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PORTSIDE CULTURE

SEARCHING FOR PALESTINE’S HIDDEN PLACES AND LOST MEMORIALS  
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Alex Preston
April 13, 2025
The Guardian
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_ In mapping the Palestinian history and culture that persists
despite Israeli suppression, Raja Shehadeh and Penny Johnson display a
strength of purpose and a promise of hope. _

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_Forgotten
Searching for Palestine's Hidden Places and Lost Memorials_
Raja Shehadeh and Penny Johnson
Other Press
ISBN: 978-1-63542-474-4

Raja Shehadeh – lawyer, activist and Palestine’s greatest prose
writer – has long been a voice of sanity and measure in the fraught,
tendentious world of Arab-Israeli politics. His first non-academic
book, _When the Bulbul Stopped Singing
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chronicled the 2002 siege of his hometown, Ramallah, while
_Palestinian Walks
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which won the Orwell prize, traced how Israel’s de facto occupation
of the West Bank had fundamentally altered both its geography and its
history. Last year, Shehadeh
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published _What Does Israel Fear from Palestine?
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his first book since the attacks of 7 October. It was a work in two
parts: the first, a characteristically measured analysis of how
history led us to this point; the second, a bitterly furious record of
the devastation wrought upon Gaza. The overwhelming impression was of
a man who, after decades of engagement, had finally, tragically,
succumbed to despair.

So it is an unexpected relief to find in _Forgotten
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different: a Shehadeh who is engaged, forensic, alert to history’s
weight but unwilling to let it crush him. Perhaps this is due to the
presence of his co-author, his wife, the academic Penny Johnson
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prose remains lawyerly, precise to the point of fastidiousness, but
the collaboration lends it a quiet strength. The first-person plural
voice used throughout the book is intimate yet resolute, while the
occasional references to “Raja” and “Penny” in the third
person suggest a certain distance – a recognition that they, too,
are subjects in this vast historical tragedy, just as much as its
narrators.
 
The project of _Forgotten_ echoes _Palestinian Walks_, but this time
there is a clear objective to Shehadeh and Johnson’s wanderings.
They are searching for evidence of Palestinian history in the West
Bank [[link removed]] – traces both
ancient and recent of the thriving culture that has endured here for
millennia, and the memorials that bear witness to the suffering of
those who call this place home.

Again and again, I thought of WG Sebald
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The resemblance lies not only in the mournful elegance of the prose
but also in its method: a meditative excavation of history embedded in
the landscape. Readers of _The Rings of Saturn
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in which Sebald wanders the East Anglian coast uncovering the buried
violence of empire, will recognise the impulse. But here, in occupied
Palestine, the violence is neither buried nor historical. It is
immediate, ongoing. “How many human lives and how many futures would
have been preserved … had the Israeli government … prevented
further settlements?”, the authors ask. “Thousands have died
since, and so here we were, on our way to see how Palestinians
memorialise their dead in Nablus.”

 

Forgotten examines the way geography and history are manipulated,
controlled and erased

At the heart of Shehadeh’s work – and the conflict itself – is
the idea of biopolitics, as explored by thinkers such as Michel
Foucault [[link removed]] and
Giorgio Agamben [[link removed]].
_Forgotten_, like _Palestinian Walks_, examines the way geography and
history are manipulated, controlled and erased. To move through
Palestine is to navigate a web of restrictions – permits,
checkpoints, detours – designed not only to obstruct but to exhaust.
It is a book about memory and memorials, but also about the sheer
difficulty of reaching them. “Checkpoints, closures and a regime of
exclusions have deprived new generations from gaining an impression of
the country as a geographical unit,” write Shehadeh and Johnson. And
that, of course, is precisely the point.
The writers seek out the ruins of Kafr Bir’im, a Palestinian village
in Galilee destroyed by the Israeli army in 1953, and the tomb of
Mahmoud Darwish
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Shehadeh’s friend and Palestine’s great poet. They visit Ottoman
khans – way stations for desert caravans – and search for the
remnants of ancient Gibeon and Qasr al-Yahud on the River Jordan, the
site of Christ’s baptism. They find a monument to a squadron of
Turkish aeronauts and the only public memorial to the _Nakba_, the
1948 expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians. Everywhere, history is
distorted or obliterated, rewritten by Israeli power.

And yet, for all this, _Forgotten_ is a book of resistance – not
just political, but existential. Shehadeh and Johnson, now in their
70s, offer a vision of Palestinian heritage that refuses to be erased,
tracing a lineage that stretches back millennia and persists today
despite the relentless attempts to efface it. History, like the land
itself, cannot be so easily obliterated. Even after bulldozers and
bombs, flowers bloom, trees reclaim razed earth, red anemones push
through rock. Shehadeh and Johnson remain awed by the hills, by
vultures and eagles wheeling above them, by the annual clouds of
almond blossom. All this layered past, _Forgotten_ insists, holds
within it the promise of a future just as rich, just as enduring.

In previous reviews, I wrote that Shehadeh’s books are like beacons
held up against the darkness of Israeli oppression. _Forgotten_ is
perhaps the brightest light of all.

* Palestine
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* geography
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* History
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* memory
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