RAMALLAH, Palestine
A veteran Palestinian geographer has urged Palestinian scientific institutions to pay more attention to the documentation of geographical sites in historic Palestine.
"All efforts to document the names of Palestinian villages and cities were done by individuals, and none of the projects initiated by official institutions ever saw the light," Kamal Abdel-Fattah, a Birzeit University geography professor, told Anadolu Agency.
According to the scientist, there are 70,000 geographical sites, including villages, areas, cities and towns across Palestine, of which only 30,000 sites had been documented by individual Palestinian geographers.
"That means that there are over 40,000 sites that remain undocumented, which should be swiftly addressed," said Abdel-Fattah, who is considered an authority on the geography of Palestine.
"I have personally documented 22,000 sites which I know and have visited myself," he added.
Abdel-Fattah said that he had conducted over 70 field trips across Palestine, including lands that are now part of Israel.
The roots of the Palestine-Israel conflict date back to 1917, when the British government, in the now-famous "Balfour Declaration," called for the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.
In 1948, with the expiry of a UN "mandate" awarded earlier to Great Britain, a new state – Israel – was declared inside historical Palestine.
As a result, some 700,000 Palestinians fled their homes, or were forcibly expelled, while hundreds of Palestinian villages and cities were razed to the ground by invading Jewish forces.
Abdel-Fattah lamented poor attention to the documentation of Palestine sites by Palestinian institutions, unlike what the Jews did.
He recalled that almost two decades before the establishment of Israel, the Jewish Agency, which was responsible for the immigration of Jews from different world countries to Palestine, had established a special committee to give Jewish names to areas and landmarks inside Palestine.
Abdel-Fattah noted that the Palestinian Authority, meanwhile, established a national committee tasked with naming the geographical sites in Palestine only in 2010.
"It was a dream that has been long overdue," he said.
Abdel-Fattah, the prominent geographer, refuted claims that Palestinians had sold their lands to Jewish groups.
He asserted that until 1916, Jews had only owned one percent of Palestinian lands through purchases from foreign consulates back then.
"For a Palestinian, his land is his honor," asserted Abdel-Fattah. "There was no chance that Palestinians would give up or sell their lands."
"No land has been lost without blood and fighting," he insisted.
Abdel-Fattah underlined the need for a central independent institution to complete the documentation of all sites inside Palestine.
"If we cannot retrieve Palestine, at least we can keep Palestine alive in our hearts," he said, quoting fellow historian Saleh Abdel-Gawwad.
