Sunday, June 17, 2018

Mapping My Return: A Palestinian Memoir 1st Edition by Salman Abu Sitta(The American University in Cairo Press)





A often childish  tantrum of a book. The author longs unrealistically for his lost world of feudal privilege and for the many Palestinian servants who worked on the land his family had long ago been granted as an Ottoman fief. This book could be valuable only as psychopathology. It shines a light into the mentality of the Palestinian upper crust, the so called "leading families" that oppressed the Arab masses before 1948 and continue to be a selfish and oblivious obstacle to the achievement of their wishes and dreams ever since.

Salman Abu Sitta was just ten years old when the Nakba-the mass expulsion of Palestinians in 1948-happened, forcing him from his home near Beersheba. Like many Palestinians of his generation, this traumatic loss and his enduring desire to return would be the defining features of his life from that moment on.

Abu Sitta vividly evokes the vanished world of his family and home on the eve of the Nakba, giving a personal and very human face to the dramatic events of 1930s and 1940s Palestine as Zionist ambitions and militarization expanded under the British mandate. He chronicles his life in exile, from his family's flight to Gaza, his teenage years as a student in Nasser's Egypt, his formative years in 1960s London, his life as a family man and academic in Canada, to several sojourns in Kuwait. Abu Sitta's long and winding journey has taken him through many of the seismic events of the era, from the 1956 Suez War to the 1991 Gulf War.

This rich and moving memoir is imbued throughout with a burning sense of justice and a determination to recover and document what rightfully belongs to his people, given expression in his groundbreaking mapping work on his homeland. Abu Sitta, with warmth and wit, tells his story and that of Palestine.

About the Author

Salman Abu Sitta was born in 1937 in Ma'in Abu Sitta, in the Beersheba district of mandate Palestine. An engineer by profession, he is best known for his cartographic work on Palestine and his work on the Palestinian Right of Return. He is the author of six books and over 300 articles and papers on Palestine, including The Atlas of Palestine, 1917-1966 (2010). He is the founder and president of the Palestine Land Society.

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