Loading summary
Transcript15 lines
- [00:01]
A
If you want access to bonus episodes, reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat, community discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast ad, free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to empire club@www.empirepoduk.com. Hello, William Durimple here we've just record a brilliant bonus episode with my old friend Raja Shahada. Raja is one of the greatest living Palestinian writers. Raja's family lost their family home in Jaffa at the Nakba in 1948. Raja grew up in Ramallah in their summer house and saw Ramallah change from a rural backwater under Jordanian rule to this kind of slowly throttled focus of Palestinian life under Israeli occupation. He's seen the different Israeli incursions, he' settlements growing. He founded the very first Palestinian human rights organization, Al Haq, to monitor the growing abuses of the IDF occupation forces and the slow throttling of Ramallah by the settlers. He's an extraordinary writer. He's a wonderful human being, an incredibly gentle, precise and learned man whose walks through the west bank have turned into a whole series of wonderful books, one of which won the Orwell Prize. And I really cannot recommend this recording more. Here is an extract from the bonus but if you want to watch the whole episode, you can join up and become a member of the club. Get early access add free main episodes Join empire club@empirepoduk.com today for again, people listening who have not been to the west bank and perhaps are confused. Could you just, in very basic terms, explain to someone who's never been to the west bank how your life would be different from, say, a Jewish author living a few miles away in Jerusalem?
- [02:12]
B
Well, a Jewish person living next door to Ramallah because Ramallah is surrounded by settlements and the settlements live under Israeli law and have all the rights under Israeli law and can move move from the west bank to Israel with a
- [02:25]
A
very good road, lovely new roads straight through without any airs and, and, and sort of brand new roads. If you have Israeli citizenship and also have a car plates that you get kind of waved through all the, all the roadblocks.
- [02:43]
B
Yeah. So visible in the west bank because the roads are segregated. Views of natural resources is segregated and discriminatory. And so the West Banker lives in a closed area which is now very much surrounded by settlements and roadblocks and sometimes gates. Israel is very adamant at making the Palestinians in the west bank feel that they are in Israel. So if you travel from Ramallah to Nablus along the road, you will find millions, thousands of Israeli flags all along the road and billboards advertising things in the settlements and restaurants and dry clean and so on, in Hebrew, of course. And all of this makes you feel that you are in Israel when you cannot move around freely and you have to be careful about when to leave because then the point will be closed and when it's, when is it open, when is it closed, when is the gate closed and when is the gate open? It's a very restricted life and you have no control over your affairs, over travel, over use of natural resources, over the taxes, Colonization at best, in a very strong sense.
- [03:56]
A
I just remember my visits to Ramallah Raja. And just to go through the gates into Ramallah, as a non Israeli, you show your passport, you can sometimes queue for an hour or two hours even if the gates are open. Bored teenagers ask you questions, security questions of the sort you might expect to get at an airport, but not just on a 20 minute trip to Jerusalem. Describe again the kind of the daily restrictions that you labor under.
- [04:30]
B
Well, now the travel is not only restricted by roadblocks, it's also dangerous because the settlements which have filled up the land come to the road and then they often throw stones at Palestinian cars which are distinguished by blue number plates. And so you are always under threat of the settlers. Sometimes they throw stones at the car and you get injured. And then there's nobody to resort to to get them to pay any price for what they've done. And some people have died on the road like this and nobody was taken to court. It's a very painful life because you see that the land is being taken more and more and you are being restricted and there's no way out, it seems.
- [05:17]
A
Raje, some of the books I love, most of yours are ones that talk about your walking. I mean, very much in the tradition of, you know, English travel writers like Paddy Lee fermor or Robert MacFarlane. But the difference is that you're walking through occupied territory which is being transform by another people as you watch. And your book, Palestinian walks in 2007 actually won the Orwell Prize, which is a book for political writing. It's the only travel book or walking book that's ever won that prize. Talk to me about those walks and this phrase you coined, Saha, the Palestinian freedom to roam this land. I mean, could you go for a walk today? Do you still put your backpack on and wander around? Or is it now an invitation to just be shot and killed?
