Facts on the Ground - Nadia Abu El-Haj

Archaeological Practice and Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society

Published 2001  Chicago University Press

REVIEW – 10 June 2009 -  Palestine News -Summer 2009

Abe Hayeem

This fascinating book is like an archaeological exploration itself, impeccably researched with quiet forensic rigour that has divided critics. While winning academic awards, it was nevertheless condemned by pro-Israel detractors, the notorious Campus Watch, in 2007, who tried (unsuccessfully) to have the writer’s academic tenure at Columbia terminated.

Edward Said, professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University until his death in September 2003, wrote of being "indebted" to the book and work of Abu El Haj, in Freud and the Non-European (2003):

"What she provides first of all is a history of systematic colonial archaeological exploration in Palestine, dating back to British work in the mid-nineteenth century. She then continues the story in the period before Israel is established, connecting the actual practice of archaeology with a nascent national ideology - an ideology with plans for the repossession of the land through renaming and resettling, much of it given archeological justification as a schematic extraction of Jewish identity despite the existence of Arab names and traces of other civilizations. This effort, she argues convincingly, epistemologically prepares the way for a fully fledged post-1948 sense of Israeli-Jewish identity based on assembling discrete archaeological particulars -scattered remnants of masonry, tablets, bones, tombs..."

Nadia Abu El- Haj analyses the practice of archaeology as a field science and it’s political use and manipulation by archaeologists, in particular Christian archaeologists in Palestine upto 1948, and thereafter in Israel, and in Occupied Jerusalem and the West Bank after 1967. It is an investigation into the methodology used by Israeli archaeologists, and the nature of territorial self-fashioning in Israeli society and identity politics of what she interprets as the ‘colonial –national’ ideology of Zionism. Archaeology has been central to the formation of Israeli identity since the establishment of the state. It has been used to ‘prove’ Jewish continuity and ownership of Palestine since biblical times, “despite the existence of Arab names and traces of other civilizations”, and to justify extending Israel’s sovereignty and occupation, as the pretext for an Israeli return to their sacred land. The existing terra firma of Palestine contained ‘the historic biblical landscapes, battlegrounds, Israelite settlements and sites of worship’  that could be revealed by “digging the soil with our own hands”, as described by Ben Gurion.

The author describes the use of bulldozers in a dig at Jezreel, to get through the strata containing 5,000 years of past histories and all the intervening debris until the deeper levels of the Bronze Age/Canaanite and Iron Age/Israelite are reached – the ones Israeli archaeologists are interested in – which cover the period of the Bible. Immediately after Israel occupied East Jerusalem in 1967, bulldozers were also used to demolish the 400-year-old Mughrabi Quarter which contained important Islamic buildings, to clear the space in front of the Western Wall. While generally, the upper layers of Muslim and Ottoman periods were marginalised in digs and museums exhibiting the finds, in excavations around the city wall, an Umayyad Palace complex was retained, as part of monumental history, at the expense of smaller remains.

Anyone visiting the Old City should read Nadia’s book beforehand, to gain a detailed insight into the annexation of the whole of East Jerusalem in June 1967. The entire Old City was declared a site of Antiquity, and all the archives and collections of the Rockefeller Museum (including the Dead Sea Scrolls), and other institutions particularly of Jewish and Israelite relevance, were declared to be the state’s ‘national and cultural’ property, contravening UNESCO’s Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict (1954). This ‘ownership’ is still emphasised today by Israel’s ‘new’ PM Netanyahu who has declared: “United Jerusalem is Israel's capital. Jerusalem was always ours and will always be ours”

The whole area around the old Jewish Quarter was subject to a comprehensive archaeological excavation, before it was expanded to 5 times its original size, with the old Roman Cardo excavated, and reconstruction “fashioned over ruins incorporated into the new structures, so as to appropriate previous historical narratives into the expansion of the Jewish nation State. Past histories – Crusader, Ottoman, Arab are subsumed and de-nationalised or stripped of their significance”. The museums – Burnt House and the Western Heritage Tunnel – the opening up of it by Netanyahu in 1996 under prompting by the Religious Affairs Ministry causing riots – reconstruct only the Herodian history relevant to the original Jewish aspect of the Temple, establishing a ‘priority of right’.

