Palestinian Walks

Forays into a Vanishing Landscape

Raja Shehadeh

• Publisher: Scribner
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781416570097
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

"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.

1 The Pale God of the Hills

RAMALLAH TO HARRASHA

IN THE UNEASY FIRST YEARS OF THE NEW MILLENNIUM I felt that my days in Palestine were numbered. But whether Palestine or myself would slip away first was an open question. Cities were being erected in its midst, as were industrial and theme parks, and wide, many-laned highways more suited to the plains of the Midwest of America than to the undulating hills of Palestine. In two and a half decades one of the world’s treasures, this biblical landscape that would have seemed familiar to a contemporary of Christ, was being changed, in some parts beyond recognition.

The biography of these hills is in many ways my own, the victories and failures of the struggle to save this land also mine. But the persistent pain at the failure of that struggle would in time be shared by Arabs, Jews and lovers of nature anywhere in the world. All would grieve, as I have, at the continuing destruction of an exquisitely beautiful place.

As a child I used to hear how my grandfather Judge Saleem liked nothing more than coming to Ramallah in the hot summer and going on a sarha with his cousin Abu Ameen, leaving behind the humid coastal city of Jaffa and the stultifying colonial administration that he served and whose politics he detested. It was mainly young men who went on these expeditions. They would take a few provisions and go to the open hills, disappear for the whole day, sometimes for weeks and months. They often didn’t have a particular destination. To go on a sarha was to roam freely, at will, without restraint. The verb form of the word means to let the cattle out to pasture early in the morning, leaving them to wander and graze at liberty. The commonly used noun sarha is a colloquial corruption of the classical word. A man going on a sarha wanders aimlessly, not restricted by time and place, going where his spirit takes him to nourish his soul and rejuvenate himself. But not any excursion would qualify as a sarha. Going on a sarha implies letting go. It is a drug-free high, Palestinian-style.

This book is a series of six sarhat (the plural of sarha) through time and place that take place on various Palestinian hills, sometimes alone and sometimes in the company of different Palestinians from the past and present—my grandfather’s cousin, the stonemason and farmer, and the human rights and political activists of more recent times, who were colleagues in my struggle against the destruction being wrought on the hills. There were other, less sympathetic, encounters that took away from my wanderings. Each sarha is in the form of a walk that I invite the reader to take with me. I hope, by describing what can be seen, heard and smelled in the hills, to allow the reader to enjoy the unique experience of a sarha in Palestine.

---

There was a time, I’m told, when the hills around Ramallah were one large cultivated garden with a house by every spring. Olive trees dotted their slopes and grapevines draped the terrace walls. But by the late 1970s, when I returned from my law studies in London, these hills were no longer being cultivated. Except for the indomitable olive trees, nothing that had been planted was growing in them. They had become an extensive nature reserve, with springs and little ponds where frogs hopped undisturbed and deer leaped up and down the terrace walls, where it was possible to walk unimpeded.

Ramallah was established some five hundred years ago by five clans. Its inhabitants depended for their livelihood mainly on the cultivation of the surrounding hills. My family belonged to one of these clans, but by the early years of the twentieth century they had left Ramallah, given up farming and joined the professional class in Jaffa, which they came to consider as their home. My grandfather Saleem served as a judge at the courts of the British Mandate over Palestine; my father practiced law in the city from the office that he established in 1935. In 1948 they were both forced to leave the city of their choice. My father came to Ramallah, where I was born. My grandfather was exiled to Beirut, where he died two years later.

Unlike most of the other Ramallah families we did not own an olive grove, and during the olive-picking season we were one of the few who did not leave town for the hills, to spend the week on the laborious work of the harvest. If we ever ventured to the hills it was to picnic in springtime, when for a few months water flowed in the wadis. Otherwise the hills, so close to the house where we lived, were remote and foreign, little more than a derided buffer that separated us from the horizon where usurped Jaffa lay and at which we looked longingly in the evenings, when the faraway Mediterranean coast blazed with light.

