Download or read book Palestinian Walks written by Raja Shehadeh and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2008-06-03 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “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 between his fellow Palestinians and settlers newly arrived from Israel. In this original and evocative book, we accompany Raja on six walks taken between 1978 and 2006. The earlier forays are peaceful affairs, allowing our guide to meditate at length on the character of his native land, a terrain of olive trees on terraced hillsides, luxuriant valleys carved by sacred springs, carpets of wild iris and hyacinth and ancient monasteries built more than a thousand years ago. Shehadeh's love for this magical place saturates his renderings of its history and topography. But latterly, as seemingly endless concrete is poured to build settlements and their surrounding walls, he finds the old trails are now impassable and the countryside he once traversed freely has become contested ground. He is harassed by Israeli border patrols, watches in terror as a young hiking companion picks up an unexploded missile and even, on one occasion when accompanied by his wife, comes under prolonged gunfire. Amid the many and varied tragedies of the Middle East, the loss of a simple pleasure such as the ability to roam the countryside at will may seem a minor matter. But in Palestinian Walks, Raja Shehadeh's elegy for his lost footpaths becomes a heartbreaking metaphor for the deprivations of an entire people estranged from their land.
Download or read book Palestinian Walks written by Raja Shehadeh and published by Profile Books. This book was released on 2010-07-09 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over two decades of turmoil and change in the Middle East, steered via the history-soaked landscape of Palestine. This new edition includes a previously unpublished epigraph in the form of a walk. When Raja Shehadeh first started hill walking in Palestine, in the late 1970s, he was not aware that he was travelling through a vanishing landscape. These hills would have seemed familiar to Christ, until the day concrete was poured over the flora and irreversible changes were brought about by those who claim a superior love of the land. Six walks span a period of twenty-six years, in the hills around Ramallah, in the Jerusalem wilderness and through the ravines by the Dead Sea. Each walk takes place at a different stage of Palestinian history since 1982, the first in the empty pristine hills and the last amongst the settlements and the wall. The reader senses the changing political atmosphere as well as the physical transformation of the landscape. By recording how the land felt and looked before these calamities, Raja Shehadeh attempts to preserve, at least in words, the Palestinian natural treasures that many Palestinians will never know.
Download or read book Going Home written by Raja Shehadeh and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2020-03-10 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner, Moore Prize for Human Rights Writing In a dazzling mix of reportage, analysis, and memoir, the leading Palestinian writer of our time reflects on aging, failure, the occupation, and the changing face of Ramallah "Few Palestinians have opened their minds and their hearts with such frankness." —The New York Times In Going Home, Raja Shehadeh, the Orwell Prize–winning author of Palestinian Walks, takes us on a series of journeys around his hometown of Ramallah. Set in a single day—the day that happens to be the fiftieth anniversary of Israel's occupation of the West Bank—the book is a powerful and moving record and chronicle of the changing face of his city. Here is a city whose green spaces—gardens and hills crowned with olive trees— have been replaced by tower blocks and concrete lots; where the Israeli occupation has further entrenched itself in every aspect of movement, from the roads that can and cannot be used to the bureaucratic barriers that prevent people leaving the West Bank. Here also is a city that is culturally shifting, where Islam is taking a more prominent role in people's everyday and political lives and in the geography of the city. A penetrating evocation of memory, pain, and place that is lightened by everyday joys such as delightful accounts of shared meals and gardening, Going Home is perhaps Raja Shehadeh's most moving and painfully visceral addition to his series of personal histories of the occupation, confirming Rachel Kushner's judgment that "Shehadeh is a buoy in a sea of bleakness."
Download or read book A Rift in Time written by Raja Shehadeh and published by OR Books. This book was released on 2011 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "First published by Profile Books, London, 2010"--Title page verso.
Download or read book Walking Palestine written by Stefan Szepesi and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the images of the Israeli- Palestinian conflict so dominant in our minds, walking for leisure is the one activity probably least associated with the West Bank region. But Stefan Szepesi s book wanders well off the beaten track of Palestine as only a synonym for occupation and strife, exploring its inspiring natural and cultural landscape, its intriguing past and present, and the hospitality of its people. The book takes first-time walkers and experienced hikers, as well as armchair explorers, through Palestine's steep desert gorges, along its tiny herders trails and over its quiet dirt roads running past silver green olive groves. With side stories and anecdotes on heritage, history, culture and daily life in the West Bank, the book ventures into the traits and character of Palestine today. Beyond the 250 km of walking trails described and mapped in detail throughout the book, Walking Palestine offers a wealth of practical walking tips, including references to local guides, the West Bank s best leisure spots and countryside restaurants, and the most charming places to spend the night.
