into obstacles

In stark contrast to yesterday's celebration of the free and unrestricted walk is a book that I finished reading just after submitting last night's post. In Palestinian Walks, the human rights lawyer Raja Shehadeh confesses his love for the hills of the West Bank and chronicles some of his favorite walks, taken over several decades. Anywhere in Western Europe or in North America, this would just be another quaint book of countryside – there's a hill, here a tree that was already old when the author was young and here a pub where the beer always tastes best right after the village church chimes four times in the afternoon.

This being Palestine, the walks described by Shedadeh don't conform to the standards of the civilized world. The walker is not free to go where it draws him. A straight line of ten miles that features in some of Richard Long's walks is out of the question. In the hills around Ramallah, the walker is not king. He is slave to sad political realities. The encroachment of Israeli settlements closes trail after trail. Roads are paved where cyclamen used to bloom, and Palestinians are blocked from accessing places where they used to roam for centuries.

Shedadeh details this development with energetic passion. Each of the chronologically ordered chapters feels more suffocating. Each walk offers less freedom and more oppression. The loving observations of geographical and botanical beauty recede into the background of the narrative, displaced by geopolitical considerations and the brutality of history.

Snarling tongues of settlements project into what used to be open space, eating up more and more vital land until the present inhabitants are squeezed out and suffocated. The inexorability of the development is frightening. Where is this going to lead? Shedadeh has no answers, but with his deep sorrow he offers a perspective that is rarely heard in political discussions about the Middle East, a point of view that deserves to enter the argument.