My first encounter with the language of the hills was at the law courts, when as a young man I used to accompany my father, who was a recognized expert in land law. He took on many cases of disputes between landowners who possessed kawasheen (certificates of ownership) for unregistered land where the boundaries of the plot were described in terms of the physical features, in the language of hill farmers. It was there that I encountered such words as sha’b, a’rsa, sabeel and bydar. In later years, when the Israeli occupation forces became interested in claiming Palestinian land for Jewish settlements and I appealed against land acquisition orders to Israeli courts, the ambiguity in these documents was used against the farmers to dispute their ownership.

The land had a strong effect on the character of the inhabitants of Ramallah. The narrow slivers on the slopes of the hills were fertile but difficult to cultivate, and their owners had to depend on the unpredictable rains and springs. They were hardy, taciturn, closed-natured, suspicious and provincial. To go on a sarha, which was expansive, open-ended and uncontrolled, allowing the soul to roam freely, must have been liberating for the inhabitants of Ramallah, confined as they were within the raggedy hills that offered no view of open territory or wide fertile fields.

In my family the practice was associated with my grandfather’s cousin Abu Ameen, who was already elderly when I was growing up. He had suffered a stroke and could only walk with the aid of a cane. I don’t remember him ever speaking of the sarha; the stroke had made his tongue too heavy. My memory of him is of a short, silent old man shuffling around his dark, cavernous, musty-ancient smelling home in the old part of town. It was from others that I heard about the sarha and Harrasha (small forest), where in the old days he used to spend the summer months cultivating his land and living out in the open fields, where Judge Saleem would visit him.

When I returned from my studies and began practicing law in Ramallah, the occupation was in its eleventh year with little prospect of ending. Insidious but significant changes in the law provided strong indications of Israel’s long-term policies toward the Occupied Territories, my home. Few seemed to be paying attention. A disquieting silence left me anxious and worried. The hills began to be my refuge against the practices of the occupation, both manifest and surreptitious, and the restrictions traditional Palestinian society imposed on our life. I walked in them for escape and rejuvenation.

In the beginning I did not know my way around. I would stray off the path, scrambling over terrace walls and causing their stones to tumble down behind me. It took a while before I began to have an eye for the ancient tracks that crisscrossed them and for the new, more precarious ones, like catwalks along the edge of the hills, made more recently by sheep and goats in search of food and water. Some of these were marked on Ordnance maps, others not. I found myself to be a good pathfinder even though I easily got lost in cities. As time passed I began to venture farther and farther into these hills and discovered new terrain, hills with different rock formations, where flowers bloomed earlier because the ground was lower and closer to the sea.

The land around Ramallah is varied but without large open areas. It is part of the Central Highlands that dominate most of the center of the West Bank. The valleys closer to town are narrow. The hills are steep, sometimes precipitous. There are no mountains anywhere in sight, only hills. The farther west you walk, the lower and rounder the hills become as the land descends gently down to the coastal plain. All you can see are hills and more hills, like being in a choppy sea with high waves, the unbroken swells only becoming evident as the land descends westward. This landscape, we are told, was formed by the tremendous pressure exerted by tectonic forces pushing toward the east. It is as though the land has been scooped in a mighty hand and scrunched, the pressure eventually resulting in the great fault that created Jordan’s rift valley, through which runs the River Jordan. The land seems never to have relaxed into plains and glens with easy-flowing rivers but has been constantly twisted and pressured to the point of cracking. Its surface is not unlike that of a gigantic walnut.

It was on the fertile plain of Marj Ibn A’mr (Jazreel Valley), which stretches below the Carmel mountains to Jenin in the West Bank and the breathtaking hills of Galilee, that most of the famous battles prior to the sixteenth century were fought and where the ruins of the fortifications and castles of the various invaders can still be seen. This was also the route of traders and pilgrims. No invaders or travelers passed through the hills of Ramallah however. The prize city of Jerusalem, ten miles to the south, could be reached from the narrow coastal plain through a valley that bypasses Ramallah by a few miles. The people in the village were protected by their hills. No heavy armament could be sent over the cracked terrain surrounding them. Nor was there much to entice conquerors. Only in 1901 was the first asphalted road opened between Ramallah and Jerusalem.

---

It was on a spring day in 1978, the year of my return to Ramallah, that I stumbled, quite by accident, upon the legendary Harrasha of Abu Ameen, deep in the hills of Palestine.

