A poignant, incisive meditation on Israel's longstanding rejection of peace, and what the war on Gaza means for Palestinian and Israeli futures.

When apartheid in South Africa ended in 1994, dismantled by internal activism and global pressure, why did Israel continue to pursue its own apartheid policies against Palestinians? In keeping with a history of antagonism, the Israeli state accelerated the establishment of settlements in the Occupied Territories as extreme right-wing voices gained prominence in government, with comparatively little international backlash.

Condensing this complex history into a lucid essay, Raja Shehadeh examines the many lost opportunities to promote a lasting peace and equality between Israelis and Palestinians. Since the creation of Israel in 1948, known to Palestinians as the Nakba, or catastrophe, each side's perception of events has strongly diverged. What can this discrepancy tell us about Israel's undermining of a two-state solution? And will the current genocide in Gaza finally mark a shift in the world's response?

With graceful, haunting prose, Shehadeh offers insights into a defining conflict that could yet be resolved.

Finalist for the National Book Award and Los Angeles Times Book Prize
An NPR Best Book of the Year

A subtle psychological portrait of the author's relationship with his father during the twentieth-century battle for Palestinian human rights.

Aziz Shehadeh was many things: lawyer, activist, and political detainee, he was also the father of bestselling author and activist Raja. In this new and searingly personal memoir, Raja Shehadeh unpicks the snags and complexities of their relationship.

A vocal and fearless opponent, Aziz resists under the British mandatory period, then under Jordan, and, finally, under Israel. As a young man, Raja fails to recognize his father's courage and, in turn, his father does not appreciate Raja's own efforts in campaigning for Palestinian human rights. When Aziz is murdered in 1985, it changes Raja irrevocably.

This is not only the story of the battle against the various oppressors of the Palestinians, but a moving portrait of a particular father and son relationship.

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.

Finalist for the National Book Award and Los Angeles Times Book Prize
An NPR Best Book of the Year

A subtle psychological portrait of the author's relationship with his father during the twentieth-century battle for Palestinian human rights.

Aziz Shehadeh was many things: lawyer, activist, and political detainee, he was also the father of bestselling author and activist Raja. In this new and searingly personal memoir, Raja Shehadeh unpicks the snags and complexities of their relationship.

A vocal and fearless opponent, Aziz resists under the British mandatory period, then under Jordan, and, finally, under Israel. As a young man, Raja fails to recognize his father's courage and, in turn, his father does not appreciate Raja's own efforts in campaigning for Palestinian human rights. When Aziz is murdered in 1985, it changes Raja irrevocably.

This is not only the story of the battle against the various oppressors of the Palestinians, but a moving portrait of a particular father and son relationship.

This is not a political book, Anthony Lewis asserts in his foreword to this revealing memoir of a father-son relationship set against the backdrop of more than thirty years of life under military occupation. Yet in a hundred different ways it is political. . . . Shehadeh shatters the stereotype many Americans have of Palestinians.

Three years after his family was driven from the city of Jaffa in 1948, Raja Shehadeh was born in Ramallah. His early childhood was marked by his family's sense of loss and impermanence, vividly evoked by the glittering lights on the other side of the hill. He witnessed the numerous arrests of his father, Aziz, who, in 1967, was the first Palestinian to advocate a peaceful, two-state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He predicted that if peace were not achieved, what remained of the Palestinian homeland would be taken away bit by bit. Ostracized by his fellow Arabs and disillusioned by the failure of either side to recognize his prophetic vision, Aziz retreated from politics. He was murdered in 1985.

The first memoir of its kind by a Palestinian living in the occupied territories, Strangers in the House offers a moving description of daily life for those who have chosen to remain on their land. It is also the family drama of a difficult relationship between an idealistic son and his politically active father, complicated by the arbitrary humiliation of the occupier's law.

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.

[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.

Few Palestinians have opened their minds and hearts with such frankness.--New York Times

Shehadeh writes beautifully, his language infused with a lyrical, melancholic sense of loss--Sunday Telegraph

Shehadeh writes with great clarity and simplicity, but no bitterness about the unhappy history of his family and country.--Independent

When conflicts become entrenched over generations, the language of war infiltrates everyday life, concealing destruction and hardening positions. Nowhere is this truer than in the Middle East.

Award-winning author Raja Shehadeh explores the politics of language and the language of politics in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, reflecting on the walls that they create--legal and cultural--that confine today's Palestinians just like the borders, checkpoints and so-called Separation Barrier. He shows how the peace process has been ground to a halt by twists of language and linguistic chicanery that have degraded the word peace itself.

