Salman Abu Sitta was born in 1937 in Ma‘in Abu Sitta, in the Beersheba district of mandate Palestine. He left his homeland when he was 10. His family’s farm estate and village were destroyed in 1948.
“My mission is to restore Palestine to its place in the records by accurately rendering the map.”
His book "Mapping My Return: A Palestinian Memoir" (AUC Press, 2016) vividly evokes the vanished world of his family and home from the late nineteenth century to the eve of the British withdrawal from Palestine and subsequent war.
He is the author of six other books, 300 articles and papers on Palestine, including "The Atlas of Palestine, 1917–1966" (2010).
Through painstaking cartographic and archival work on Palestine, he has single-handedly made available crucial mapping work on Palestine.
He is also the founder and president of the Palestine Land Society.