Taking you home: “Palestinian Walks”

With such dreams in hand did 19th-century Western travelers visit the Levant (present-day Syria, Lebanon, Israel-Palestine and Jordan) in search of the biblical "Holy Land." Thus they came, saw and recorded their fantasy and their disappointment, and bound them together into a beautiful canon of half-truths and outright lies that first helped shape popular perception and finally were used to help justify the colonization of Palestine.

Who could imagine "a land without a people" without William Thackeray's vivid depiction of Palestine as "parched mountains, with a grey bleak olive tree trembling here and there; savage ravines and valleys paved with tombstones -- a landscape unspeakably ghastly and desolate ..."?

Who would have felt inspired to "make the desert bloom" without Herman Melville's description of "Whitish mildew pervading whole tracts of landscape -- bleached-leprosy-encrustations of curses-old cheese-bones of rocks -- crunched, knawed, and mumbled -- mere refuse and rubbish of creation ... all Judea seems to have been accumulations of this rubbish"?

Yet, these accounts also compelled Raja Shehadeh, founder of the human rights organization Al-Haq, to provide a counter-narrative, in Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Landscape. "The accounts I have read do not describe a land familiar to me," Shehadeh writes, "but rather a land of these travelers' imaginations. Palestine has been constantly reinvented, with devastating consequences to its original inhabitants."

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