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 weeks podcast, ad-free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.EmpirePodUK.com Hello, William Durenpel here. We've just recorded 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 Nakhba 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's seen the settlements growing. He founded the very first Palestinian human rights organization, Al-Hak 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 All-World 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 at 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? Well a Jewish person living next door to Ramallah because Ramallah is surrounded by settlements and the settlements live under the Zayli law and have all the rights under the Zayli law and they can move from the West Bank to Israel. With a very good road, lovely new roads straight through without any errors and sort of brand new roads if you have Israeli citizenship and also have a car with yellow plates that you get kind of waved through all the roadblocks. 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 surrounded by settlements and roadblocks and sometimes gates. Israel is very adamant at making the Palestinians in the West Bank field that they are in Israel so if you travel from Ramallah to Nablus along the road you will find millions, thousands of the 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 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. I just remember my visits to Ramallah, Raja and just to go through the gates into Ramallah as a non-Israeli you have to show your passport, you can sometimes queue for an hour or two hours if even if the gates are open, board teenagers, ask you questions, security questions of the sort you might expect to get to an airport but not just on a 20-minute trip to Jerusalem. Describe again the kind of the daily restrictions that you labor under. 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 on the 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. Raja, 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 Furman or Robert McFarlane but the difference is that you're walking through occupied territory which is you know being transformed by another people as you watch and your book Palestinian walks in 2007 actually won the All-Wall Prize which is a book for political writing. I don't know it's the only travel book or walking book that's ever won that prize. Talk to me about about those walks and this phrase you coined, Saha, the Palestinian freedom to roam this land. How much, I mean could you go for a walk today? Would you still put your backpack on and wander around or is it now an invitation to just be shot and killed? It's a great limitation now because the hills have been militarized and have settlers there with the brandishing weapons roaming them and attacking anybody and 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 interest in walking and writing and so it was when I did that I was very happy because I enjoyed writing and enjoyed walking. I mean we should perhaps say but I mean 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 Pieradela 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. 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 the 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. 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 a some beautiful Renaissance painting but also you know for anyone who's brought up in the Christian world you know the word that comes immediately to world of course is biblical because there are shepherds and people in cafes 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. They rip through the 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 which from which they can go back to their work in Tel Aviv and the 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 settlements. I mean I as a foreigner can use both sets of roads and have done and it's completely different experience because wandering around in a Palestinian service taxi it is again you know 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 talked to settler leaders in the settlements and you're given a bus from Jerusalem and in sort of 15 minutes you're suddenly in a completely different world in these in this high security behind Barbois with incredible immunity suddenly everyone's got swimming pools and children have got crashes and there are state-of-the-art industrial parks and so high tech industries springing up in the middle of this very medieval landscape. Palestinian settlements, the Palestinian areas of living are in villages and 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 and without space in between them and without gardens and and the settlements are open land and wide areas of possibilities for expansion and development and this has been planned from 1980 when when they made a huge a 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 the and now the the consequence of this is visible if you walk if you travel through the West Bank you immediately recognize the Palestinian villages because they're cramped and and and and don't have space around them and now of course the settlements are building high rises also in order to to make it more difficult for the for them to be relocated and some places have become like cities with 100,000 more than 100,000 people and this is in the midst of a land that is so fragile and and so unsuitable for such a wide area but so quickly without any proper planning and and so on. So that was the wonderful Raja Shahada 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 M-bar club.
