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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Life under occupation,
This review is from: A Rift in Time: Travels with my Ottoman Uncle: Travels of My Ottoman Uncle (Paperback)
R.Shehadeh's book is a 'must' read for everyone who wants to know what sort of life the Palestinians are enduring under Israeli Occupation. Their life is similar to the life of the Jews in the Warsaw Ghettos.Raja had to travel days and suffer humiliation and harrassment from the Israeli occupier in order to follow the steps taken by Najib Nassar (his great-uncle) who during the Ottoman rule had no problem travelling in the area.A fascinating saga depicting the life of a man who sacrificed his life for the Palestinian cause through his newspaper Al Carmel.He was the first Arab who warned the Arab leaders at the time of the danger of Zionism.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
An Education,
By
This review is from: A Rift in Time: Travels with my Ottoman Uncle: Travels of My Ottoman Uncle (Paperback)
I don't do politics....perhaps a lifetime in Northern Ireland has been partly responsible for that! My faint knowledge of the Middle East conflict is restricted to vague images of Yasser Arafat and the 80s trend of wearing that little tassled scarf - oh and I can also recognise the Palestinian and Israeli flags as they are frequently flown in Nationalist and Loyalist areas, dare I say, in order to wind each other up...
So, it was with slight trepidation that I picked up A Rift in Time, Raj Shehadeh's memoir of his great-uncle Najib Nassar. Raj is a prominent Palestinian lawyer and human rights activist. He lives in Ramallah on the West Bank, currently under military occupation by Israel. In this book, he retraces his uncle's footsteps during his time on the run from the Ottoman authorities between 1915 and 1918. Najib came under suspicion of espionage and treasonable activities as he voiced opposition to the Ottoman participation in World War I and spent three years in hiding in different locations, depending on the generosity of friends and foes alike. Raj's present day journey, following in his uncle's footsteps, lacks the fluidity of Najib's adventures, given that he is faced with border restrictions, army checkpoints and other physical obstructions. He finds the landscape ravaged by the intensive farming favoured by the Israeli settlers. Villages which welcomed and sheltered Najib back in the 1900s are now wiped off the map, having been razed to the ground in 1948. I found it useful to have a map of the area at my side especially when Shehadeh was moving through different areas, Haifa, Ramallah, Jericho, Tyre, Beirut, the Jordan Valley as it made it easier to follow his journey and that of Najib. As a result I had a better understanding of the shifting borders and how the political landscape has changed although I remain bewildered as to how around 750,000 Palestinians became refugees and were not allowed to return to their homes. Admittedly, Shehadeh's account has a habit of jumping from one century to another, from one country to another and it can be difficult to keep track of things but then we are dealing with a very complicated situation. Here is a man who yearns for political agreement achieved by peaceful means and he recognises that the past is important and we can draw lessons from it, but we must also put the past behind us and strive for an egalitarian society.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta) Amazon.com:
4.5 out of 5 stars (2 customer reviews) 3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Complaint Worth Repeating,
By Dr. Hatim Kanaaneh - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: A Rift in Time: Travels with my Ottoman Uncle: Travels of My Ottoman Uncle (Paperback)
A COMPLAINT WORTH REPEATING
I beg forgiveness for stating my first reaction to Raja Shehadeh's secondd book of hiking memoirs, this one with the emphasis provided by the desire to retrace the steps of a respected forbearer: We have been through this before. I had attended the author's reading in East Jerusalem and had my autographed copy for keepsake. Especially as a fellow involved Palestinian who reads on daily basis many a pained statement of our loss at the hands of the Zionist colonialist project, I was tempted to put the book aside. Except that the tale of Raja's legendary Ottoman uncle was compelling enough for me to keep on reading. Its setting in Galilee and the adjacent environs of the upper Rift Valley kept me going. After all, my own facination with Galilee and committment to its native residents had launched me as an author with my "A Doctor in Galilee: The Life and Struggle of a Palestinian in Israel" thus, not unlike Raja, switching careers from a physician to a writer. As I followed Raja and his wife Penny on their meanderings in and out of Galilee, his frequent asides about our loss as Palestinians and about the Zionists' well-planned and mercilessly executed dislodging of our people by diliberate force and geographic fragmentation, the elimination of their cultural and archeological heritage, and the spacial confinement and physical control of those who remained gained in freshness and legitimacy with repetition. It started with the bit of information about Najib Nassar, Raja's Ottoman uncle, being the first Palestinian writer to address the potential threat of the Zionist colonialist project to our people's future and continued clear through to the end of the narrative that I managed to get through by the end of the night of the same day I had started it: 'The best heir of the best forbearer' as we say in Arabic, I had to admit with tears in my eyes as Raja stands at his great great uncle's grave in Nazareth. I was particularly taken by the artfully intermixed narrative of Raja's own present day nature walks with that of the forced flight of his predecessor into the wilderness: The two accounts are nearly seamlessly interwoven, so much so that I found the repeated assertions of the similarities between the two protagonists in thought and predilictions perhaps unnecessary, even though I found myself equally often thinking how much resemblance I also had to the two. The only part that I was surprized to read when I reached it was about Najib's second wife being the Granddaughter of the Grand Bahai, founder of the Bahai faith. I would have baited the reader with a hint about it very early in the book. And a second artful tactic that Raja Shahadeh uses as if it were the most normal of practices is the mixing of the intimate with the public and the general: Personal and family affairs are brought casually into focus to be transcended at will to historical events and world affairs. Had I not been open to similar villification I would have accused the auther of slight of hand magic. But then again, the focus of the whole account is family centered while it is the entire world, particularly the West, that is Raja's target readership and potentially his accused perpetrators of neglect if not agression against the Palestinian people. Hence it is only natural that Raja zooms in and out of focusing at homes and family life in Ramallah, Haifa, Nazareth and Eyn-Anoub rendering their evident humanity accessible to his world audience. Also for the non-Palestinian there is much more to savor: the reflective pauses about the human condition at large, about nature, about the geology, the fauna and flora of Galilee, Palestine and the Rift Valley, and particularly about understanding the basic nature of Israel's agressive pursuit of the Zionist dream of a Jewish state west of the Jordan River. And, yes, indeed the repetitive message in the enlightening discourse woven around the record of Raja's and his Ottoman uncle's nature walks, one compelled by his Ottoman and the other by his Israeli persuers, is worthy of repeating to the wider world again and again. We will not be silenced by the world's inattentiveness. Hatim Kanaaneh, MD, MPH Author of 'A Doctor in Galilee: the Life and Struggle of a Palestinian in Israel', Pluto Press, 2008 Active Blog:[...] 2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
People in Rift,
By Clive J. Payne - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: A Rift in Time: Travels with my Ottoman Uncle: Travels of My Ottoman Uncle (Paperback)
A book proving the stupidity of 'men in power' who made decisions that were totally unjust. Until these decisions are reversed we will never alas see a lasting peace in the lands that were stolen from the Palestine People.
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