Palestine A Four Thousand Year History by Nur Masalha

We have there [in Palestine] a land teeming with fertility and rich in history, but almost without an inhabitant – a country without a people, and look! Scattered over the world, a people without a country. (Lord Shaftesbury, Chairman of the Palestine Exploration Fund, Palestine Exploration Fund, Quarterly Statement for 1875, London, 1875, p. 116)

Central to the Victorian ‘peaceful’ Crusader revivalism of the 19th century and the successful opening of the ‘Holy Land’ to Europe’s geo-political and cultural-religious penetration was the British Palestine Exploration Fund and ‘Ordnance Survey of Western Palestine’ between 1871 and 1877. British scientific and technological advances in cartography and cadastral mapping were fully harnessed for empire and imperial expansionism in the Middle East.

Ordnance Survey (OS) is the national mapping agency of Britain and is one of the largest producers of maps in the world. The British official agency’s name indicates its original military and strategic purposes and its origins go back to the mapping of Scotland in the aftermath of the Jacobite uprising of 1745 and the absence of military maps and detailed knowledge of the Scottish Highlands. The British were not the first to conduct instrumental strategic mapping of Palestine. The first modern maps of Palestine, based on an instrumental survey and using the most developed scientific instruments of the time, had already been produced by Colonel Pierre Jacotin, a French map-maker and Director of the French Survey Military Corps during Napoleon’s expedition in Egypt and Palestine, who in 1799, on Napoleon’s orders, prepared dozens of secret maps of Egypt, Sinai and Palestine. Six of those maps show parts of Palestine, especially the parts of the country through which Napoleon’s army marched in February to June 1799. Jacotin continued to work on these maps after he returned to France and they were eventually published in 1826, and became widely known as the ‘Jacotin Atlas’, labelling Palestine in French and Arabic as ‘Palestine or Holy Land’/‘land of al-Quds’ فلسطين أو أرض قدس) ) (also Khatib 2003; Karmon 1960: 155–173, 244–253).

This cartographer representation of Palestine by the French would also find strong echoes in the establishment and naming of the autonomous administrative province of al-Quds: متصرفية القدس الشريف (Mutasarrifate of Noble Jerusalem) by the Ottomans fifty years later, in 1872 (see pp. 259-260). The ‘Jacotin Map of Palestine’, surveyed during Napoleon’s campaign in 1799, was also later published by the Palestine Exploration Fund (Kallner 1944). British colonial ambitions in late 19th century Palestine and the lack of detailed British military maps of the area were two of the key factors behind the formation of the British Palestine Exploration Fund and ‘British Ordnance Survey of Western Palestine’ in the 1870s.

As we shall see in chapter ten, the Israeli toponymic projects in the post-1948 period had their foundations in the de-Arabisation activities of James Finn and the biblical explorations in the 1870s by members of the Palestine Exploration Fund whose work, Names and Places in the Old and New Testament and Apocrypha: with their modern identifications (compiled by George Armstrong; revised by Sir Charles W. Wilson and Major C. R.

Conder 1889), was central to British colonial toponymic projects in Palestine in the late 19th and first half of the 20th century.

The systematic mapping, surveying and place-naming projects, which reached their peak with the British Ordnance Survey of Western Palestine between 1871 and 1877, were largely strategic. The sacredness of Palestine was not a sufficiently convincing reason for the British to organise and finance such surveys. The main motive for mapping the country as a whole was its strategic and geo-political importance for the British Empire, which was then engaged in international struggles over the Middle East (Goren 2002:

87–110). However, the surveys and mapping of the British Royal Engineering Corp in the 1870s led subsequently to the growth of proto-Jewish Zionism.

The British Palestine Exploration Fund was founded in 1865 by a group of biblical scholars, scriptural geographers, military and intelligence officers and Protestant clergymen, most notably the Dean of Westminster Abbey, Arthur P. Stanley. Its ‘scientific exploration’ was coordinated very closely with the British politico-military establishment and intelligence community anxious to penetrate Ottoman Palestine, a country ruled by the Muslim ‘sick man of Europe’. With offices in central London, the PEF today is an active organisation which publishes an academic journal, the Palestine Exploration Quarterly. In addition, the PEF presents public lectures and funds research projects in the Near East. According to its website, ‘Between 1867 and 1870 Captain Warren carried out the explorations in Palestine which form the basis for our knowledge of the topography of ancient Jerusalem and the archaeology of the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sherif [sic]’; ‘In addition to his explorations on, under, and around the Temple Mount/ al-Haram al-Sherif, Warren surveyed the Plain of Philistia and carried out a very important [military] reconnaissance of central Jordan’.7 Captain (later General Sir) Charles Warren (1840–1927) of the British Royal Engineers, one of the key officers of the PEF, who was sent to map the ‘scriptural topography’ of Jerusalem and investigate ‘the site of the temple’, noted:

‘[British] King Consul [James Finn] rules supreme, not over the natives of the city, but over strangers; but yet these strangers for the most part are the rightful owners, the natives, for the most part, are usurpers’ (Shepherd 1987: 127–128). Both Warren and the (above-mentioned) long-serving and famous British Consul, Finn, who was a restorationist Christian Zionist involved with the ‘Mission to the Jews’ (Shepherd 1987: 110), apparently ‘literally burrowed’ beneath the Muslim shrines in Jerusalem to chart the ‘original dimensions’ of the ‘Temple Mount’. The biblical archaeology and toponymic projects of Warren and the Royal Engineers have remained basic data for many Israeli archaeologists, geographers and strategic planners of today (Shepherd 1987: 195; Benvenisti 2002: 11–27).

Following in the footsteps of the PEF, the British Mandatory authorities in Palestine set out to gather toponymic information from the local Palestinian population. The British drive to present European colonialism as a continuation of an ancient Jewish ownership of the land meant that place names in Palestine became a site of fierce contest between the European Zionist settler-colonisers and the indigenous Palestinians. Palestinian Arab names were (and continued to be) ‘unnamed’ and Hebraicised by the Zionists using a colonising strategy based on Old Testament names.

Local Palestinian place names were deemed ‘redeemed’ and liberated when they were rendered from Arabic into Hebrew (Slyomovics 1998, 2002). The genealogy of British colonial name commissions and the Zionist Hebrew renaming project, which began in the 19th century, lingered under the British colonial system in Palestine (al-Shaikh 2010) and were accelerated dramatically after the Nakba and the expansion of biblical and archaeological departments at Israeli universities.