Most controversially, excavations have been allowed to be taken under control by the ultra religious authorities and organisations like Ateret Hacohanim in the Western Heritage Tunnel, and the radical settler movements like Elad in Silwan creating the integration of the sacred, colonial, and national aspects where the tunnels become places of prayer, the Bible becomes history, and the cultural politics of a supposedly modern secular nation are reconfigured. This is now being questioned by professional archaeologists themselves, worried at the dangerous concoction of its use as part of the colonial expansion in the Old City and the ‘Holy Basin”.where religious Elad settlers have taken over all the open spaces, using armed guards backed by the Israeli soldiers, and is tunnelling under houses without concern for the Silwan residents, to try and find evidence, so far lacking, of the biblical City of David, which some Israeli archaeologists doubt actually existed.

The whole irony, in the spirit of El_Haj’s exposition, was commented on by Israeli architect Eyal Weizman, “Archaeology provided not only a pretext for an Israeli return to occupy Palestinian land, but also the ‘footprint’ of historical authenticity that could be developed into built form by Israeli architects. Biblical archaeology was used to validate the claim that vernacular architecture was in fact “Jewish’ at source and allowed ‘Israeliness’ to define itself as a local ‘native culture’ appropriated and altered by the latecomer Palestinians.”

Dr.Nadia Abu El-Haj is assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at Barnard College, Columbia University, NY.

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Book review: Un-erasing the erasure of Palestine

Book review: Un-erasing the erasure of Palestine
Gabriel Ash, The Electronic Intifada, 12 February 2009

I read Jonathan Cook's new book Disappearing Palestine: Israel's experiments in human despair before Israel committed its most recent massacres in Gaza. Israel's massive disregard for Palestinian life and the clearly deliberate destruction of life-sustaining infrastructure shocked many poorly informed observers, but few of those acquainted with the knowledge contained in this book would have been taken by surprise. Cook is a British journalist who made the Palestinian city of Nazareth his home. Over the last six years Cook published a series of highly informative and original articles that broke with the Western tradition of stenographic journalism. Although previously a staff journalist of the liberal British paper The Guardian, few of his recent articles were featured in the mainstream Western press. He knows too much.

This book is in fact two short books for the price of one. The second half comprises a selection drawn from these articles Cook published over the last six years in a variety of websites and newspapers. The first half is an outstanding essay that seeks to distill the so-called "Israeli-Palestinian conflict" and to trace within it the overarching principle that guides Israel's policies. Cook's thesis is that "the goal of Israeli policy is to make Palestine and the Palestinians disappear for good."

Proving such a strong thesis is not an easy task. Many historians, and many laypersons with a liberal education, tend to be suspicious of plans and purposes. History, when examined closely enough, often looks like a patchwork of accidents. No doubt chance had a substantial impact on the history of Zionism. Few of the colonizers who laid the ground for the future State of Israel in the 1920s imagined the coming holocaust in Europe, or the massive influx of Jews from Arab countries. The most fateful decisions taken by the state were the result of intense internal debates and can be easily imagined resolving the other way. For example, the decisions to attack Egypt in 1956 and 1967 required the no small feat of isolating a sitting prime minister, Moshe Sharett in 1955 and Levi Eshkol in 1967. Ariel Sharon's provocation that ignited the second Palestinian intifada in September 2000 was an election campaign ploy, and so were the recent massacres in Gaza.

However, when a driver has an accident every year, it is not enough to note that each accident was different -- here the street lighting was faulty, there the brakes malfunctioned, one time happened during a snow storm; we are at fault if we ignore the pattern. Cook synthesizes a voluminous array of books relating to both the ideology and practices of the Israeli state, in order to present a compelling and appalling pattern of actions and words leading, planning and driving in one inexorable direction, the disappearance of Palestine and Palestinians. He does this in a lean and matter-of-fact prose, with a style that keeps the inevitable pull of ironic language in check, and with effortless narrative guidance that acquaints the reader along the way with the main historical and geographical signposts. The first chapter covers Zionism's early beginnings and the erasure of Palestinian history, the colonial imagination of the "empty land," the emergence of active plans for getting rid of the inhabitants of Palestinian villages (transfer), followed by the actual massive ethnic cleansing that took place in 1948. A battered Palestinian minority remained under Israeli control, mainly in the Galilee and the Negev. Cook then describes and traces the common denominator of the various policies adopted vis-a-vis this minority after 1948, from land confiscations and "judaization" campaigns to explicit calls for transfer, revealing the persistence and consistency of the overarching Israeli purpose: disappearing Palestinians.

