Palestinian Walks by Raja Shehadeh
Profile Books, 218pp, £7.99

Almost everybody knows roughly where the West Bank is and why it is the key to solving or perpetuating the Israel-Palestine conflict. Very few of us, however, have a feel for the physical nature of the region, its hills, olive groves and wildlife. It used to be a tradition of the Palestinian Arabs to go on a sarha, a walk without a fixed route or destination lasting several days, almost like an Aboriginal walkabout. Raja Shehadeh, a well-known human rights lawyer from Ramallah, has made many sarha over the last 20-odd years, a period in which the West Bank has been drastically transformed by the Israeli occupation and the development of settlements. Shehadeh set himself the task of charting the gradual disappearance of a landscape which he adored and which he believes has now disappeared for ever. He has no love of Israel and what it has meant for his homeland but though his account of his many walks is often punctuated by anger, the overall tone is more melancholic and elegiac. His final chapters detail a meeting with a hashish-smoking young Israeli settler, which seems to offer a possible vision of future peaceful co-existence, and a frightening encounter with two young Palestinian toughs who make no bones about wanting to kill his young female companion, a Scottish peace activist, which provides a bleaker vision of the future.
Robert Low