A Rift in Time

“Mr. Shehadeh mourns a land lost. For [T.E.] Lawrence, Palestine was ‘a collection of small irritating hills, crushed together pell-mell’ but for Mr. Shehadeh, as in his prize-winning Palestinian Walks (2008), the landscape is his inspiration and solace, a history book waiting to be read. Almond trees mark Palestinian villages long gone, their drifts of white blossom gliding to the ground ‘in utter, hushed silence’…Mr. Shehadeh’s reverence for Palestine’s land and history renders it holy anew.” —The Economist

“Raja Shehadeh combines the passion of James Baldwin, the cool precision of Primo Levi, and the curiosity of that greatest of flâneurs, Walter Benjamin. An impassioned critic of the cruelty and oppression that remain the daily diet of Palestinians under Israeli occupation, a rueful observer of human vanities, an archaeologist of a Middle Eastern past that Zionism has sought to suppress, Shehadeh has compiled, book by book, with diligence and determination, an essential record of the Palestinian experience. But his books provide us with something far more nourishing, more reflective, more literary, than a mere record. They are the work of a defiant free spirit who, in spite of all the forces ranged against him, has lost neither his intellectual freedom nor his heart.” —Adam Shatz, author of The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon