Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape [Illustrated] [Paperback]

Having not long returned from a visit to Israel and the West Bank I decided to read "Palestinian Walks" written by Raja Shehadeh, a Palestinian human rights lawyer who has stayed living in the West Bank through all the troubles of the last 60 years. It was a far better book than I had anticipated with the brilliant way that Shehadeh was able to intertwine the experiences, beauty and destruction of the environment witnessed in his walks, with personal reflections and history and incidents of the region.

I agree completely with the quotes from reviews of the Independent on Sunday "Delivering what many activists neglect to mention: the odd, slightly absurd details that really touch people" and the NY Times "Few Palestinians have opened their minds and hearts with such frankness."

The sadness and frustration of Shehadeh come over, without any hatred or bigotedness, and also incredibly not giving the reader an utter sense of despair at the end. Obviously Shehadeh is critical of Israeli policy in the West Bank, but he also expresses his frustration and anger with the former PLO leadership in exile at their insistence on recognition at the expense of an adequate land solution in the Oslo Agreement, as well as corrupt practices when in control.

It was the small details that were so enlightening. In the last two walks encounters and conversations with a young Israeli settler (An Imagined Sarha) and two young, angry Muslim Palestinians (The Masked Shepherds) are recorded which are so sensitively done. The tradegy of how particularly Israeli policy, as well as fear, makes contact between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs so limited is brilliantly displayed in the conversation which makes up a large part of the chapter "An Imagined Sarha". The book is worth reading for that conversation alone.

Also the chapter "And How Did You Get Over It?" was fascinating, when a Palestinian doctor and politician with whom Raja is friends asks on a walk how Raja overcome his anger at the defeat incurred by the Oslo Agreement. Raja reflects that he has not had to suffer as much as his father had to and that when he could walk and reflect on the geography and think about previous generations and civilisations which the land barely reflects now he comments:

"For a long time my enjoyment of these hills has been impaired by a preoccupation with the changes in land law relating to them. But such man-made constructs can be diminished if looked at in a particular way. Viewed from the perspective of the land they hardly count...Stones are gathered to build houses but then they crumble and return to the land, however large and formidable they might once have been.

Thinking in the long term made it possible for me to separate "the present" from the rest of time and thereby realize that what Palestine and Israel are now would not necessarily be for ever. I was here on earth for a relatively short period and after that time passed, life would go on without my points of view, biases and fears." (p170-1)

Winner of the Orwell Prize 2008. Raja Shehadeh's twenty seven years going on sarha's, wandering the hills of Ramallah and beyond, form the warp and the weft of a life rich with observations. The purpose of a sarha is to wander freely and aimlessly, to nourish the soul and rejuvenate. Each walk combines poignant, lyrical, reflections of a vanishing landscape with an ancient history. Along with that, eloquent stories of the people who cultivated the land with terraces of olive trees and grapevines. Poetic, political, and spiritual, this second edition has seven unique walks, each one embracing real people, past and present.

The hills are alive with the music of shepherds and their flocks, vibrant spring flowers, arid sunburnt wadis, transforming light, winter rain and snow, and Jewish settlers who claim a divine right to the land. One of the most captivating stories in the book is that of Abu Ameen, a poor stone mason. For all its poignancy, this is also an elevating story of human endurance, tested to extremes, in the harshness of a land with many restrictions.

Raja Shehadeh is a lawyer and writer living in Ramallah, a city in the Palestinian West Bank. He is also the author of the highly praised When the Bulbul Stopped Singing and Strangers in the House.

The author is a Palestinian human rights activist & lawyer specialising in land law. He has been extensively involved in trying to prevent Israeli expropriation of land for settlements for many years. He tells the history of the impact of Israeli settlement development through the medium of a series of walks undertaken in the West Bank over a period of almost thirty years. The book is beautifully written, lyrical, evocative. It is intensely political but not polemical which for me makes it all the more powerful. He describes the changes in the physical landscape over the years - the settlements, the new roads constructed on Palestinian land that Palestinians are not permitted to use, the silence of the hills & valleys now disturbed by the incessant sound of construction, the walls, the pathways destroyed by rubble thrown down from settlement & road building. "Throughout our walk in these hills we had not come across a single soldier or settler and yet we felt their presence all around us as they continued to build new settlements, enlarge existing ones and connect them with roads."

At times I sensed profound disillusionment, loss of self-confidence and sense of purpose. He writes:

"For many years I managed to hold on to the hope that the settlements would not be permanent. I had meticulously documented the illegal process by which they came to be established, every step of the way. I felt that as long as I understood, as long as the process by which all this had come about was not mysterious and the legal tricks used were exposed, I could not be confused and defeated and Israel could not get away with it. Knowledge is power. I had to keep up with the Israeli legal manoeuvres and expose them to the world. I had perceived my life as an ongoing narrative organically linked to the forward march of the Palestinian people towards liberation and freedom from the yoke of occupation. But now I knew this was nothing but a grand delusion."

Shehadeh does not spare the Palestinian leadership from criticism. Throughout the book he shares his anger at the Palestinian leadership's failings in the negotiations that resulted in the signing of the Oslo accords, which excluded the settlement issue. He attributes this to the desire of the PLO to be the recognised representative of the Palestinian people, internal political expediency taking precedence over ensuring a just and viable agreement. He believes that part of the problem was that the PLO factions guiding the Palestinian negotiators had been living in Tunis and before that in Beirut, and had little real experience of the lives of Palestinians living in Palestine, many never having lived in or visited Palestine until after the signing of the agreement. In one telling story he heads to the Dead Sea for a walk with a woman of Palestinian origin recently arrived in the country after growing up in Beirut and later, when the PLO were ejected from there, Tunis. She is surprised that the settlements look so permanent and that Israeli soldiers can stop cars on the roads in the Territories. She has no idea that the agreement allows this even though she worked for the chief Palestinian negotiator in the Oslo talks. "Like Selma the PLO negotiators did not have a real sense of what the settlements were about."

The epilogue to the book describes a walk Shehadeh attempted to make with an Englishwoman who came to Palestine as a volunteer. They are stopped on their way by two young Palestinians. They are suspicious of the woman because she is English and they associate the British with both the creation of the state of Israel and with killing Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan. "They seemed to define themselves more in terms of Islam than as Palestinian nationalists." Somewhat shaken, the pair are allowed to walk on. As they reach the end of this truncated walk, he looks back down the hillside: "As I stood in the ruins of one of my favourite places in the valley, this valley near where I was born and have always lived, I felt the hills were not mine any more. I am no longer free to come and walk." You feel his sense of loss, the unbearable sadness as he realises that he will not walk this way for many years to come.

This immensely moving, desperately sad book speaks volumes.