Palestinian Walks Summary
Palestinian author, lawyer and human rights activist Raja Shehadeh offers a vivid portrayal of the changing Palestinian landscape in his book entitled Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape (2008). The book is composed of six chapters, each one narrating a sarha, an Arabic term for a long meditative walk in the wilderness, set in a particular time and place. He starts from the early 1980s until 2006. Unlike Susan Abulhawa, writer of Mornings in Jenin (2010), who focused on narrating the historical and personal side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Shehadeh instead focused on its geographical side.
The author wonders in the beginning of his narrative: “would it really be possible to implement these plans? Could our hills, unchanged for centuries, become home within a matter of a few years for around 100,000 Jewish settlers who claim a divine right to …show more content…
He relates trauma to a physical space, i. e. the road, because it embodies loss of the land, as well as the supremacy of Israel and therefore the Palestinian powerlessness.
The idea Shehadeh entertained throughout his narrative is that the Israeli policies including building settlements and expanding roads and highways have severely destroyed the Palestinian landscape. The latter becoming increasingly restricted to Palestinians. He fights a losing battle when he tries hardly to challenge the Israeli settlements in their own courts, but eventually he realizes the bitterness of the defeat and hopelessness when he acknowledges:
I knew I would be able to find ways of dealing with the trauma of defeat. Somehow despite the problems and fears I would continue to walk and to write. At my age my father had successfully survived two catastrophic defeats. I was more fortunate. So far, I have had to deal with only
The author wonders in the beginning of his narrative: “would it really be possible to implement these plans? Could our hills, unchanged for centuries, become home within a matter of a few years for around 100,000 Jewish settlers who claim a divine right to …show more content…
He relates trauma to a physical space, i. e. the road, because it embodies loss of the land, as well as the supremacy of Israel and therefore the Palestinian powerlessness.
The idea Shehadeh entertained throughout his narrative is that the Israeli policies including building settlements and expanding roads and highways have severely destroyed the Palestinian landscape. The latter becoming increasingly restricted to Palestinians. He fights a losing battle when he tries hardly to challenge the Israeli settlements in their own courts, but eventually he realizes the bitterness of the defeat and hopelessness when he acknowledges:
I knew I would be able to find ways of dealing with the trauma of defeat. Somehow despite the problems and fears I would continue to walk and to write. At my age my father had successfully survived two catastrophic defeats. I was more fortunate. So far, I have had to deal with only