Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Landscape - Softcover

Shehadeh, Raja

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1416569669 ISBN 13: 9781416569664

Publisher: Scribner, 2008

Synopsis

“A rare historical insight into the tragic changes taking place in Palestine.” —Jimmy Carter

From one of Palestine’s leading writers, a lyrical, elegiac account of one man’s wanderings through the landscape he loves—once pristine, now forever changed by settlements and walls—updated with a new afterword by the author.

“I often come to walk in these hills,” I said to the man who was doing all the talking and seemed to be the commander. “In fact I was once here with my wife, it was 1999, and some of your soldiers shot at us.”

“It was over on that side,” the soldier pointed out. “I was there,” he said, smiling.

When Raja Shehadeh first started hill walking in Palestine, in the late 1970s, he was not aware that he was traveling through a vanishing landscape. In recent years, his hikes have become less than bucolic and sometimes downright dangerous. That is because his home is Ramallah, on the Palestinian West Bank, and the landscape he traverses is now the site of a tense standoff between his fellow Palestinians and settlers newly arrived from Israel.

In this original and evocative book, we accompany Raja on six walks taken between 1978 and 2006. The earlier forays are peaceful affairs, allowing our guide to meditate at length on the character of his native land, a terrain of olive trees on terraced hillsides, luxuriant valleys carved by sacred springs, carpets of wild iris and hyacinth and ancient monasteries built more than a thousand years ago. Shehadeh's love for this magical place saturates his renderings of its history and topography. But latterly, as seemingly endless concrete is poured to build settlements and their surrounding walls, he finds the old trails are now impassable and the countryside he once traversed freely has become contested ground. He is harassed by Israeli border patrols, watches in terror as a young hiking companion picks up an unexploded missile and even, on one occasion when accompanied by his wife, comes under prolonged gunfire.

Amid the many and varied tragedies of the Middle East, the loss of a simple pleasure such as the ability to roam the countryside at will may seem a minor matter. But in Palestinian Walks, Raja Shehadeh's elegy for his lost footpaths becomes a heartbreaking metaphor for the deprivations of an entire people estranged from their land.

About this title

About the Author

Raja Shehadeh is one of Palestine’s leading writers. He is also a lawyer and the founder of the pioneering Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq. Shehadeh is the author of several acclaimed books including Strangers in the House; Occupation Diaries; the Orwell Prize–winning Palestinian Walks; and We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I, a finalist for the 2023 National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. In 2022, he was named an International Writer of the Royal Society of Literature. He lives in Ramallah, Palestine.

Reviews

Starred Review. In 60 years of fighting, Israelis and Palestinians often seem to ignore the pernicious impact that decades of warfare have had on the contested land itself. Not so Palestinian human rights lawyer and avid walker Shehadeh (Strangers in the House), who has spent most of his adult life watching the West Bank—territory recognized internationally as part of a future Palestinian state—carved up by Israeli roads and settlements. The region's vistas have been a distant second consideration to the needs of Israeli nationalism and security concerns, perceived and real. Shehadeh's memoir is profoundly pained, his anguish over Israeli occupation policies palpable, as he lovingly sketches a landscape that is rapidly disappearing. Our land was being transformed before our eyes, he writes, and a new map was being drawn.... We had become temporary residents of Greater Israel. The son of Aziz Shehadeh, the first Palestinian to call publicly for a two-state solution, Shehadeh's anger isn't reserved only for Israeli occupation policies—he also rails against Palestinian negotiators he believes favor political expediency over territorial integrity or environmental concerns—and he searches genuinely for common ground with Israelis. Ultimately, though, Shehadeh is too honest to offer much hope, comforting himself only with the understanding that human realities come and go, but the land remains. (June)
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A work of passionate polemic, journeying, history, and autobiography, this highly original consideration of the Palestinian-Israeli issue is structured around a series of vigorous, attentive hikes through the occupied territories. Shehadeh, a lawyer and human-rights activist who lives in the West Bank city of Ramallah, gives the reader, accustomed to the point-counterpoint of daily journalism, a personal sense of one man’s attachment to his land and of a people’s feelings of loss and uncertainty as more settlements are constructed and reconciliation drifts farther from view. Shehadeh is firm in his views of Israeli policy, but he is also an open soul, and his final walk in the book is with an Israeli––a moving encounter in a volume that, in the Palestinian literature of hope and fortitude, ranks with Sari Nusseibeh’s memoir, "Once Upon a Country."
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Shehadeh—a Palestinian lawyer, human-rights advocate, and highly praised author—writes from Ramallah about the disappearing landscape of his childhood. In a series of hikes around the surrounding hills, an area he is intimately familiar with, Shehadeh explains how the relentless construction of Israeli settlements and roads is not only eradicating the possibility for Palestine to posses enough contiguous land to ever develop a state but also destroying the countryside for Arab and Jew alike. Having argued numerous land-claims suits, Shehadeh removes the Palestinian-Israeli conflict from political terror headlines and recasts it as a battle that encompasses countless environmental issues. The very nature of community is challenged here, as are the most basic questions of land ownership. He laments the Oslo Accords and expresses acute disappointment with the PLO leadership’s acquiescence to settlement development in exchange for political power. In all, a stirring and eye-opening work by a man motivated by a deep love for the ground he walks, and despair for its vanishing future. A final exchange between Shehadeh and a Jewish settler is particularly riveting. --Colleen Mondor

Edition details

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1416569669
• ISBN 13: 9781416569664
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224