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.[1] It established the Palestine grid.[2] 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.[3]
The maps produced by the survey have been widely used in "Palestinian refugee cartography" by scholars documenting the 1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight;[4] notably in Salman Abu Sitta's Atlas of Palestine and Walid Khalidi's All That Remains.[4][5] In 2019 the maps were used as the basis for Palestine Open Maps, supported by the Bassel Khartabil Free Culture Fellowship.[6]