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 forthcoming Jewish State. This department became the Survey of Israel. The maps produced by the survey have been widely used in "Palestinian refugee cartography" by scholars documenting the 1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight; notably in Salman Abu Sitta's Atlas of Palestine and Walid Khalidi's All That Remains. In 2019 the maps were used as the basis for Palestine Open Maps, supported by the Bassel Khartabil Free Culture Fellowship.
History
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. 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. 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". The national triangulation framework had been completed by 1930, consisting of 105 major points and c.20,000 lower-order points. 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. 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" 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. 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. 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.
Land disputes 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:
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