This article was supported by Viva La Book Review.
During their travels throughout the West Bank, Israel and the occupied Palestinian and Syrian territories, married couple Raja Shehadeh and Penny Johnson visited a Maronite (eastern Syriac Catholic) church in Kfar Bir’im near the border with Lebanon. It’s the last, surviving structure in the village since the Israeli air force bombed it in 1953, years after expelling its residents in 1948.
They arrived on a Saturday and attended a church service with displaced survivors, and their descendants, one of whom is a friend of theirs. In the courtyard, they noticed a phrased scrawled in Arabic: “Return is the way.”
This four-word phrase encompasses the heart of their book, “Forgotten: Searching for Palestine’s Hidden Places and Lost Memorials.”
The impetus for the book began by accident in the summer of 2021 when the global pandemic quarantine had loosened up and COVID-related restrictions were lifted. The couple decided to take a long walk along the separating wall between the West Bank and Israel, where they discovered a path they hadn’t seen before. That path revealed a memorial stone dedicated to three soldiers from the Egyptian Arab Army who died in 1967 during the battle for Latrun.
Spurred forward by this discovery, the couple spent 2022 visiting numerous sites, often traveling with friends as guides and meeting new people along the way, in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories to search for similar historic sites that had either been lost or hidden from plain view.
“With every visit to a new site, we encountered Israeli attempts to develop a new geography, and the picture of how this was happening became clearer to us,” they write in the book’s introduction.
“Forgotten” is equal parts travel guide, history, and memoir. Through 222 pages, Shehadeh and Johnson take the reader to more than a dozen sites and places, including art exhibits and an amusement park, all of which had plenty to reveal about historic Palestine and about the effects of the continuing Zionist project to build Israel.
This isn’t the first time either Shehadeh or Johnson have written about Israel, Palestine and the occupied territories. Shehadeh has written multiple nonfiction books on the matter, including the 2008 Orwell Prize winner Palestinian Walks: Notes On A Vanishing Landscape, and is the co-founder of Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq. Johnson is a senior researcher at the Institute of Women’s Studies at Birzeit University and co-editor of “Seeking Palestine: New Palestinian Writing on Exile and Home.”
The history in the book is by no means exhaustive. No book of similar length could deeply cover the history of the entire region. The history provided, however, serves to show the reader the deep-lying connections that still exist today between the past and the present, despite both passive and aggressive actions to erase them.
In Ramallah where the authors live, for example, they write of burial chambers from a series of caves known as the Khirbet Tireh, which existed for centuries and survived multiple eras and empires. Today, nearly 75% of the site has been buried thanks to multiple construction efforts since at least the 1960s, including the Women’s Training Center, which was built as part of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees, the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate’s St. George’s School, an apartment complex and, most recently, a gas station.
A trip to the Al Samhan palace provides the authors with another opportunity to educate and elucidate. The palace is a four-story building completed in 1799 and served as a throne village during Ottoman times. The trip required driving through the village of Ayn Arik where the Israeli army once built a checkpoint that blocked the only road (at the time) from it and other villages to Ramallah in early 2002. One day, Israeli soldiers shot and killed a Palestinian man trying to get through the checkpoint.
“He was taken down to the valley and, in their words, was ‘shot dead like an animal and his body thrown to the dogs,’” write the authors.
The official story from an Israeli soldier claimed that the unnamed Palestinian man refused to show his ID and attempted to take a knife from the commander onsite, which is why, in his words, a soldier “slammed a bullet into him.”
Some time after, two Palestinian fighters attacked the checkpoint at night and killed six of eight Israeli soldiers stationed there. The council of a local Jewish settlement planned to build a memorial in honor of the slain soldiers, until Robi Damelin, the mother of one of the soldiers, spoke out against it.
According to Damelin, her son “opposed settlements in the territories and supported Peace Now. I am against everything that’s happening in the territories and cannot imagine David’s memory being perpetuated there. This is a cynical exploitation of bereavement to fix facts on the ground in a place they will have to argue about afterwards.”
The memorial was never built.
And so the book travels through its 200+ pages: through the distant past that still survives in ancient structures, to the recent history of modern Israel, to the present day where the authors reflect on everything they’ve learned and witnessed.
The book ends with a visit to the Mamilla (Ma’man Allah) Muslim cemetery and historic site in western Jerusalem. The authors found an unmarked and unprotected area left to the elements with an unknown number of bodies exhumed from the site. The northern side of the cemetery faces the Museum of Tolerance Jerusalem, Milken and Mizel Campus, still under construction at the time of their writing and built on nearly three acres of the former cemetery.
“As we looked up at the forbidding facade of a building supposedly dedicated to tolerance,” they write, “it became clear to us that confronting the denial of the experiences of the other, as well as connections – lost, remembered, present, and threatened – are what unites our explorations.”
“Return is the way” is not only for one people, but for “layers of peoples and civilizations – to be cherished rather than be reduced to one simple story.”
“Forgotten,” ultimately, is an invitation to understand in the type of hope born of the idea that many peoples can truly live together in peace, despite what can often feel like absolute hopelessness. More importantly, it’s an invitation to believe that this is a hope worth pursuing.
“Forgotten: Searching for Palestine's Hidden Places and Lost Memorials” is available now via Other Press.
