Roaming Freely in a Land of Restraints: Rajah Shehadeh's Orwell Prize winning "Palestinian Walks: Forays Into a Vanishing Landscape,"
Roaming Freely in a Land of Restraints
Roaming Freely in a Land of Restraints
Raja Shehadeh, left, with a Palestinian farmer on a hillside overlooking Ramallah, West Bank.
RAMALLAH, West Bank — There is an Arabic word for Raja Shehadeh's pastime.
Israeli-built barriers restrict movement in the West Bank.
"Sarha is to roam freely, at will, without restraint," he writes in "Palestinian Walks: Forays Into a Vanishing Landscape," an account of six walks in the West Bank, which won this year's Orwell Prize, Britain's pre-eminent award for political writing, and was published by Scribner in the United States in June. "A man going on a sarha wanders aimlessly, not restricted by time and place."
Of course, it is difficult not to be restricted by time and place in the occupied territories, where movement is everyday more limited by a growing number of Israeli-built fences, walls, barriers, checkpoints, settlements and the separate roads constructed to link them. But Mr. Shehadeh — a lawyer and founder of Al Haq, a Palestinian human rights organization, who apart from a sojourn in London for law school has lived his entire life in Ramallah — still tries.
One recent walk began on the side of a road near the village of Ein Sinya, a short drive from the city center. Mr. Shehadeh took measured steps down a trail lined with sage, Syrian thistle, flowering oregano and wild artichoke. On either side rose limestone-buttressed terraces of olive trees.
"We have an exquisite quality of light here," he said, motioning to the surrounding buttes.
The bucolic landscape is scarcely the West Bank of popular imagination. It was with that prevailing impression in mind that Mr. Shehadeh set out to write the book — to put on paper his experience of the place, mediated neither by historical imagination nor by images in the news, for readers who think of it only in terms of conflict and violence.
In the book, though, one walk is interrupted when Mr. Shehadeh's 10-year-old nephew picks up an unexploded missile; another when he and his wife come under prolonged gunfire from the Palestinian police. The six walks, from 1978 to 2006, become more fraught over time.
Not far into the valley the trail came to and then ran alongside a tall limestone bluff that resembled a cresting wave. Midway down was a constellation of Arabic words spray-painted on the rock. Mr. Shehadeh stopped and read them aloud: "Ahmad, Aqel, Jojoo, Anas, Nidal, Kamal — Raja!"
Pleased at the sight of Palestinian names grafted on the land, Mr. Shehadeh continued down the trail. After a switchback and past a small cave, he came upon an igloo-shaped stone structure called a qasr — a type of dwelling where farmers once lived, storing their olives inside and sleeping on the roof.
"This one is quite well preserved," he said, "like that of Abu Ameen." Mr. Ameen, a cousin of Mr. Shehadeh's grandfather, was a stonemason who lived in a qasr, the author's discovery of which makes up the book's first chapter.
Mr. Shehadeh's grandfather, Saleem, was a judge in the courts of British Mandate Palestine. His father, Aziz, was a lawyer too. (One of the first Palestinians to advocate a two-state solution publicly, Aziz Shehadeh was stabbed to death in the family's driveway in 1985. The case was never solved.) Mr. Ameen represents the side of the Shehadeh family that did not join the professional class, and a life of ultimate sarha.
Beyond a long rock ledge was another hill of terraces. Mr. Shehadeh preferred not to tread on the fields, as they were freshly plowed, or scale up the retaining walls, for fear of eroding them. He turned around.
"Natsh," he said, pointing at a wiry, thorny thistle alongside the trail.
Thought by some to have been the material used for Jesus' crown of thorns in the Bible, natsh has in recent years been put to a contemporary use. Mr. Shehadeh's work as a lawyer has primarily involved defending Palestinians in Israel's military land courts, where, he recounts in the book, natsh is often cited as evidence that a particular plot of land is untilled and thus unoccupied.
As Mr. Shehadeh navigated through the natsh, a herd of goats and a shepherd came wandering over the hilltop and started down the incline, rounding switchbacks single file and then flooding into the fields.
"Peace be with you," Mr. Shehadeh said in Arabic.
"And on you be peace," the man responded.
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