Saturday, 19 January 2019

Where The Line Is Drawn by Raja Shehadeh

Raja Shehadeh, Where The Line Is Drawn (London, 2018).

1 The Stamp Collector: Ramallah, 1959 (pp.1-4)
"For nineteen years after the Catastrophe in 1948, or the Nakba, when around 750,000 Palestinians were forced out of their homes and Arab villages were razed to the ground with the end of the British Mandate and the establishment of Israel, we lived in the part of historic Palestine under Jordanian rule. How could we have known then that in a few years Israel would occupy our land, that over the years we would cross its borders so frequently and that our entire life would come to be dominated by the country with the unmentionable name?" (pp. 3-4)

2. Henry: Tel Aviv, 1977 (pp. 5-28)

"He was an articulate, thoughtful man who had begun his career as a lawyer in Jaffa in 1935 under the British Mandate. In 1948, during the Nakba, he lost his practice, his home and all his properties, and he had to start all over again in Ramallah." (pp. 7-8)

"These new Palestinians [PLO] were responding to years of deprivation. In the UN refugee camps in neighbouring Arab countries they had been turned into passive human beings dependent on charity, living under the surveillance of their Arab 'hosts' while they waited for their interminable suffering to end. The image of the new Palestinian was liberating, energizing." (p. 10)

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