The bulk of the main essay is devoted to the history of the colonization of the West Bank and Gaza, from the war of 1967 and the pursuant occupation, through the various strategic phases of the settlements enterprise, up to the Oslo accords of the mid-1990s, the second Palestinian intifada, the building of the apartheid wall and Sharon's "disengagement" from Gaza. It is in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, where demographic constraints make Palestinian presence so much more of a threat to Zionism, that the single-minded pursuit of the goal of disappearance assumes its most monstrous forms so far, fully justifying the book's subtitle, "Israel's experiments in human despair." Cook weaves into the historical swipe copious evidence about the planning and thinking behind the settlement project. This thinking appears most clearly in the Kafka-esque legal subterfuges that Israel devised in order to give ethnic cleansing the patina of legality. The chapters about the law is a must-read primer into one of the most chilling aspects of Palestinian life under Israeli rule, chilling precisely because of its seemingly aseptic calm and the invisibility of violence. Political theorist Hannah Arendt's phrase, "the banality of evil," both resonates in and is questioned by this account: the banality of the local commanders and petty bureaucrats who make the occupation happen cannot exist without the sadistic creativity of its lawyers.

The final pages of the essay assess the implications of this story. Cook uses the late Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling's concept of "politicide" to call attention to the careful ways in which Israel constructs and describes its policies in order to dodge an accusation of genocide, when in fact the accusation is fully merited:

"So long as Israeli outrages can be presented as spontaneous, unsystematic and related to security needs, the international community will turn a blind eye. As long as Israel ensures that politicide -- a subtle incremental, war of attrition against the Palestinian public and private life -- does not look much like the popular notion of genocide (concentration camps and butchery) Israel will be able to continue its policies unchecked. The ultimate goal, however will be the same: the disappearance of a Palestinian nation for good."

Being proven right by events is not conclusive evidence of a thesis, but it is nonetheless a useful reminder that understanding matters. Cook writes in the last paragraph, "Gaza's inmates are staring at a future in which they are supposed to return to the Stone Age, without fuel, electricity, medicines, and even basic foodstuffs." That future is here, making Cook's other dire predictions all the more alarming.

Part of what the essay reveals, although Cook does not make it explicit, is how much the Israeli dependence on constructed historical narratives also translates into an almost "literary" sensitivity to the power of narration that is itself harnessed to the goals of disappearing Palestinians. Not only does Israel seek to erase the Palestinian presence in the land, and with it that historical memory, but its strategies of erasure are constrained by narrative rules, and designed with a view of fragmenting the potential national narrative that emerges from the erasure itself. Israel seeks not only to erase, but, borrowing from the language of architecture, to erase the erasure of Palestine, thus satisfying both internal needs for a clear conscience as well as the demands of Western amnesia to depict every new phase of this genocide as "spontaneous, unsystematic and related to security needs." History and journalism with memory, writing that insists on un-erasing the erasure, defragmenting the accidental and the spontaneous and tracing its patterns back to the bureaucrats, ideologues and politicians behind it and simultaneously to the resistance in front of it, is not just a matter of accuracy and knowledge, but also of survival.

Cook not only seeks to meet this requirement, but also exposes the complicity of those writers for whose consumption Israel tailors its genocide the way it does. This is done in the second half of the book. The reprinted articles are a useful series of "snapshots" from different moments in the war of disappearance. They tackle a variety of topics, from the persecution of Palestinian political leader Azmi Bishara, the rise of the Russian right-winger Avigdor Lieberman, the difference between left and right in Israeli politics, the siege of Gaza and more. An important number deal with analyzing the way various narrators of the events in question play an active role in the erasure of the disappearance of Palestine. Here, Cook takes to task Israeli writers Uri Avnery and David Grossman, as well as the rights organizations B'Tselem and Human Rights Watch for the complicit ways they represent the Palestinian struggle and Israeli actions.

Cook's book is a timely and useful contribution to the urgent work of countering the hegemonic discourse in the West as it seeks to accept and legitimize the disappearance of Palestine. There are however two lacunae in this exposition of Israel to Western audiences. First, Palestinian resistance appears in it only en passant, in a fragmented way. In un-erasing the erasure, Cook reconstructs Israel as a subject carrying out genocide against Palestinians, but leaves Palestinian agency fragmented and to a large extent erased. This fragmentation is no doubt the result of successful Israeli repression, but part of the task of writing the story of this repression is to resist and recover from it. For a Western audience, this lacuna means that the book ultimately sustains a humanitarian appeal more than a demand for solidarity and support for Palestinian resistance.

