Forgotten: Searching for Palestine's Hidden Places and Lost Memorials review

Raja Shehadeh – lawyer, activist and Palestine's greatest prose writer – has long been a voice of sanity and measure in the fraught, tendentious world of Arab-Israeli politics. His first non-academic book, When the Bulbul Stopped Singing, chronicled the 2002 siege of his hometown, Ramallah, while Palestinian Walks, which won the Orwell prize, traced how Israel's de facto occupation of the West Bank had fundamentally altered both its geography and its history. Last year, Shehadeh published What Does Israel Fear from Palestine?, his first book since the attacks of 7 October. It was a work in two parts: the first, a characteristically measured analysis of how history led us to this point; the second, a bitterly furious record of the devastation wrought upon Gaza. The overwhelming impression was of a man who, after decades of engagement, had finally, tragically, succumbed to despair.
So it is an unexpected relief to find in Forgotten something different: a Shehadeh who is engaged, forensic, alert to history's weight but unwilling to let it crush him. Perhaps this is due to the presence of his co-author, his wife, the academic Penny Johnson. The prose remains lawyerly, precise to the point of fastidiousness, but the collaboration lends it a quiet strength. The first-person plural voice used throughout the book is intimate yet resolute, while the occasional references to 'Raja' and 'Penny' in the third person suggest a certain distance – a recognition that they, too, are subjects in this vast historical tragedy, just as much as its narrators.
The project of Forgotten echoes Palestinian Walks, but this time there is a clear objective to Shehadeh and Johnson's wanderings. They are searching for evidence of Palestinian history in the West Bank – traces both ancient and recent of the thriving culture that has endured here for millennia, and the memorials that bear witness to the suffering of those who call this place home.
Again and again, I thought of WG Sebald as I read Forgotten. The resemblance lies not only in the mournful elegance of the prose but also in its method: a meditative excavation of history embedded in the landscape. Readers of The Rings of Saturn, in which Sebald wanders the East Anglian coast uncovering the buried violence of empire, will recognise the impulse. But here, in occupied Palestine, the violence is neither buried nor historical. It is immediate, ongoing. 'How many human lives and how many futures would have been preserved … had the Israeli government … prevented further settlements?', the authors ask. 'Thousands have died since, and so here we were, on our way to see how Palestinians memorialise their dead in Nablus.'
At the heart of Shehadeh's work – and the conflict itself – is the idea of biopolitics, as explored by thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben. Forgotten, like Palestinian Walks, examines the way geography and history are manipulated, controlled and erased. To move through Palestine is to navigate a web of restrictions – permits, checkpoints, detours – designed not only to obstruct but to exhaust. It is a book about memory and memorials, but also about the sheer difficulty of reaching them. 'Checkpoints, closures and a regime of exclusions have deprived new generations from gaining an impression of the country as a geographical unit,' write Shehadeh and Johnson. And that, of course, is precisely the point.
The writers seek out the ruins of Kafr Bir'im, a Palestinian village in Galilee destroyed by the Israeli army in 1953, and the tomb of Mahmoud Darwish, Shehadeh's friend and Palestine's great poet. They visit Ottoman khans – way stations for desert caravans – and search for the remnants of ancient Gibeon and Qasr al-Yahud on the River Jordan, the site of Christ's baptism. They find a monument to a squadron of Turkish aeronauts and the only public memorial to the Nakba, the 1948 expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians. Everywhere, history is distorted or obliterated, rewritten by Israeli power.
And yet, for all this, Forgotten is a book of resistance – not just political, but existential. Shehadeh and Johnson, now in their 70s, offer a vision of Palestinian heritage that refuses to be erased, tracing a lineage that stretches back millennia and persists today despite the relentless attempts to efface it. History, like the land itself, cannot be so easily obliterated. Even after bulldozers and bombs, flowers bloom, trees reclaim razed earth, red anemones push through rock. Shehadeh and Johnson remain awed by the hills, by vultures and eagles wheeling above them, by the annual clouds of almond blossom. All this layered past, Forgotten insists, holds within it the promise of a future just as rich, just as enduring.
In previous reviews, I wrote that Shehadeh's books are like beacons held up against the darkness of Israeli oppression. Forgotten is perhaps the brightest light of all.
Forgotten by Raja Shehadeh and Penny Johnson is published by Profile (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

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