It had been a long winter, continuing to rain throughout April and during the first few days of May, which is most unusual for this part of the world. I set out on my sarha just two days after the rain had stopped. The sun had emerged and the earth was not too muddy. The sky was blue with low, scattered clouds that sometimes blocked the sun, making it very pleasant to walk.

My starting point on that day was behind the Anglican School in a northwestern neighborhood of Ramallah. I walked down the newly paved road, which continued northward toward the unfinished housing development, at that time the farthest incursion of the town into the hills. I found the path almost immediately; once on it, a certain peace and tranquillity descended upon me. Now I could go on with no need to worry, just walk and enjoy the beauty of the nature around me.

I ambled alongside the western side of the valley across from the hill referred to as El Batah (the duck), so called because of the way it sits on the valley. Along the path the wildflowers were in abundance. Most were in miniature, blue irises only an inch or so high, pink flax also very close to the ground and the slightly taller Maltese Cross and pyramid orchids, a colorful but thin carpet covering the vibrant land. I had assumed a pace that was neither hurried nor dawdling. I was heading toward the appropriately named Wadi El Wrda (the flower) across the shoulder of the hill, a gentle descent that took me over one fold, down a small incline and up another in a diagonal trajectory toward the valley.

I could see that the wadi had longer grass and plants because it was fed by the sweet water of A’yn El Lwza (the almond). I crossed over and listened to the faint sound of the dripping of the water down to a pool. Then I bent and looked into the hollow in the rocks from which the water oozed. I stretched out my hand and let the cold water run over it. There were plenty of stones and weeds. The spring was in bad need of cleaning—otherwise the water would be gushing out. I sat nearby, smelling the moist soil and looking at the impressive mossy brown cliff across the wadi. It was studded with cyclamens that grew out of every nook and cranny. They always seemed to grow in rocks that shielded them from the glare of the midday sun, squeezing themselves between cracks to prevent their bulbs from drying out. And despite their precarious position, their delicate flowers grew straight up and were hooked at the top like a shepherd’s staff. Their large, variegated leaves, similar to those of the grapevines but thicker and a deeper green, seemed suspended from nowhere, miraculously hanging on the high steep rock. Above the cliff the hill was steep and from this vantage point seemed high and formidable.

Nearby I found a well-preserved qasr. The word, which literally means a “castle,” refers to the mainly round stone structures dotting the land where farmers kept their produce and slept on the open roof. It was in one of these structures that my grandfather Saleem and my uncle Abu Ameen camped out when they went on their sarha together. It must have taken a good degree of skill to build one on this slope, where it has lasted for more than a hundred years. Before visiting the qasr, I took a moment to look around. It was as though the earth was exploding with beauty and color and had thrown from its bosom wonderful gifts without any human intervention. I wanted to cry out in celebration of this splendor. As I shouted “S-A-R-H-A!” I felt I was breaking the silence of the past, a silence that had enveloped this place for a long time. My cry of greeting echoed against one hill then another and another, returning to me fainter and fainter until I felt I had somehow touched the entire landscape.

Along the terrace wall was a rock rosebush with its thick leaves and muted pink flowers. It climbed hesitantly over the stones, green against the gray as if someone had carefully chosen it to decorate this ancient wall. The stones with which the wall was built were carefully picked and piled together, and had held back the soil over many years without a single one of them falling, come rain or flood. Between these neatly arranged rocks more cyclamens grew. Their flowers stood at a thirty-degree angle, pink and red droplets, all across the wall. In an opening between the two terraces were three wide stone steps placed there to make it easier to move between the two gardens. By the side of the steps was a yellow broom with its spiky green leaves. Its sweet scent filled the air. Lower down were some tall white asphodels and lower still bunches of blue sage. Even the long grass that grew along some parts of the wall added color and texture. And when I looked up at the next level, I saw another beautiful garden, graced by a fabulous olive tree many centuries old, whose shallow roots were like thick arteries clinging together, clasping the ground firmly, forming a perfect wooden furrowed seat on which to sit and rest one’s back against the trunk. Above this garden there was another. This terrace was large enough for two olive trees surrounded by a carpet of color that spread all the way to the wall that led to yet another garden above, one garden hanging on top of another and another, going up as far as the eye could see. I felt I could sit all day next to this qasr and feast my eyes on this wonderful creation. What fortunate people once lived in this veritable paradise. And how wide of the mark was Herman Melville, who described this area as barren when he visited it in the middle of the nineteenth century:

Whitish mildew pervading whole tracts of landscape—bleached-leprosy-encrustations of curses-old cheese-bones of rocks—crunched, knawed, and mumbled—mere refuse and rubbish of creation—like that laying outside of Jaffa Gate—all Judea seems to have been accumulations of this rubbish.