The second lacuna is the concentration on the surface of Israeli policies. The coherent portrayal of Israel as it perpetrates genocide against Palestinians is not false. Without a doubt Israel is persistent in a slow drive to disappear Palestine. But beneath this coherence lay internal struggles and fractures that matter to the success of the work of stopping and undoing that disappearance. In the late 1980s, a dominant section of Israeli elites was eager, for reasons of self-interest, to move from a colonial to a post-colonial relation with Palestinians. To be sure, that would not have ended the repression, and it would not have meant the end of the Palestinian liberation struggle. However, the results of that failed transformation, doomed by the interplay between the global neo-liberal reaction and the internal fractures of Jewish Israeli society, were fundamental to the reinvigorated genocidal policies adopted by Israel in the '90s and beyond. As vital as it is to reconstruct Palestinian agency in the face of fragmentation, it is also vital to deconstruct Israeli agency to both its local internal components and to the global structures that co-opt and use it. By attributing to Israel a level of coherence that it doesn't actually possess we risk echoing uncritically the false claims of its leadership to represent Jews and Jewish interest, supposedly against Palestinians, a hostile region and a hostile world. Especially today, amidst a collapsing neo-liberal globalization and the inchoate possibilities opened by this collapse, it is crucial to de-exceptionalize the story of Israel and to integrate its analysis within larger frameworks that can facilitate dismantling its genocidal structures before they fulfill their apocalyptic potential. I am well aware that addressing both issues would have required a much beefier volume than Cook intended. It would have been useful however to call attention to the lack and make the reader aware of what is left untold.

Gabriel Ash is an activist and writer. Ash is a core member of IJAN (Inrternational Jewish Anti-Zionist Network). He writes because the pen is sometimes mightier than the sword and sometimes not. He welcomes comments at g.a.evildoer A T gmail D O T com.


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Sari Makdisi- Jeff Halper -Jonathan Cook

Grab every hilltop

• Last Updated: September 05. 2008

Arab workers construct new housing units for Jewish settlers in the West Bank settlement of Givat Zeev in March of this year. AP

Three new books detail Israel’s undiminished power over Palestinian lives and land. Alan Philps doubts they can upend the entrenched narrative of the conflict that has taken hold in the West.

1) Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation
Saree Makdisi
W W Norton & Co
Dh105

2) An Israel in Palestine: Resisting Dispossession, Redeeming Israel
Jeff Halper
Pluto Press
Dh112

3) Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair
Jonathan Cook
Zed Books
Dh99


It is easy to forget that not so long ago Israelis and Palestinians used to get together for all kinds of reasons. At the start of the Oslo process in the early 1990s, when peace looked to be on the horizon, Israeli musicians were playing in the night clubs of Ramallah. Palestinian dentists in the border town of Qalqiliya were doing a brisk trade fixing the teeth of visiting Israelis. Mega-markets sprang up on the old Green Line, where Israelis would spend their Saturdays buying cheap food and consumer goods.

There were some far-sighted souls, led by Edward Said, who saw that all this activity was dust in the eyes. The so-called peace process, he argued, could never lead to justice for the Palestinians because its basic document, the 1993 Oslo Accords, lacked the elements required for success, not least a freeze on Jewish settlements.

A decade on, we know that Said was right. It is the fate of people whose gaze is fixed on the horizon to have their pockets picked, and that is what happened to the Palestinians. The number of Jewish settlers doubled during the years of the Oslo peace process. While the Israeli jazzmen were blowing their horns in Ramallah, the Palestinians were being quietly robbed of their land.

The end of Oslo has brought a harsh clarity to the conflict. The three authors of the books under review – an Israeli, a Palestinian and a Briton – have each picked apart the elements of Israel’s 40-year occupation – brutality by the security forces, legal duplicity and foreign PR of eye-watering audacity. Their conclusion is that just as Washington has got around to accepting the idea of a Palestinian state there is no land left to build it on, only a big prison.

