Forgotten: Searching for Palestine’s Hidden Places and Lost Memorials
Raja Shehadeh and Penny Johnson, Profile Books, £14.99

CULTURE wars have been waged for so long already, as colonisers have sought to undermine the cultures of the colonised, suppressing their languages and denying the significance of their histories, and attempting to erode the sense of their own humanity in the process.

One of too many examples, the illegal white settler regime’s denial of the Great Zimbabwe’s black African history illustrates precisely these forms of culture wars. It was only with freedom from colonial rule that Zimbabwe’s own past could be publicly celebrated.

Forgotten: Searching for Palestine’s Hidden Places and Lost Memorials provides a more contemporary example. The state of Israel has been systematically suppressing memorials of Palestinian history and culture, with Palestine described as “a land without people,” negating past realities in the attempt to justify the country’s forcible occupation in 1948.

This thought-provoking book sets out to overturn these negations; to search for hidden or neglected memorials and places in historic Palestine, now Israel and Occupied Palestinian Territories, exploring what they might tell us about the land and the people who have lived and are still living in it.

Raja Shehadeh is a human rights lawyer as well as being the author of a number of beautifully written books about Palestine. His co-author and partner, Penny Johnson, is a founding member of the Institute of Women’s Studies at Birzeit University. 

Together they recorded a number of journeys for this book, many of them illustrated by their friend, the photographer, Bassam Almohor, recalling Palestine’s past, from the Bronze Age onwards, through Byzantine, Ottoman and more recent occupations, from the British mandate through to contemporary times.

Their visits identified a number of places that had been neglected, or unnoticed in the past. 

“I’ve passed here hundreds of times and never seen it,” Bassam reflects, when they view a ruined Byzantine church. 

But other records of the past have been erased rather than simply forgotten. What about monuments to record the destruction of some 400 villages during the Nakba in 1948, for example? There was one monument with the names of those massacred since the 1930s at Kfar Kanna, in Galilee, they remarked — but with no mention of the word “Nakba.”

The authors also reflect on the deterioration in the situation in recent years, recalling previous walks that are no longer possible, due to the proliferation of checkpoints and illegal settlements. As a result of these processes of fragmentation, young Palestinians  struggle to appreciate the country as it had been as an entity, with its own vibrant histories, at the crossroads of different trade routes and cultures, over time.

The authors succeed in conveying their feelings of loss very effectively, alongside their love for the beauty of nature and for the arts and poetry, in Palestine. “We hope that we will continue to pay attention both to what we love and what troubles us,” they conclude, “and that we will continue our exploration.”

Morning Star readers can expect to find this a disturbing book. But it is also uplifting, written with such appreciation for Palestinian history and culture, such love of nature and such concern for the environment. While “Forgotten” works as an entity, each chapter can be read as self-standing reflections on the search for Palestine’s hidden places and monuments.

Highly recommended.