The Survey of Palestine (1920 - 1948) was a department of the government of the British Mandate of Palestine that surveyed and mapped Palestine. Established in 1920, the Survey moved from Jaffa to Tel Aviv in 1931. The Zionist Organization (now the World Zionist Organization) pressured the Survey to begin triangulation surveys of Palestine from its creation with the goal of using the surveys to identify land in Palestine that the Organization could acquire. For this reason, Palestinian Arabs resisted the Survey's efforts, since they viewed its projects as efforts to sell their land out from under them. The survey completed the national triangulation framework in 1930 and the 1:10,000 survey in 1934. In 1940 the government relieved the Survey of its responsibility to adjudicate land settlement claims, which allowed the department to focus on surveying. The department had finalized topographical maps for all of Palestine except the southern Negev by the 1947-1949 Palestine war. The British Mandate appointed a temporary Director General of the Survey Department for the both the forthcoming 'Jewish State and 'Arab State' in early 1948 under the terms of the United National Partition Plan for Palestine.
