Palestinian Walks
Raja Shehadeh & Penny Johnson
What is travel writing in a land under military occupation and dotted with checkpoints and barriers? Raja Shehadeh is considered by many to be Palestine’s leading writer. In Forgotten: Searching for Palestine’s Hidden Places and Lost Memorials, he and his wife Penny Johnson search for a wider vision of the small slip of land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean. Together they visit the ruins of a great Bronze Age city and a buried pre-1948 Palestinian neighbourhood, uncovering destroyed Byzantine villages as well as parts of their hometown Ramallah.
In conversation with Samatha Knights KC, Raja and Penny will also discuss the changes wrought by the Israeli settlement enterprise to the land and the Palestinians that depend on it as explored in his 2008 book Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape.
