Vycházky Palestinou - Zápisky o mizející krajině – Shehadeh Raja (2026)

Who is the Promised Land for? Under the Oslo Accords, the West Bank was supposed to form part of the territory governed by the Palestinian National Authority. Israel, however, began supporting the establishment of settlements which, together with patrolling soldiers, restrict and displace Palestinian inhabitants and fundamentally transform the landscape. Green hills are covered with concrete, and then a wall rises. Raja Shehadeh, Palestine’s best-known writer, witnesses this transformation during seven walks taken over the course of thirty years. He received the prestigious Orwell Prize for this book. Shehadeh set out on his first walk in the late 1970s, when he still crossed a wild landscape where stories known from the Bible seemed to have taken place only yesterday. He knows the hills around Ramallah, where he was born and lives, as well as the land around the Dead Sea. As a lawyer and human rights activist, he has also spent decades seeing the injustices of Israeli settlement on the West Bank at close range. He does not appeal to emotions, but describes what he sees and sticks to the facts. Each walk takes readers through specific places and gradually through Palestinian history, intertwined with the fate of Shehadeh’s family, who had to flee Jaffa and settle on the West Bank. The book’s uniqueness also lies in its time-lapse approach: through the author’s eyes, we observe what has happened to previously almost untouched nature while becoming aware of the consequences of political decisions in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. With Shehadeh, we walk among characteristic hills, around springs and wadis, and past the remains of old settlements, as well as through villages and suburbs, alongside the newly built wall and Israeli settlements. These are places where residents of Palestinian villages are afraid to let their children go out alone or harvest their olives. Sometimes someone accompanies the author, at other times he talks to a settler; most often, he becomes the target of official and military harassment, and on one occasion even of unknown shooters. Writing, as he observes himself, helps him avoid becoming bitter. These walks through Palestine are among Shehadeh’s best-known works and have appeared in several expanded editions, uniquely blending the talent of an observer who captures the landscape’s enchantment from the perspective of an almost archetypal wanderer with the stark reality of the territory through which he travels.