- [06:10]
B
It's a great limitation now because hills have been militarized and have settlers with brandishing weapons roaming Them and attacking anybody, any Palestinian, even if going on a hike. But then I've always been interested in hiking and started in 79 walking in the land and never realized that I could do a book which combined my both interests in walking and writing. And so it was when I did that, I was very happy because I enjoyed writing and enjoyed walking.
- [06:40]
A
And we should perhaps say again, for people that don't know the west bank and only see it on news clips, often with burning cars or burning buildings or soldiers, the west bank is slightly like Tuscany. I mean, it's one of the most beautiful hilly areas of the Mediterranean you can imagine, isn't it? I feel as I'm walking through a kind of Piero della Francesca canvas at times when you find some of the more remote areas that haven't been landed, with enormous concrete settlements on the hilltops. I mean, there are very, very beautiful places out there.
- [07:10]
B
Absolutely. And one of my purposes, objectives in the Palestinian walks was to evoke the beauty of the land and to show the leader that the land is so beautiful and so attractive and so convenient for walking that it's a pity that it's been destroyed by these settlements which were built very quickly with roads that are totally unsuitable to the hills and not going along the contours, but cutting through and wide roads that are not convenient for the purposes of the delicate land of the West Bank.
- [07:43]
A
It's a very, very striking visual metaphor to go and see, walk through this ancient landscape where there are olive groves and strip farms and flocks of sheep and shepherds, and immediately looks like a Tuscan fresco in the back of some beautiful Renaissance painting. But also for anyone who's brought up in the Christian world, the word that comes immediately to world, of course, is biblical, because there are shepherds and people in cafies and so on. And then you turn a corner and you come across one of these settlements, which is built in concrete, often white, and they're cut into the landscape. So the landscape is cut away to create these ranks of houses. And through the landscape are driven these straight settler roads, which are magnificent roads and great works of engineering, but they rip through the hills. They're not built with the landscape. Describe that to me a bit, Roger.
- [08:39]
B
They rip through, you're right, they rip through the hills. And the idea is that the Israeli government wanted to convince the settlers to move into the settlements from which they can go back to their work in Tel Aviv and central Israel in the shortest possible period of time. And so they made them very straight and very unsuitable to the land. But suitable for the purposes of the settlement.
- [09:04]
A
I mean, I, as a foreigner, can use both sets of roads and have done. And it's a completely different experience because wandering around in a Palestinian service taxi, it is again, like in rural Greece or rural Italy, olive groves, winding roads going round these lovely contours. And then if you're going, I mean, as I've done reportage from settlements and talked to settlers and talk to settler leaders in the settlements and you get in a bus from Jerusalem and in sort of 15 minutes you're suddenly in a completely different world in this high security behind Barbwa, with incredible immunity. Suddenly everyone's got swimming pools and children have got crashes and there are state of the art industrial parks and sort of high tech industries springing up in the middle of this very medieval landscape.
- [09:54]
B
Palestinian settlements, the Palestinian areas of living are in villages and cities and they have been confined to small areas and they are not allowed to increase beyond these areas. You find that the Palestinian villages are cramped and without space in between them and without gardens. And the settlements are open land and wide areas of possibilities for expansion and development. And this has been planned from 1980, when they made a huge plan for the west bank whereby the majority of the land was reserved for the settlements and the Palestinians were confined into small areas of the villages. And now the consequence of this is visible. If you travel through the west bank, you immediately recognize the Palestinian villages because they're cramped and don't have space around them. And now, of course, the settlements are building high rises also in order to make it more difficult for them to be relocated. And some places have become like cities with more than 100,000 people. And this is in the midst of a land that is so fragile and so unsuitable for such a wide area built so quickly without any proper planning and so on.
- [11:24]
A
So that was the wonderful Raja Shahad. I'm sure you found it interesting. If you want to listen to the full episode, to get early access to the main series and receive our weekly newsletter, head to empirepoduk.com and join Empire Club.