A book worth reading....

Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape by Raja Shehadeh, published by Profile books

Ian Black, the Guardian's Middle East editor
reviews


'Shehadeh, the author of several other acclaimed (and more optimistic) memoirs, has not produced a guidebook to rambling and hiking in the Holy Land: there are no routes up mountains or recommendations of cosy pubs in lonely valleys, no sketches of the stone shelters built by farmers to store their crops or shelter their sheep. But, like the poet Mahmoud Darwish, he conjures up something of what has been lost, and is still being lost, to the Palestinians - and what that means.

Tellingly, the Arabic word "sarha" - a walk or roam - derives from the verb used for cattle grazing freely on pasture. Shehadeh's musings as he anxiously negotiates the changing landscape - isolated Palestinian enclaves, Israeli checkpoints and an ever-expanding network of settler-only bypass roads, and finally the "separation wall" - give new meaning to the "right to roam" that most in the west rightly take for granted'