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Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Landscape

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I've walked in Israel and the West Bank before the Intifadas, before the barriers, and subsequently tried to make some sense of the mistakes and the historical horror show that has occurred. I think that the Arabic term "al Naqba", the catastrophe, truly best states what has happened, and what continues for all those who live there.
For everyone who shares the author's love of the land or has any respect for human dignity, this book will make you despair over the tragedy of it all.
Some books on the subject have challenged me, all have upset me, but none have effected me as viscerally as these personal ruminations on the irretrievable loss of the landscape itself.
It's beautifully written. Read it and weep.

An extraordinary book describing the desecration of Palestine by the Israeli government. It is a poignant memoir of a time past, beautifully written and pregnant with emotion.

None of the dozens of books I have read about Palestine approaches this in its depth and thoughtfulness. This is not a history of who did this, and who did that. Rather it is a personal story about the connection of one Palestinian man to the fast changing natural landscape of the land he inhabits. This could be read as a travel book documenting journeys into the Biblical landscape. What makes it deeper than that is the inner journeys the author is not afraid to share with us as he takes us on the walk. The book is informed by Shihadeh's decades of knowledge of the land, as well as his legal experience in defending it. It is a small book that is very heavy in content, thought, and feeling.

Raja Shehadeh's writing brings the land of Palestine to life. Excellent. I could not put this book down. Everyone who cares about the mideast should read this book. As other reviewers have said, What a tragedy that this landscape is disappearing.

On a positive note, this book is a real treat to the senses. The beauty of the land comes to life. very, very good!

...what will be left, I believe, is topology: the dreaming memory of the land as it lay this way and that."

So said Annie Dillard, at the beginning of her autobiography, "An American Childhood." Others have felt the same way, from Cezanne's obsession with Mont St. Victoire, to even myself, and the light on a certain mountain in Vietnam's Binh Dinh province, which I hoped to be able to recall clearly, 25 years after my first encounter with it. Shehadeh's sentiments are strongly similar; he has a deep attachment to the land of his birth, how it lays this way and that. In his first of six stories in this book, he introduces the concept of "sarha," an Arabic word that means to roam freely, at will, without restraint. Throughout his life he has enjoyed taking long hikes in his native hills; his prose reflects this profoundly moving and therapeutic pleasure. Unlike Pittsburgh, or Provence, or even south central Vietnam, the topography that has given Shehadeh so much pleasure is rapidly changing, the result of individuals who believe they have a higher priority right to the land, and reinforce their belief with endless concrete, leveling hilltops for their settlements, and paving roads straight through them, instead of following the contours. At the same time they are building walls, more walls, more barriers that restrict Shehadeh, and his fellow Palestinians' access to the land of their birth. Though he does not literally say it, the entire book echoes, with a slight paraphrase, the words of Ronald Reagan: "Mr. Netanyahu, tear down these walls."

Each of the six stories is solid, and well-written, but my favorite is the second one, "The Albina Case." Shehadeh is a lawyer, and he has been at the forefront in the losing battle of attempting to use the law, Israeli law, to prevent the seizure of Palestinian land for settlement by Israeli colonists. Albina was one of the first cases, one of the strongest in the sense that much paperwork existed, including maps, that showed Albina was the rightful owner. But what can be done in the face of the law which might be dubbed "even if we are wrong, we are still really right." Article 5 of Military Order 58 says: "Any transaction carried out in good faith between the Custodian of Absentee Property and any other person, concerning property which the Custodian believed when he entered into the transaction to be abandoned property, will not be void and will continue to be valid even if it were proved that the property was not at that time abandoned property." (p. 81-82) Shehadeh even documents the case of the land of an individual Jew, living on the West Bank prior to 1967, being seized, for the Jewish people in general. Such is the logic, and inconsistencies of Zionism. The author provides convincing evidence that the actions of the Israeli government are all part of an overall plan for the settlement of the West Bank, reducing the Palestinians to isolated and easily managed enclaves. Bantustans? Shehadeh says: "Religious practice in the Land of the Bible tends to encourage exclusivity and discrimination rather than love and magnanimity. There is no place like the Holy Land to make one cynical about religion." (p 140). And thus it is ironically fortunate that his home town, Ramallah, was NOT mentioned in the Bible, "Unlike Jerusalem, Jericho, Nablus and Hebron...", and thus they are spared a "settlement" in their town.

At one point in the book he meets "settlers" in their "settlement." They were not the "devils incarnate, fanatic, crazy people, starry-eyed and religiously inspired..." that he had expected, but as he concludes: "I doubt, if I had articulated to them my deeply held convictions and argument against the settlement project, that they would have even heard me, so full were they of their own sense of purpose." And so, as he says in the Introduction, "Beautiful wadis, springs, cliffs and ancient ruins were destroyed by those who claim a superior love of the land."

My only quibble with Shehadeh is that as a writer, who should know that words matter, he adopts the language of the occupier, and uses the word "settler," which connotes occupying vacant land, as was purportedly done in the American West. The French use "colon," the same word they used for their own people who once occupied Indochina and Africa, and which properly translates as colonist, and so should not Shehadeh use the same, since that is his message?

Overall though, a moving, evocative, and painful book; a paean to a landscape, people and way of life which are rapidly vanishing. He finishes strong, with the story, "An Imaged Sarha," recounting a meeting with a young "settler" on a walk, who espouses the "party line" justifying the colonies, and Shehadeh blurts out: "Can't you think for yourself"? I only wish that Shehadeh could have walked with a Jew who did, who also walked the land, and eventually understood the reality behind the stones he was stepping over, the destroyed villages, that belied the official propaganda, and wrote an excellent account of this transformation. He is Goran Rosenberg, who wrote "L'Utopie Perdue: Israel- Une Histoire Personnelle." Kudos to both for their courageous books.

