cases of dispute are heard by British Land Settlement Officers… Even in areas that are not under Settlement, a land-owner can apply for an authoritative registration of title on a modern survey, but if there is a dispute, this has to be settled by the Land Court, a much slower, more expensive and laborious proceeding than an investigation and judgment by a Settlement Officer.
The Mandate government laws regulated and empowered surveying, surveyors, and survey fees.
The first headquarters – in early 1920 – were based in Gaza City; they moved to Jaffa just a few months later. On 1 January 1931 a purpose-built building was opened to house the department at the southern end of a 30acres plot near the German Templar colony on the outskirts of Tel Aviv (the location can be seen on this 1930 map). The location of the headquarters in the coastal plain favored for Zionist settlement, together with the fact that all other offices of the Mandate Government were in Jerusalem, have been said to emphasize "the strong link between the cadastral survey of Palestine and Zionist motives". Proposals to move the office to Jerusalem were raised in 1925, 1928 and 1935, but to no avail.
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"Contrary to general practice in which country surveys started with topographical maps to describe the earth surface, there was a great rush to produce cadastral maps. The aim was to undertake “legal examination of the validity of all land title deeds in Palestine," in Weizmann's words. Thus, the extent and identity of private land ownership would be determined. All else would be "state or waste land," open for Jewish settlement… This meant that the mandate government effectively held all land in Palestine under its control and released only those lots for which the owner provided absolute proof of ownership. Since much land was held by Custom Law – by long-term recognition of ownership – or held in common ownership or used for grazing or woods, this system, and particularly the Zionist motives behind it, was resisted by the Palestinians, to the extent of chasing the surveyors away or destroying their equipment."
"The whole country except for the Beersheba sub-district had, by 1934, been surveyed without contours on 1/10,000 scale for fiscal purposes. These surveys formed the basis for a 1/20,000 (and 1/100,000) topographical series for which contours were compiled from new work. Prior to 1940 the published 1/20,000 sheets, numbering some 45, covered only the coastal plain… virtually the whole settled area north of the latitude of Beersheba had, by 1948, been covered with about 150 sheets."