This study examines the transformations of the Palestinian map in cultural and political imagery since the beginnings of the Palestinian national project’s collapse, in 1974, until the admittance of Palestine as a non-member observer state in the United Nations, in 2012. The paper conceptually, technically, and aesthetically analyzes the various manifestations of the fragmentation of the Palestinian map, and how its representation has been deformed in Palestinian political and artistic expression. This investigation of the shifts in the Palestinian map’s representation in political discourse points to the heavy toll of political realism, which imagined a solution to the “Palestinian question” through the establishment of a state along the 1967 ceasefire line. However, examining the transformations of the map in Palestinian artistic discourse opens up the possibility for surpassing that political realism toward an “aesthetic realism” that proposes a cultural vision for the resolution of the Palestinian cause. This centers around the 1948 Nakba as a conjunctural, foundational, and self-referencing system: an identity, a memory, and a map.