Palestinian Walks: Forays Into a Vanishing Landscape

'A rare historical insight into the tragic changes taking place in Palestine.' --Jimmy Carter From one of Palestine's leading writers, a lyrical, elegiac account of one man's wanderings through the landscape he loves--once pristine, now forever changed by settlements and walls--updated with a new afterword by the author. 'I often come to walk in these hills,' I said to the man who was doing all the talking and seemed to be the commander. 'In fact I was once here with my wife, it was 1999, and some of your soldiers shot at us.' 'It was over on that side,' the soldier pointed out. 'I was there,' he said, smiling. When Raja Shehadeh first started hill walking in Palestine, in the late 1970s, he was not aware that he was traveling through a vanishing landscape. In recent years, his hikes have become less than bucolic and sometimes downright dangerous. That is because his home is Ramallah, on the Palestinian West Bank, and the landscape he traverses is now the site of a tense standoff