Raja Shehadeh

Raja Shehadeh is a Palestinian lawyer, who has spent much of his career challenging the reclamation of West Bank land for settlements. He is also a walker, who sees beauty in the hills where many others have only seen barren hostility - indeed, one of his aims is to make the land seem real and vivid, rather than a biblical wilderness or site of political struggle.

This beautifully written book is somewhere between a memoir and a collection of essays, framed as six walks in the hills around show more Ramallah. Lyrical descriptions of the landscape are combined with distress at its destruction (by settlements, growing Palestinian towns, vandalism and carelessness) and anger and despondency at the situation of the Palestinians. One of the many sad things in the book is the way that simply walking in the hills is treated with great suspicion - Shehadeh is shot at by both sides in the course of these walks.

Sample: The further down I went the deeper the silence became. As always the distance and quiet made me attentive to those troublesome thoughts that had been buried deep in my mind. As I walked, many of them were surfacing. I sifted through them. The mind only admits what it can handle and here on these hills the threshold was higher. show less

Raja Shehadeh’s powerful essay about the situation in Palestine/Gaza must make you worry about the state of the region, the world’s complicity, and hypocrisy. Why, you may ask, does the Western world have one standard for Israel and one for the rest of the world?
Raja was explicit when he wrote about the Israeli attitude towards the current apartheid regime: Israelis don’t know, and they don’t care. The Israeli government needs continued aggression to justify its existence. When the show more Europeans and Americans settled European Jews in Palestine, the Nakba ensued: a bloody beginning to the story of Israel.
Raja’s essay demonstrates how Israeli propaganda influences international and domestic audiences. While you get an excellent sense of why the Israelis do not wish to live in peace with the indigenous Palestinians, you don’t get a definitive answer: maybe this is impossible.
The continued focus on rewriting history must terrify every reader of this excellent essay, as should the Israeli government’s focus on dehumanizing its citizens. You will only regard others as less than human when you lose your soul.
You will sense the author’s pain in his restrained language when he speaks of Palestinians as people who, several decades ago, lived carefree lives full of laughter, now replaced by pain and suppressed anger.
He covered vast ground in this slim volume, which must be essential reading for anyone following the events unfolding in the region and anyone with a soul who values justice, decency, and genuine human values.
The poem he quotes at the end is powerful, “If I must die….”
The book is sad, informative, and bitter, with a message of hope. show less

Mr. Shehadeh is a Palestinian attorney but more than that he is a walker. When he is frustrated by the outcome of his caseload he loves nothing more than traversing the land which surrounds his home in Ramallah. Every hill, every cave, each artifact he discovers holds a special place in his heart. He see's the landscape begin to transform with each of the six walks he describes in this book. Shehedah describes how roads are being cut into the hills he once walked with friends, solo or with show more his wife. Bulldozers eat away at caves and new homes are being built where Bedouin once tended their sheep. In what he considered his own land, he now walks in fear of being arrested, shot at or simply denied entrance. His final walk described in this book brings him face to face with a settler. There is no doubt, they each love the land, each wants it for their people, each want to enjoy it without fear yet each will do anything to hold on to what each believe is rightfully theirs. Yet, towards the conclusion of the book Shehadeh and a settler share an intimate moment along side a babbling brook enjoying the landscape.........together.
Maps and photos of his walks would have been a helpful addition to this book.
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This is a memoir by a Palestinian lawyer and human rights activist, about what formed him - and in particular, his often difficult relationship with his father. Born in Ramallah, as a child Shehadeh heard constantly about the glories of his family's life in Jaffa. Though his father was politically active, Shehadeh was not interested in the student activism around him, preferring to write poetry and read philosophy. Later, he decided to follow in part in his father's footsteps and become a show more lawyer, with a dream to be "an example of a new sort of Palestinian professional", Western-educated but living in and supporting the community. His lack of political awareness, however, meant that he had not recognised the difficulties, given that most Palestinian lawyers were boycotting the courts so as not to give recognition to the occupation (this despite the fact that his father had been disbarred from the Bar Association for challenging the boycott). However, in some ways this apparent naivety was also a strength, as Shehadeh continues to pursue his aims in defiance of the prevailing reality, whether that is to use judicial activism to promote human rights, to manage his dual life as lawyer and writer, or to insist that others saw Palestinian society as a complex and full society in its own right, not just one half of a struggle.

After we all ate heartily and drank a considerable amount of alcohol they wanted to know about the situation back home. What could I tell this intoxicated group? How could anything of that life come back to me now in this Texas living room? Even after a brief absence the reality of life under occupation seemed so bizarre and distant. ... I knew what was expected of me: an inflamed passionate denunciation of the Zionist enemy as the source of all our troubles. Yet I somehow could not oblige. Why, I wondered?

Only later did I realize that to do so would have been a betrayal of my own existence. To simplify my life and paint it in black-and-white terms was to deny my own reality, which I mainly experienced in tones of grey. If my countrymen really cared about me they had to see me as a human being, one who did not exist only in those heroic moments of struggle against the occupation as they liked to imagine. show less