A review by ceallaighsbooks
Palestinian Walks: Forays Into a Vanishing Landscape by Raja Shehadeh

emotional hopeful informative inspiring reflective sad tense fast-paced

5.0

“The biography of these hills is in many ways my own, the victories and failures of the struggle to save this land also mine. But the persistent pain at the failure of that struggle would in time be shared by Arabs, Jews and lovers of nature anywhere in the world. All would grieve, as I have, at the continuing destruction of an exquisitely beautiful place.”

TITLE—Palestinian Walks

AUTHOR—Raja Shehadeh

PUBLISHED—2007

PUBLISHER—Profile Books Ltd.

GENRE—memoir essays; socio-political; nature writing

SETTING—Palestine, mid to late 20th c./early 21st c.

MAIN THEMES/SUBJECTS—meditative walking, community bonding, Palestinian history & culture, Israeli settler-colonialism, displacement of indigenous people & environmental destruction due to land expropriation & settler construction, fascist dystopia & military regimes, Hope & Faith, apartheid governments & thinly veiled corruption, propaganda & manipulation, US imperialism

“In the course of a mere three decades, close to half a million Jewish people were settled within an area of only 2,278 square miles. The damage caused to the land by the infrastructural work necessary to sustain the life of such a large population, with enormous amounts of concrete poured to build entire cities in hills that had remained untouched for centuries, is not difficult to appreciate… Beautiful wadis, springs, cliffs and ancient ruins were destroyed by those who claim a superior love of the land. By trying to record how the land felt and looked before this calamity, I hope to preserve, at least in words, what has been lost forever.”

My thoughts:

Published sixteen years ago now, this book describes six walks taken by the author through the hills of Palestine, in Ramallah, between the years 1978 and 2006. In those years, he writes, Palestine—both her land, and her people—saw unthinkable destructive violence at the hands of militant Israeli settlers. The thought that now, sixteen years later, the world is watching the apartheid state’s latest genocidal push, funded and supported by western imperialist nations, against the indigenous people and ancient lands of these “glorious hills”, is too terrible for words.

Shehadeh demonstrates what actual indigeneity looks like—how it is literally rooted in the land, not in just an abstract, metaphorical sense, but a very real physical and deeply spiritual sense—and how the flora and fauna, the soil, the sky, and the waters are all connected to the indigenous people and how stewardship and respect must always be the foundation and at the forefront of such identities. In the face of all of the false modern claims to indigenous identity in and to the region, Shehadeh’s demonstration is conclusive.

I would recommend this book to everyone. This book is best readimmediately.

Final note: My most gifted book this year! I have also already tracked down copies of more of Shehadeh’s works and am excited to read them.

“Halfway up the hill I began to feel dizzy from the height and had to sit down. I could go no farther. I seemed to be constantly slipping. I put both my hands on the ground and held firm, for I felt I could easily tumble all the way down the deeply channeled side of this precipitous mountain into the abyss, with no way to stop my fall. With my hands anchoring me to the ground I turned my head and looked up at the unreachable caves. I could see their dark openings in the rocks. I wanted so much to stand at their mouths and look down into them as I used to do with my cave alongside the old road when I was young, traveling with my father to Jericho. But having sat down I could not make myself stand up again and continue the climb. I was petrified of slipping.”

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Season: Autumn into Winter

CW // genocide, racism, police & state violence, irreversible environmental desecration & destruction (Please feel free to DM me for more specifics!)

Further Reading—

• everything else by Raja Shehadeh—TBR
• LIGHT IN GAZA edited by Jehad Abusalim
• SALT HOUSES by Hala Alyan
• WILD THORNS by Sahar Khalifeh—TBR
• MY FATHER WAS A FREEDOM FIGHTER by Ramzy Baroud—TBR
• VOICES OF THE NAKBA edited by Diana Allan—TBR
• TEN MYTHS ABOUT ISRAEL by Ilan Pappe—TBR

Favorite Quotes—

“Palestine has been one of the countries most visited by pilgrims and travelers over the ages. The accounts I have read do not describe a land familiar to me but rather a land of these travelers' imaginations. Palestine has been constantly reinvented, with devastating consequences to its original inhabitants. Whether it was the cartographers preparing maps or travelers describing the landscape in the extensive travel literature, what mattered was not the land and its inhabitants as they actually were, but the confirmation of the viewer's or reader's religious or political beliefs. I can only hope that this book does not fall within this tradition… I hope to persuade the reader how glorious the land of Palestine is, despite all the destruction that has been wrought over the past quarter of a century.”

