Will I love Palestinian Walks?

In luminous prose, Raja Shehadeh describes six walks into the Palestinian countryside between 1978 and 2006.

He writes of the ancient practice of rural peoples of naming each wadi, spring, hillock, escarpment, etc., in their immediate environment.

Shehadeh sometimes risks his life simply to walk on the land near Ramallah in the proximity of ever-expanding Israeli settlements. I have twice been to the West Bank, most recently in January of 2025. No area is safe, but the love Palestinians have for the land has in no way lessened.

Shehadeh’s book is a timeless and compassionate love letter to the earth.… show more.

This book has never been far from my mind since I first read it. I love it because of its incredible thoughtfulness about place, its honest, personal, and political connection to land, and its exquisite storytelling of the embodied and culture-making experience of walking. 

This isn’t a book that tells you what to think; it lets you find your way. Raja Shehadeh eloquently focuses on the personal, the physical, the beautiful, and the loved. Following his stories, following his walks, helped me understand one of the most complex and brutalized places on the planet. 

To read Shehadeh’s walks and his… show more.

Palestinian Walks is a hiking memoir by Raja Shehadeh, who invites you to wander with him and mourn for the loss of an irreplaceable wilderness and the rights of the people who’ve lived there for millennia. Over six hikes, spanning a quarter-century, Shehadeh chronicles how his beloved hills outside Ramallah have been violently transformed by Israeli colonization. Fortress-like settlements have replaced rolling hilltops; highways have fractured ecosystems and human communities alike; streams have filled with garbage as development outpaces infrastructure; and the simple act of walking has been transformed, as it becomes both illegal and life-threatening for the author to… show more.