I recently read and adored "Palestinian Walks" by Raja Shehadeh (available in paperback), nonfiction, about a Palestinian lawyer who enjoys walking in the hills above his home in Ramallah and writes about the changes he's seen over four decades of ambling. I learned more about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from reading this lovely book than from anything else I've ever read!

This is an eloquent, and passionate story of Palestine, and its beauty and usurped soul Great literary work by Raja Shehadeh. Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Landscape

The story evoked memories of my hikes as a youngster. I recalled the hills and wild flowers and drinking out of holes in the rocks. The destruction of the natural beauty of the land is a tragedy.

I have just made arrangements to go to Palestine and experience walks in Palestine in the midst of a brutal occupation! This is how powerful this book!

The author writes about Prophet Muhammad who prayed towards Jerusalem.
It shows the centrality of Jews in his world view; he based his new religion on Judaism.
Mr. Shehadeh lamented illusory times when one could hike tan hills of Palestine without impediment, without "harassment". Like visitors, aliens and locals do in Switzerland...
Nobel Prize winner in literature Ivan Bunin who lived in France was attacked by Arab stone throwers 100 years ago while traveling with his wife from Jaffa to Jerusalem. He left us great poems about Turkish vilayets of Palestine; this stanza is from "Caravan".

A light wind starts, it gets cooler.
Night is sighing, so sweet to sleep in saddle
Hiding face in a warm camel's neck.
The moon is setting. A rooster sings in Ramleh.
And milky blueness of the Judean mountains
Show their contour in darkness.

Palestine was always very dangerous and, as Avi Shlaim wrote in his volume "Lion of Jordan", often in a state of "brigandage".
20 years ago I marched through Galilee to the organic farming kibbutz Harduf and I stopped for lunch at some bushes near the Arab town of Shefaram. I was immediately checked and welcomed by an elderly Arab who allowed me to continue my way. I was lucky. In other times I was held at knife point by youngsters in Abu Tor near Jerusalem. Once Karmiel police did not allow me to walk Galilee to the solar village of Klil since I had to pass inhospitable Arab villages and towns. We must realize that almost half of Israel within a "green line" is controlled by Arabs who constitute only 20% of Israeli citizenry. In Greater Palestine Arabs occupy 85% of the land while numbering almost 70% of its population. Jews are minority in 15 million strong Palestine.
"The curse of Palestine is due to the West's historical and biblical imagination", writes our author. He forgets to point to the early Judeo-Christian and Byzantine character of Palestine. He forgets Greek cultural dominance, Circassian presence and Samaritans' perseverance.
On page xvi Raja Shehadeh states that almost all picturesque structures around Ramallah have been produced by Palestinians and he is saddened by the "fact" that Jewish settlers come to replace Arabs. Not at all! The population has soared due to the influx of new people. Jews were decimated and dumped in Palestine by the West and Arab countries. Germanic states of England, Australia, Canada and the US refused to allow Jewish refugees in. Libya, Iraq, Egypt and Syria got rid of their Jewish communities.
Arabs control 95% of the West Bank and--due to their high birthrate -naturally keep Jews of the West Bank and of entire Israel in Jewish Bantustans and ghettos. But Mr. Shehadeh snatches the Jewish Italian buzzword penning "Palestinian enclaves becoming more like ghettos". He confuses unarmed and feeble Jews of medieval Venice or Rome with armed and robust Arabs of Jenin and Gaza.
On page 161 Mr. Shehadeh notices "the piles of garbage on the top of the hill" in the Arab canton. I was pained to see mounds of refuse in the dry Bethesda pool of Jerusalem controlled by the Muslim authority.
On page 163 our writer confides with his readers, "Israelis and tourists could come to enjoy our lovely hills". This remark shows the exclusionary and elitist character of the whole book. Jews could go to Germany, live there and soak in magnificent mountains. Why not in Palestine, their abode for almost a millennium? Raja coins this phrase "This land would remain ours, a place where we could walk in peace and silence, undisturbed." How about Jews, who also feel for the land and who are not in a position to move abroad?
On page 174 Raja Shehadeh gets enlightened, "...money played a big role in moving people". How true! Low middle class and proletarian Jews could not afford tickets and visas and perished in Holocaust. Lucky ones were corralled in Palestine and permitted to settle in America. Impoverished Arabs could not build villas or move to Europe.
There was happy time when I walked freely from Mount Zion to Bethlehem to buy postage stamps of the Palestinian Authority. But intrepid Muslim lads of Bethlehem decided to stop all this nonsense (so much for the Swiss-like Palestine!) and decided to get guns and explosives. They even occupied the Church of Nativity in one of their pranks.
On page xx Mr. Shehadeh writes about landscape mentioning "names Arabic, others Canaanite or Aramaic". Hebrew names do not exist for Mr. Shehadeh as if the Bible was written in Arabic or Aramaic. Raja Shehadeh debases the Jewish minority in Levant.
Yet I share Mr. Shehadeh's nostalgia, I am with him protesting excessive development of Palestine--not a stone left unturned there. But what can we do about it? Palestine is very attractive for Arabs; they make a good living there and raise large families. Arabs hold dear their Israeli citizenship, they benefit from the thin Jewish presence in the Philistine nexus of the Middle East. Palestinian Arabs are the most advanced speakers of the Arabic language due to their Jewish roots and proximity of downtrodden Jews returning from their long and fruitful embraces of Germanic culture, African experience, Persian splendor and French civilization.

Gehenna Ravine
half-buried in newer trash
my bloodless poppy