“To go on a sarha was to roam freely, at will, without restraint. The verb form of the word means to let the cattle out to pasture early in the morning, leaving them to wander and graze at liberty. The commonly used noun sarha is a colloquial corruption of the classical word. A man going on a sarha wanders aimlessly, not restricted by time and place, going where his spirit takes him to nourish his soul and rejuvenate himself. But not any excursion would qualify as a sarha. Going on a sarha implies letting go. It is a drug-free high, Palestinian-style.”

“I remember hearing when I was growing up how Abu Ameen had built the qasr with his wife on their honeymoon. We had all heard how, after they finished, he could not find anyone else around to do the sakja dance in celebration of the completion of the task. So he called on his wife: "Yalla Ya, Zariefeh." She was a pretty woman and always wore a turban festooned with pierced Ottoman coins. She removed her turban, pulled up her thob (traditional Palestinian embroidered dress), took her husband's hand and together they danced around their new home, until they fell to the ground with exhaustion. An expression relating to this became common in our family. When we had to do with less than what was normally required we would say: "Yalla Ya, Zariefeh" and get whoever was there to do it.”

“How unaware many trekkers around the world are of what a luxury it is to be able to walk in the land they love without anger, fear or insecurity, just to be able to walk without political arguments running obsessively through their heads, without the fear of losing what they've come to love, without the anxiety that they will be deprived of the right to enjoy it. Simply to walk and savor what nature has to offer, as I was once able to do.”

“I got such a sense of relief from hearing the water pouring down from the heavens, running down the pipes to the cistern situated close to the fig tree. When it doesn't rain during the winter months I get anxious. I begin to feel something is terribly amiss. Then when the rain returns a feeling of well-being comes over me. This was a good house in which to listen to the falling rain. Could this obsession with rain be related to a primordial anxiety passed on from my ancestors, who depended on agriculture for their livelihood? Living in a dry land that gets all its water from the few months of winter rain must have ingrained a fear of drought deep within me, though I've never experienced one myself. What other hidden fears do I have, fears I'm forever trying to discover so that I can free myself from them? How I have thought of becoming free! But are my endeavors futile?”

“Thus began a process that continues to this day of travelers and colonizers who see the land through the prism of the biblical past, overlooking present realities. Eager to occupy the land of their imagination they impose their vision and manipulate it to tally with that mythical image they hold in their head, paying scant notice to its Palestinian inhabitants.”

“Walking helped me put things in perspective… The mind only admits what it can handle and here on these hills the threshold was higher.”

“The other day I had to plead with a soldier to be allowed to return home. I was getting back from our winter house in Jericho, where I had spent a relaxing day. I had to implore the Israeli soldier. I told him that I really did nor know a curfew had been imposed on Ramallah. I was awas all day and hadn't listened to the news. "I'm tired," I said, "please let me through." Oh, the humiliation of pleading with a stranger for something so basic. Why should I endure all these hardships? Why should I spend so much of my time thinking about the dismal future? Living as a hunted, haunted human with a terrible sense of doom pervading my life? Why could I not live in the moment, be at ease? But I knew why. If I and people like me were to leave rather than stay and resist the occupation, we would wake up in a few years to a new reality, with our land taken from under our feet. We had no alternative but to struggle against our predicament.”

“…the courageous fighter was not concerned with nationalist issues. He believed only in two constants, God and the land. Not to fight in every way possible to hold on to his land was a sacrilege.”

“The settlers, driven by religious motives, were convenient agents for the state to fulfill its strategic objectives. They had its full support. … so full were they of their own sense of purpose.”