Jeff Halper, a white-bearded anthropology professor who immigrated to Israel after the 1973 Yom Kippur War takes the most personal approach. His life changed, he writes, when he witnessed the demolition of a Palestinian home by the Israeli army in 1998. He instinctively rushed to defend the family, and found himself knocked down into the dirt with Salim Shawamreh, the owner of the destroyed house. Both men were looking up at the barrel of an Israeli gun. At that moment, Halper says, he saw through the “membrane” that surrounds all Jewish Israelis. This is the invisible barrier which keeps life in Israel sharply focused and brightly lit, and turns the Palestinians into dark, inhuman figures in the shadows.

He struggled to comprehend why, if there was land in the West Bank for half a million Jewish settlers, there was no space for Shawamreh, his wife and children – and the 18,000 other Palestinian families who have had their homes reduced to rubble. His conclusion is that Israel, far from being the only democracy in the Middle East is a Jewish tribal state whose guiding principle, from 1904 until the present day, has been the dispossession of the Palestinians.

Halper cannot deny his Israeliness after 35 years of residence. He now considers himself a post-Zionist, which puts him at odds with the mainstream peace movement. He believes that Israel can only “redeem itself” – to subvert a favourite phrase of the Zionists – by ending a century of dispossession and sharing the land with the Palestinians.

The Israelis who think like Halper – including his three sons, all conscientious objectors who refused to serve in the Israeli army – could probably fit around his kitchen table. He left academia to become a full-time activist as the head of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions. At the end of August, he was one of the 44 activists who sailed in small boats from Cyprus to Gaza to defy the Israeli blockade. Upon entering Israel he was arrested, and he spent the night in Ashkelon jail.

Dispossession began slowly at the start of the last century and reached a military peak in 1947-48 with the ethnic cleansing of most Palestinians from the state of Israel. In the 1967 war it was not possible to expel all the West Bank Palestinians, so more sophisticated means were found to make life impossible for them, in the hope that the rest would depart. The figures speak for themselves. Before 1948, the Palestinians owned – either outright or through customary title – 93 per cent of the land in Mandatory Palestine. After the Nakba, this declined to 25 per cent, and now stands at a mere four per cent.

The settlers’ red-roofed houses, Halper writes, have “replaced the tank as the smallest fighting unit” in the drive to conquer the land. Under the guise of normal governance – zoning, road building and the creation of “nature reserves” – and “security” concerns, the Israelis have imprisoned the Palestinians in what Halper calls a “matrix of control”: a dynamic network of army bases and settlements, checkpoints and settler-only roads that chokes off all normal life. This is one of the many legacies of Ariel Sharon, who urged the settlers to “grab every hilltop”. The lesson of Israeli manoeuvres in the West Bank is that you do not have to hold all the land – just the right land – to control it.

To most people the map of the West Bank is impossibly complex. To Halper the matrix of control is crystal-clear. “Imagine a blueprint for a planned prison. Looking at it, it appears as if the prisoners own the place. They have 92 per cent of the territory: the living areas, the work areas, the exercise yard, the cafeteria, the visiting area. All the prison authorities have is a mere eight per cent or less – the prison walls, the cell bars, the keys to iron doors, some glass partitions, surveillance cameras and weapons. Not much in terms of territory, but enough to control the inmates.”

The final phase of dispossession is now under way in the form of a separation barrier that has encircled Qalqiliya and its dentists with a concrete barrier twice as high as the Berlin Wall.

Halper sees himself as a teacher, trying to educate people, to “reframe” the conflict not in terms of security, as now, but in terms of rights and international law. He wants to help others see through the “membrane” like he did.

Jonathan Cook, a freelance writer living in the city of Nazareth, is an altogether angrier personality. Just as Halper is at odds with the mass of Israelis, Cook has distanced himself from the Jerusalem press corps that provides most of the world with news about the conflict. Based in Nazareth, the capital of Israel’s Palestinian minority, he breaks the first rule of the Jerusalem press corps – “Jews make news” – and the second rule: “No editors are interested in Palestinians.” By stepping off the treadmill of the staff correspondent, he can concentrate on writing what he likes for where he likes, including The National. For Cook, the experience of the Palestinian citizens of Israel is crucial to understanding life on the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip and is likely to be a key factor in the unravelling of the Zionist project.

This perspective gives his book Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair a feel completely different from any other reporter’s work. The Israeli government, which is usually at the heart of a foreign correspondent’s coverage, appears as a distant, threatening force.