The situation at the world's greatest political fault-line has never looked bleaker, but still Shehadeh finds reason to hope and explains why.

Raja Shehadeh is Palestine's leading writer. He is also a lawyer and the founder of the pioneering Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq. Shehadeh is the author of several acclaimed books including Strangers in the House and Occupation Diaries and winner of the 2008 Orwell Prize for Palestinian Walks. He lives in Ramallah in Palestine.

A profound meditation on memory and the preservation of Palestinian heritage, from the award-winning author of We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I.

Forgotten uncovers the hidden or neglected memorials and places in historic Palestine--now Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories--and what they might tell us about the land and the people who live on the small slip of earth between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.

From ancient city ruins to the Nabi 'Ukkasha mosque and tomb, acclaimed writers and researchers Raja Shehadeh and Penny Johnson ask: what has been memorialized, and what lies unseen, abandoned, or erased--and why? Whether standing on a high cliff overlooking Lebanon or at the lowest land-based elevation on earth at the Dead Sea, they explore lost connections in a fragmented land.

In elegiac, elegant prose, Shehadeh and Johnson grapple not only with questions of Israeli resistance to acknowledging the Nakba--the 1948 catastrophe for Palestinians--but also with the complicated history of Palestinian commemoration today.

The Israeli army invaded Ramallah in March 2002. A tank stood at the end of Raja Shehadeh's road; Israeli soldiers patrolled from the rooftops. 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 children, ages four and six. This book is an account of what it is like to be under siege: the terror, the frustrations, the humiliations, and the rage of civilians becoming trapped in their own homes and at the mercy of young soldiers who have been ordered to set aside their own sense of human decency in order to bully, harass and in some cases brutalize an unarmed population. 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? And what does it feel like when occupier and occupied, who are supposed to be enemies, are forced to set aside feelings of empathy? When the Bulbul Stopped Singing reveals universal and timeless truths. A new introduction by Colum McCann and an afterword by the author show how little things have changed since this record of life under siege was first compiled.

This book represents an in-depth legal analysis of the lengthly and complicated agreements signed between Israel and the PLO. The legal and administrative developments that took place in the Palestinian areas over the past twenty years are surveyed and closely analysed, providing the background essential to an understanding of the agreements signed between Israel and the PLO. The negotiation process is critically considered and the pot-agreement legislation is reviewed. There is an analyses of the legal developments in the areas under the Palestinian Authority which is the first of its kind. The book has appendices which include military orders and proclamations, letters and negotiation documents which have not been previously published.

This book represents an in-depth legal analysis of the lengthly and complicated agreements signed between Israel and the PLO. The legal and administrative developments that took place in the Palestinian areas over the past twenty years are surveyed and closely analysed, providing the background essential to an understanding of the agreements signed between Israel and the PLO. The negotiation process is critically considered and the pot-agreement legislation is reviewed. There is an analyses of the legal developments in the areas under the Palestinian Authority which is the first of its kind. The book has appendices which include military orders and proclamations, letters and negotiation documents which have not been previously published.

This is not a political book, Anthony Lewis writes in his foreword. Yet in a hundred different ways it is political.... Shehadeh shatters the stereotype many Americans have of Palestinians. Hath not a Palestinian senses, affections, passions? This revealing memoir of a father-son relationship, the first o its kind by a Palestinian living in the occupied territories, is set against the backdrop of Middle East hostilities and more than thirty years of life under military occupation.

Three years after his family was driven from the coastal city of Jaffa in 1948, Raja Shehadeh was born in the provincial town of Ramallah, in the rural hills of the West Bank. His early childhood was marked by his family's sense of loss and impermanence, vividly evoked by the glittering lights on the other side of the hill.

Growing up in the shadow of home, he was introduced early to political conflict. He witnessed the numerous arrests of his father, Aziz Shehadeh, who, in 1967, was the first Palestinian to advocate a peaceful, two-state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He predicted that if peace were not acheived, what remained of the Palestinian homeland would be taken away, bit by bit, through Israeli settlement. Ostracized by his fellow Arabs and disillusioned by the failure of either side to recognize his prophetic vision, Aziz retreated from politics. He was murdered in 1985.

Strangers in the House offers a moving description of the daily lives of those who have chosen to remain on their land. It is also the family drama of a difficult relationship between an idealistic son and his politically active father complicated by the arbitrary humiliation of the occupier's law.