“The building of settlements in the Occupied Territories was a state project. It was not going to be hampered by questions of law. The custodians, legal advisers and judges would have to work out the legal solutions among themselves. The government knew the decision it wanted out of these land courts. Higher national objectives overrode legal niceties.”

“I had intended to inquire from Adel about relations between the inhabitants of the settlement and the village, who seemed of almost equal numbers. But when I saw how things looked on the ground there was no point in asking. The answer was written, large and in the most graphic way possible. Standing before the wall I could see in concrete terms the consequence of the policy of building Jewish settlements pursued by successive Israeli governments over the past thirty-nine years. For an occupier to take through legal chicanery the lands of the occupied, and in stark violation of international law settle its own people in the midst of the towns and villages of the hostile occupied population can only lead to violence and bloodshed. There is no way that such usurpation of land could be accepted. A bloody struggle was inevitable. A high wall dividing the mixed population living on the same hill in Beit 'Ur and Bet Horon will not placate anyone. It only shields the usurpers from the anger and hatred in the eyes of those whose village has been unjustly divided, whose life and movement have been restricted, whose future has been doomed.”

“…unlike their predecessors these present-day rebels live on state subsidies. They are protected by the strongest army in the region and needn't work for a living. Instead they spend their time studying Scripture in strategically positioned yeshivot (the plural of yeshiva, a Jewish religious school), which use the pretext of religious study to metamorphose into Jewish settlements that serve political objectives. Their heroism is attributed to their harassment of unarmed Palestinian civilians: women, men and children whom they attempt to drive away from the land they consider theirs. What will today's settlers leave for posterity but ugly structures that destroyed the land they claim to love and a legacy of hateful colonial practices condemned the world over that have contributed to delaying the onset of peaceful relations between the Palestinian and Israeli people?”

“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.”

“It was deemed that the greatest enemy of these forests was the goats owned by Arab farmers who had managed to stay in the country. Legislation was enacted, and firmly enforced, to restrict the grazing of goats in these protected areas. It cannot be denied that goats are not discriminating in what they eat. They have the annoying habit of climbing up tree trunks to munch on the green foliage, especially of young saplings, often leaving the grass below untouched. Over the years they have caused undeniable damage to the natural fora of Palestine. But any attempt to interfere with nature is not without its risks. In the Carmel forest the goats used to feed on the parasitic plant hamoul (field dodder), which is hard to control and nearly impossible to eradicate. Its threadlike, yellow stems wind themselves around the trunks of pine trees. With the banning of the goats from the forest the dodder spread uncontrollably, so that when wildfires began, they spread more easily over a larger area. And just as the goats ate many of our beautiful wildflowers they also fertilized the land, invigorating the soil and ensuring that growth would be stronger in future years. They took but they also gave.”

“The Jewish prophet Isaiah, who famously cried in vain in the wilderness, was supposed to have stopped here in this wadi on his way to Egypt. I too have been crying out in a wilderness, to a world that did not hear. Along with other committed Palestinians from the Occupied Territories I addressed the Israeli side and warned that the future would be bleak for all of us if these settlements were not stopped. I also went on speaking tours in the United States, alone and with others, Palestinians and Israelis alike, to caution against a disastrous policy that supported and funded the settlement project. Isaiah so despaired that he begged for an end to his life without hope. I hoped I would never know such despair.”

“I walked through a corridor covered with frescoes representing the Last Judgment to a chamber cut out of the rock where a vault containing ancient bones was located. This was the oldest part of the building. I looked at the icons; some were new but some very old. Two that were by the door attracted my attention. One had a holy cow with angel wings. I had never seen a cow memorialized in church in this way. Another was of a deer with a cross between its antlers and a monk looking on in awe. Perhaps a miracle had occurred in this wilderness when it still had deer.”

“Writing would help sustain me in this next period. But it was only honest and daring writing that would be able to penetrate the depths that enveloped and paralyzed me now.”

“At my age my father had successfully survived two catastrophic defeats. I was more fortunate. So far, I have had to deal with only one.” 💔