Cook quotes Moshe Dayan, defence minister in 1967, as saying the Palestinians must live “like dogs” so that they leave. This, of course, has not been achieved, though the middle classes have fled, grabbing any chance they can find to make a better life abroad. The Israeli project, Cook says, is “ethnic cleansing not by butchers in uniform but technocrats in suits.”

The hounding of the diaspora Palestinians who returned to their homeland under the Oslo process, only to be kicked out, is at the heart of Saree Makdisi’s Palestine Inside Out. It is clear that Israel wants to decapitate Palestinian society, removing those with capital and economic expertise – the very people who set up mega-markets for Israeli shoppers in the Oslo years. As Theodor Herzl, the father of political Zionism, wrote, the goal of Zionism should be to “spirit a penniless population across the border by … denying it any employment in our own country.”

Makdisi is the nephew of Edward Said and, like him, a professor of English, though not in New York but at the University of California, Los Angeles. But while he is a smart speaker, the book disappoints. Born in Beirut and living in California, Makdisi is a visitor to Palestine. Every page is packed with facts and statistics, but he fails to take the reader by the hand and lead him through the thicket of numbers and acronyms, as Raja Shehadeh did successfully in Palestinian Walks. His sources are mostly the reports of international organisations and Israeli human rights groups. Depressingly, the Palestinians appear as abject victims.

All these writers have succeeded in wresting the narrative from Israel’s preferred framework, in which the imperatives of security are the only issues, to one that focuses on the Palestinians and their half-lives as non-citizens with no rights. But the weakness of these books is that the writers all have an academic bent: the audience for these books is a limited one.

This year is the 50th anniversary of the publication of what is probably the most influential book on Israel-Palestine – not an academic tome but Leon Uris’s novel Exodus. This saga of the heroic birth of the Israeli state was wildly popular when it was published in 1958 and instantly turned into a hit film starring Paul Newman. It furnished the mindsets of Western correspondents and commentators as they covered the Six-Day War – making it seem that the conquest of Jerusalem was part of God’s plan.

Halper devotes an anguished chapter to the legacy of Exodus. It popularised many of the myths on which Israeli propaganda is based: the Jews as underdogs, the Palestinians as brigands and squatters and, most enduringly, the idea that the Palestinian’s defeat in 1948 proved they lacked a true connection to the land they could not defend.

All these falsehoods have been skewered by Halper, Makdisi, Cook and dozens of other writers. But will their books unseat the Exodus myth and change the way people think about the conflict? Can any book alter the increasingly incompatible narratives that have taken hold among partisans of both sides?

The Palestinians used to have a national myth made up of armed struggle and steadfastness, one that sought to expunge the victimhood of 1948. The work of Mahmoud Darwish, the Palestinian poet who died last month, glorified a kind of heroic resistance. But now, thanks to Israel’s military might and its unbreakable bond with America, the Palestinians have been defeated. All that remains of the resistance narrative is the desperate stratagem of suicide bombing, which has only helped the Israelis to win the global propaganda war.

These three volumes are full of tragic tales – of daily humiliation at checkpoints, of villagers cut off from their land, of children walking to school through frontier-style terminals. There is no heroic new myth here, only cosmic victimhood.


Alan Philps is associate editor of The National. aphilps@thenational.ae

Palestinian Walks by Raja Shehadeh

Taking you home: "Palestinian Walks"
Lora Gordon, The Electronic Intifada, 21 July 2008

The travel memoir fills our shelves with vicarious adventure. It leads us down the roads we will never travel and feeds us at tables where we will never sit. Who needs ordinary life? We want our chutes down Niagara; we want our treks up Everest. More than anything we want our journeys into ancient and exotic worlds.

With such dreams in hand did 19th-century Western travelers visit the Levant (present-day Syria, Lebanon, Israel-Palestine and Jordan) in search of the biblical "Holy Land." Thus they came, saw and recorded their fantasy and their disappointment, and bound them together into a beautiful canon of half-truths and outright lies that first helped shape popular perception and finally were used to help justify the colonization of Palestine.

Who could imagine "a land without a people" without William Thackeray's vivid depiction of Palestine as "parched mountains, with a grey bleak olive tree trembling here and there; savage ravines and valleys paved with tombstones -- a landscape unspeakably ghastly and desolate ..."?

Who would have felt inspired to "make the desert bloom" without Herman Melville's description of "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 ... all Judea seems to have been accumulations of this rubbish"?