Download or read book Where the Line Is Drawn written by Raja Shehadeh and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2017-06-13 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[Shehadeh's] books are maps, painstakingly pieced together, of regions lost to senseless division, to bad choices, and to lies.” —The Nation “Remarkable and hopeful . . . a deeply honest and intense memoir.” —Gal Beckerman, The New York Times Book Review A moving account of one man’s border crossings—both literal and figurative—by the award-winning author of Palestinian Walks, published on the fiftieth anniversary of the Six Day War In what has become a classic of Middle Eastern literature, Raja Shehadeh, in Palestinian Walks, wrote of his treks through the hills surrounding Ramallah over a period of three decades under Israel’s occupation. In Where the Line Is Drawn, Shehadeh explores how occupation has affected him personally, chronicling the various crossings that he undertook into Israel over a period of forty years to visit friends and family, to enjoy the sea, to argue before the Israeli courts, and to negotiate failed peace agreements. Those forty years also saw him develop a close friendship with Henry, a Canadian Jew who immigrated to Israel at around the same time Shehadeh returned to Palestine from studying in London. While offering an unforgettably poignant exploration of Palestinian-Israeli relationships, Where the Line Is Drawn also provides an anatomy of friendship and an exploration of whether, in the bleakest of circumstances, it is possible for bonds to transcend political divisions.
Download or read book All that Remains written by Walid Khalidi and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 708 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Seeking Palestine written by Penny (ed.) Johnson and published by Interlink Publishing. This book was released on 2013-10-01 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do Palestinians live, imagine and reflect on home and exile in this period of a stateless and transitory Palestine and a sharp escalation in Israeli state violence and accompanying Palestinian oppression? How can exile and home be written? In this volume of new writing, fifteen innovative and outstanding Palestinian writers—essayists, poets, novelists, critics, artists and memoirists—respond with their reflections, experiences, memories and polemics. Their contributions—poignant, humorous, intimate, reflective, intensely political—make for an offering that is remarkable for the candor and grace with which it explores the many individual and collective experiences of waiting, living for, and seeking Palestine. Contributors include: Lila Abu-Lughod, Susan Abulhawa, Suad Amiry, Rana Barakat, Mourid Barghouti, Beshara Doumani, Sharif S. Elmusa, Rema Hammami, Mischa Hiller, Emily Jacir, Penny Johnson, Fady Joudah, Jean Said Makdisi, Karma Nabulsi, Raeda Sa’adeh, Raja Shehadeh, Adania Shibli.
Download or read book Mural written by Mahmoud Darwish and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2017-08-01 with total page 74 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The most celebrated writer of verse in the Arab world." –Adam Shatz, The New York Times Poetry from former national poet of Palestine, illustrated by original drawings by John Berger Mahmoud Darwish was the Palestinian national poet. One of the greatest poets of the last half century, his work evokes the loss of his homeland and is suffused with the pain of dispossession and exile. His poems display a brilliant acuity, a passion for and openness to the world and, above all, a deep and abiding humanity. Here, his close friends John Berger and Rema Hammami present a beautiful new translation of two of Darwish’s later works. Illustrated with original drawings by John Berger, Mural is a testimony to one of the most important and powerful poets of our age.
Download or read book Rifqa written by Mohammed El-Kurd and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2021-10-12 with total page 105 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rifqa is Mohammed El-Kurd’s debut collection of poetry, written in the tradition of Ghassan Kanafani’s Palestinian Resistance Literature. The book narrates the author’s own experience of dispossession in Sheikh Jarrah--an infamous neighborhood in Jerusalem, Palestine, whose population of refugees continues to live on the brink of homelessness at the hands of the Israeli government and US-based settler organizations. The book, named after the author’s late grandmother who was forced to flee from Haifa upon the genocidal establishment of Israel, makes the observation that home takeovers and demolitions across historical Palestine are not reminiscent of 1948 Nakba, but are in fact a continuation of it: a legalized, ideologically-driven practice of ethnic cleansing.
Download or read book Language of War Language of Peace written by Raja Shehadeh and published by Profile Books. This book was released on 2015-02-12 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Award-winning author Raja Shehadeh explores the politics of language and the language of politics in the Israeli Palestine conflict, reflecting on the walls that they create - legal and cultural - that confine today's Palestinians just like the physical borders, checkpoints and the so called 'Separation Barrier'. The peace process has been ground to a halt by twists of language and linguistic chicanery that has degraded the word 'peace' itself. No one even knows what the word might mean now for the Middle East. So to give one example of many, Israel argued that the omission of the word 'the' in one of the UN Security Council's resolutions meant that it was not mandated to withdraw from all of the territories occupied in 1967. The Language of War, The Language of Peace is another important book from Raja Shehadeh on the world's greatest political fault line.
