Book Review
By Raja Shehadeh and Penny Johnson
Profile Books
£14.99
ISBN 9781805222415
By Mike Scott-Baumann
In early 2022, the writers Raja Shehadeh and Penny Johnson emerged from pandemic lockdown, an experience with which they were not wholly unfamiliar, having lived through the Israeli military curfew of 2002. A husband-and-wife team, Raja is a well-known human rights lawyer, Penny an academic at Birzeit University who has long adopted Palestine as her homeland.
They set out, as they write in the Introduction, to ‘search for hidden or neglected memorials and places in historic Palestine, now Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and what they might tell us about the land and the people who live on our small slip of earth between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.’ With their friend, photographer and driver, Bassam, they negotiated difficult terrain and rough tracks, as well as Israeli checkpoints and roadblocks, in order to discover what has been memorialised, and what lies unseen, abandoned or erased.
In the village of Al-Jib, near their home in Ramallah, they descended the steps leading to what had been a Bronze Age water system and wine storage area. And on the edge of the village, they found a maqam, a sheikh’s tomb, a domed structure inside of which was ‘a mysterious small painting in blue of a sailing ship’. A group of boys were playing and one of them jumped from the roof of the maqam. When asked the name of the sheikh they chorused ‘Sheikh Hamid’, later confirmed by an eminent historian. The boys know there is something connected to their identity, to their past, when playing on the maqam.
As the authors approached Nablus, ‘Israeli bulldozers were at work gouging out the hills…….. to construct a four-lane bypass road’, confiscating Palestinian land in order to do so. The city of Nablus has its Roman, Islamic, Crusader and Ottoman pasts. But the first memorial they encountered in the Old City was a triptych, not of paintings of church martyrs as in Byzantine times, but three posters of youths killed when an Israeli tank ploughed through their family home in 2002. Later, during their visit to Nablus, they came to a memorial, not to young men but to a lost civilisation, the remains of a wall surrounding the Bronze Age city of Tell Balata, neglected and surrounded by tower blocks but still visible.
Further east, beside the River Jordan, near the site where John baptised Jesus, the authors were confronted with barbed wire fences warning of land mines. It was hardly a welcoming place but it was possible to visit the recently re-opened Greek Orthodox monastery, originally established in the 4th Century.
When they travelled through Israel, as opposed to the occupied West Bank, they were keen to find out how the Palestinian citizens of Israel commemorate the Nakba, the erasure of over 400 Palestinian villages and the exile of three-quarters of a million Palestinians before and during the war of 1948-49. They were disappointed to discover that there is no lasting memorial in stone but heartened to realise that the Nakba is commemorated ‘through Palestinians who remained in Israel engaging in Marches of Return, annual marches, launched in the 1980s, whereby descendants walk to the sites of destroyed villages from which their forbears were exiled.’
Shehadeh and Johnson had first visited Khan al Tujjar, in the Galilee region of Israel, 30 years previously. It is one of 160 khans, or caravanserai, built in historic Palestine. Most were built in Islamic periods, this one by the Ottomans, and many dotted the route from Damascus to Cairo serving as inns and resting places for pilgrims and traders. The authors now found access by road blocked by the Israelis. The site is unmarked and in poor repair and there is no mention of it in Israeli guide books although it is one of the most impressive khans. They scrambled over rough ground and through thickets of thorn and thistle, eventually coming across the stone arches, all that remains of a site that had ‘brought together people from all over our region.’
The book is full of snatched memories, of snippets of history, often mediated by Palestinians they stumble upon in their searches, such as the old man in Qibya who showed them the rock marking the spot where 14 Palestinians were killed during a devastating Israeli operation that led to the deaths of 77 people in the village in 1953. The old man knows that these memories need to be preserved. However, the authors are distressed to learn later that Shehadeh’s niece and nephew had never heard of the massacre, let alone learned about it in school.
Echoing what Shehadeh observed in his Orwell Prize-winning Palestinian Walks in 2007, the authors write: ‘As the landscape fills up with more and more settlements the days of our pristine hills seem numbered’ before concluding that: ‘We have to hold on to hope’. To sustain that hope, they provide an account of places and memorials that may have been lost but, which they show, have not been forgotten.
Their prose is lucid and elegant, sometimes elegiac, but their story is one of resilience, of sumud — the quiet, steadfast determination to keep walking forward, even as the paths and hills in front of them are being demolished.
Mike Scott-Baumann is a trustee of the Britain Palestine Project and chair of the charity’s Executive Committee.