Yet, these accounts also compelled Raja Shehadeh, founder of the human rights organization Al-Haq, to provide a counter-narrative, in Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Landscape. "The accounts I have read do not describe a land familiar to me," Shehadeh writes, "but rather a land of these travelers' imaginations. Palestine has been constantly reinvented, with devastating consequences to its original inhabitants."

European, and later Zionist colonizers, traveled to Palestine looking for ancient Israel. Many wrote travelogues that silenced Palestinian history, says Shehadeh, and paved the way for the Jewish state to take control not only of the land but also of Palestinian time and space.

But here is a travel memoir that crosses no continents, only hills and valleys; that searches for recent present rather than distant past, and celebrates the real and the ordinary in order to debunk the imagined extraordinary. Its title ironically evokes the map-filled travel guides of tourists visiting natural parks. But Shehadeh's text runs counter to the world of maps, containing, he reveals, not a single walk. Rather, this is an account of six sarhat, the plural of sarha, or to wander.

"A man going on a sarha," he writes, "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."

The text itself resembles a sarha, meandering from the hills of Ramallah, to Shehadeh's family history, into Palestinian history, and finally the foreboding present. Waist-deep in wildflowers, readers wade through a land that tells its own stories. We learn that Shehadeh's family belonged to one of the five founding clans of Ramallah 500 years ago, but left farming life for urban Jaffa. In 1948 they were expelled and much of the family found itself back in Ramallah, displaced urbanites who rarely visited the city's surrounding hills. Not until returning from law school in London did Shehadeh, preoccupied by "Israel's long-term policies toward the Occupied Territories," begin to wander out of the city of his birth.

Shehadeh writes: "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." Foreign to the hills, he at first got lost, but finally he "began to have an eye for the ancient tracks ... 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." The sarha finally proved more natural than urban navigation: "I found myself to be a good pathfinder even though I easily got lost in cities."

Shehadeh takes us through rich passages as he perches on a large rock, tests his lungs running up a hill, or rests to take in a view:

"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. ... Its surface is not unlike that of a gigantic walnut."

On that first sarha in 1978, we stumble accidentally onto Shehadeh's uncle's old qasr, a stone hut long abandoned: "It was as though in this qasr time was petrified into an eternal present, making it possible for me to reconnect with my dead ancestor through this architectural wonder." We meet Abu Ameen, who rejected the family's city life to raise his family in this house while supporting himself as a stonemason. Reflecting on the slow erosion of these lands under settlement construction, Shehadeh wonders what his uncle would think to see it now. "Would his spirit be brimming with anger at all of us for allowing it to be destroyed and usurped, or would he just be enjoying one extended sarha as his spirit roamed freely over the land, without borders as it had once been?"

Unlike the accounts of travel writers past, Shehadeh's hills are full of people, not only the ghost of his uncle but also the plaintiffs he represents in court who seek to preserve their land from settlement use; old men meditating and young boys running around; the negotiators of the Oslo Accords who return from abroad with Yasser Arafat to rule the country, and the politicians who rise to challenge them.

Each sarha walks us through different and multifaceted aspects of Israel's occupation, from the draining of the Dead Sea to irrigate settlement lands, to the concrete "poured over these hills" to support Israel's expanding industrial zones, to the wall that not only isolates communities but also destroys their land and livelihood. Over time, the hills, robbed of simplicity, contradict themselves. They provide solace only next to grief, freedom only coupled with imprisonment, and sanctity never without danger. Finally, we find the hills that once provided Shehadeh with an escape from occupation have been transformed into its quintessential landscape, and Thackeray's and Melville's dreary accounts have been fully realized into the Jewish-only settlements that claimed them as inspiration. In this upside-down land, Shehadeh gets lost in a fearsome labyrinth of settler highways, and dodges bullets as Palestinian security forces shoot from a distance.

Honest, haunting and heartbreaking, this travelogue hits close to home while transporting us not only into Palestine's telling geography, but also into our own daily paths, making us question how they, too, shape our lives.

Lora Gordon lives in Chicago, where she studies journalism at Northwestern University and works at a community health center.


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Destruction as Cultural Cleansing

from Building Design 

3 February 2006

By Abe Hayeem

A new book examines how attackers use the tactical eradication of architecture.

The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War
Robert Bevan
Reaktion Books, HB, 240pp £19.95

"The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then you have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was."
Milan Kundera, The Book Of Laughter and Forgetting.

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