(Journals of a Visit to Europe and the Levant: October 11, 1856–May 6, 1857)

I did not want to dwell on the vilification by Western travelers of this precious land and instead turned my mind to Abu Ameen, wondering how he managed his summers here. Was life in one of these qasrs so difficult that he never had time to stop and look at these gorgeous surroundings as I was doing? Perhaps he didn’t need to stop to look. Perhaps his entire time in the hills with Saleem was one long sarha such as I might never be able to achieve.

The ponds along the wadi were filled with water from the spring. They had plenty of frogs, high spearmint, the common reed and swaths of algae floating in the water, an unusual sight in these dry hills. This section of the wadi, called Wadi Qasrya, was wider, with the low hills on both sides seeming to recline farther and farther back. Coming down their sides were several small wadis, Wadi Shomr (fennel) and Wadi El A’rsh (the throne). I left Wadi Qasrya and began climbing the high hill to the north, with the ruin of Khirbet Sakrya, of which only a few stone houses have remained.

As I walked up I looked at the unterraced hill to my left. What, I wondered, would it take to clear this and terrace it? What a feat it must have been to look at the wild hill and plan the subdivisions. How did they know when to build the terrace wall in a straight line, when in a curve and when to be satisfied with a round enclave where only a single tree could be planted? They must have been very careful to follow the natural contours, memorizing the whole slope before deciding how to subdivide it. The large rocks that could not be moved were kept standing where they found them. Here and there one could see clusters of them. The terracing snaked down the slope to the wadi on one side and trailed up on the other, curving with the folds of the hill, always leaving a passage for the mule-drawn hand plow to pass. Where once was a steep hill there was now a series of gradually descending terraces. In this way my ancestors reclaimed the wild, possessed and domesticated it, making it their own.

I was about to continue with my walk when I heard a rustle. I was afraid it would be a pack of wild dogs. With trepidation I looked up and saw instead a group of seven gray gazelles, the color of the rocks, running up the hill, taking big strides with their long thin legs, jumping so effortlessly over the large boulders that no stones tumbled in their wake.

I continued my slow ascent, following the silent musings of my mind and smelling the sharp brittle scent of thyme, which was growing in abundance on the side of the hill. My peace was shattered, when, out of nowhere, a huge gray bird flew right at me, its wings spread wide. I fell to the ground. It was an owl with a wingspread of just over three feet. It flew across to the opposite hill and landed on a rock, waiting to see whether I would pass and leave its nest in peace. I moved away quickly.

When I got around the high hill, a new vista opened up. The hills south of the village of Abu Qash spread out like the high waves of a turbulent sea all the way to the west. I now had to cross Wadi Matar (rain), along which ran an excellent path leading to the village. I managed to negotiate my way between the thickets. A smell of oregano from low bushes on the path lingered where I brushed against them. I had seen another imposing round qasr and was heading toward it.

The path took me behind the qasr, where I saw a cistern that the owners must have dug. I walked by the rusty metal cover in the ground and then over the fields, which had been cleared of stones. A copse of pines was growing there, the branches rustling in the light wind. I circled around to the front. As I stood before the door I had a sense of the family who must once have lived here. But no one was home, all was abandoned; except, perhaps, for the spirits. On this walk I had passed at least a dozen abandoned qasrs. Those who had once inhabited them were gone, that way of life was no more. Their owners had moved on to other places. At a certain point the land ceased to be capable of sustaining those cultivating it and other more lucrative opportunities for making a living opened up in the petroleum-rich Gulf and the New World. When I met Fareed, who originally came from R...