Palestinian Walks

Notes on a Vanishing Landscape

Raja Shehadeh

ISBN 1861978049

ISBN 13 9781861978042

August 2007

Price £9.99

Paperback, 240 pp.

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Subject: Memoir

WINNER OF THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL WRITING

Raja Shehadeh, celebrated human rights campaigner and lawyer, navigates recent Palestinian history, from Ayn Kenya to the Shukba Caves, the Ramallah hills and the Dead Sea. Literally entwined within the chinks and fissures of these walks is a mine of conflict and failures, which Shehadeh chronicles with vigour and poignancy.

Raja Shehadeh narrates excerpts from Palestinian Walks on YouTube

‘Intensely political while avoiding the excesses of pure polemic, Shehadeh’s account of six different Palestinian walks continually grapples with misconceptions and misinformation…Shehadeh is always engaging. There’s such an eccentricity to his approach, commenting on dinosaur footprints in the rock one moment, challenging Israeli law the next...it’s a remarkable way of going about things, delivering what many activists neglect to mention: the odd, slightly absurd details that really touch people; things that appear off-camera, away from news reports – things that seem real.’
— Independent on Sunday

‘He distils his pain and anger into eloquent prose, meticulously counting the ways he loves his land, allowing it to sing in evocations of grass luminous in sunlight, a sea of poppies, low oregano bushes yielding their scene as he brushes past, scarlet cyclamens growing out of crevices, muted pink rock roses…Palestinian Walks is no trite exercise in myth-making or propaganda. ’
— Sunday Tribune (Ireland)