Download or read book Tasting the Sky written by Ibtisam Barakat and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2007-02-20 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A spare elegant memoir. . . . The immediacy of the child’s viewpoint . . . depicts both conflict and daily life without exploitation or sentimentality.” —Booklist, starred review “When a war ends it does not go away,” my mother says. “It hides inside us . . . Just forget!” But I do not want to do what Mother says . . . I want to remember. In this groundbreaking memoir set in Ramallah during the aftermath of the 1967 Six-Day War, Ibtisam Barakat captures what it is like to be a child whose world is shattered by war. With candor and courage, she stitches together memories of her childhood: fear and confusion as bombs explode near her home and she is separated from her family; the harshness of life as a Palestinian refugee; her unexpected joy when she discovers Alef, the first letter of the Arabic alphabet. This is the beginning of her passionate connection to words, and as language becomes her refuge, allowing her to piece together the fragments of her world, it becomes her true home. Transcending the particulars of politics, this illuminating and timely book provides a telling glimpse into a little-known culture that has become an increasingly important part of the puzzle of world peace. Winner, Arab American National Museum Book Award for Children’s/YA Literature “Beautifully crafted. Readers will be charmed by the writer-to-be as she falls in love with chalk, the Arabic alphabet, and the first-grade teacher who recognizes her abilities.” —School Library Journal, starred review “A compassionate, insightful family and cultural portrait.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review “Brims with tension and emotion.” —Publishers Weekly
Download or read book Palestinian Refugees in International Law written by Francesca P. Albanese and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-05-21 with total page 609 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Palestinian refugee question, resulting from the events surrounding the birth of the state of Israel seventy years ago, remains one of the largest and most protracted refugee crises of the post-WWII era. Numbering over six million in the Middle East alone, Palestinian refugees' status varies considerably according to the state or territory 'hosting' them, the UN agency assisting them and political circumstances surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict these refugees are naturally associated with. Despite being foundational to both the experience of the Palestinian refugees and the resolution of their plight, international law is often side-lined in political discussions concerning their fate. This compelling new book, building on the seminal contribution of the first edition (1998), offers a clear and comprehensive analysis of various areas of international law (including refugee law, human rights law, humanitarian law, the law relating to stateless persons, principles related to internally displaced persons, as well as notions of international criminal law), and probes their relevance to the provision of international protection for Palestinian refugees and their quest for durable solutions.
Download or read book When the Birds Stopped Singing written by Raja Shehadeh and published by Steerforth. This book was released on 2013-03-12 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Israeli army invaded Ramallah in March 2002. A tank stood at the end of Raja Shehadeh's road; Israeli soldiers patrolled from the roof toops. Four soldiers took over his brother's apartment and then used him as a human shield as they went through the building, while his wife tried to keep her composure for the sake of their frightened childred, ages four and six. This is an account of what it is like to be under seige: the terror, the frustrations, the humiliations, and the rage. How do you pass your time when you are imprisoned in your own home? What do you do when you cannot cross the neighborhood to help your sick mother? Shehadeh's recent memoir, Strangers in the House: Coming of Age in Occupied Palestine, was the first book by a Palestinian writer to chronicle a life of displacement on the West Bank from 1967 to the present. It received international acclaim and was a finalist for the 2002 Lionel Gelber Prize. When the Birds Stopped Singing is a book of the moment, a chronicle of life today as lived by ordinary Palestinians throughout the West Bank and Gaza in the grip of the most stringent Israeli security measures in years. And yet it is also an enduring document, at once literary and of great political import, that should serve as a cautionary tale for today's and future generations.
Download or read book Julia Gillian and the Quest for Joy written by Alison McGhee and published by Scholastic Inc.. This book was released on 2010-07 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new school year has started for Julia Gillian, and so far, it's not going very well. Her best friend, Bonwit Kellar, doesn't seem to want to be her best friend anymore. Learning to play trumpet, once Julia Gillian's heart's desire, is much more difficult than it looks. And the school has hired an interim lunch monitor, the all-too-strict Mr. Wintz. As Julia Gillian's music teacher would say, "Where is the joy?". Thankfully, Julia Gillian soon learns that sharing problems is often the only way to solve them, and that life is only as complicated-or joyful-as we want it to be.
Download or read book Keep Your Eye on the Wall written by Olivia Kiang-Snaije and published by Saqi Books - Saqi Books. This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Powerful, unique and beautifully produced - an insightful and thought-provoking critique of the Wall around Palestine.
Download or read book Occupation Diaries written by Raja Shehadeh and published by Profile Books. This book was released on 2012-08-02 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is often the smallest details of daily life that tell us the most. And so it is under occupation in Palestine. What most of us take for granted has to be carefully thought about and planned for: When will the post be allowed to get through? Will there be enough water for the bath tonight? How shall I get rid of the rubbish collecting outside? How much time should I allow for the journey to visit my cousin, going through checkpoints? And big questions too: Is working with left-wing Israelis collaborating or not? What affect will the Arab Spring have on the future of Palestine? What can anyone do to bring about change? Are any of life's pleasures untouched by politics?
