In 2004, the Arab Israeli advocacy group Adalah took up a case on behalf of Islamic religious leaders in Israel. Though the country’s 1967 Protection of Holy Sites Law was meant to apply to all religions – and made it a crime to damage any holy site – the dozens of sites designated as holy by Israel were all Jewish. Adalah petitioned Israel’s high court to force the government to issue regulations to protect Muslim holy places in Israel, claiming that the lack of protection had resulted in either desecration or the outright destruction of these sites. That same year, the Arab Association for Human Rights (AAHR) released a report that found 250 non-Jewish religious sites had either been destroyed during or since the 1948 war, or had their access restricted to the Arab population.
Adalah’s petition was litigated for nearly five years before it was rejected by the high court. The court stated that designating Muslim sites as holy was a “sensitive issue”.
Two decades later, it was this lack of Muslim holy sites in Israel – along with the scarcity of memorials or markers of Palestine’s physical history across the country and the occupied West Bank – that prompted the writers Raja Shehadeh and Penny Johnson to write Forgotten: Searching for Palestine’s Hidden Places and Lost Memorials. Part travelogue, part historical recounting, the slim but profound book follows Shehadeh and Johnson – who are married and have long been avid hikers – as they venture out from their home in Ramallah, in the West Bank, in the post-pandemic months of early 2022 to “retrace Palestine’s material history”. They visited abandoned ruins, memorials and crumbling historical sites wherever they could find them in Israel and the West Bank (they, of course, were unable to travel to Gaza, due to the blockade and then subsequent war after 7 October). As they travelled, they documented “the disappearing or hidden places we only half-know, and that many generations may not know at all, and the events that are partly lost to memory but can tell us about ourselves and our possible futures”.
From the ruins of a Bronze Age city, including an intricate water system, which now shares its name with an oppressive checkpoint between Jerusalem and Ramallah, to a memorial of a former train station in Haifa, which once connected the region to destinations as far as Istanbul, and what still remains of the vanishing Dead Sea, they collect snippets of history. But theirs is “not an exercise in nostalgia”, they write. Rather, it’s “a search for a usable past that might take us beyond our fragmented land and occupied lives”.
Shehadeh and Johnson, who narrate the book together with the first-person plural “we”, are particularly disturbed by the disappearing of any trace of the Nakba (“catastrophe” in Arabic), when up to half of the Arab population were driven out of their homes during the 1948 formation of Israel. After reading that the sole memorial to the Nakba in Israel is in Kafr Kanna in Galilee, they set out to find it – and are dismayed to find that the word “Nakba” does not appear once on the stone pillar memorial.
Their journey is often frustrating, plagued by disappointments. Many of the sites they seek out have been half-destroyed, either intentionally or due to neglect. Others are difficult to find to begin with, hidden behind a labyrinth of security checkpoints and restricted areas – designed in part, the authors write, “to alienate the new generations who have no memory or experience of historic Palestine”.
The argument that the erasure of Palestinian villages and historical sites is an attempt to divorce Palestinians from both their cultural memory and their historical connection to the land is not a new one. Shehadeh and Johnson’s search, however, manages to show, rather than tell, just how effective that erasure has been.
In the 1990s, Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) signed the Oslo Accords that divided the West Bank into three distinct areas – Area A, which was under Palestinian control; Area B, under joint Israeli and Palestinian control; and Area C, under Israeli control. Though the majority of the West Bank was classified as Area C – under Israeli control – the arrangement was only meant to last a handful of years before control was transferred to the Palestinians. That never happened. Instead, although the Accords banned the construction of new Israeli settlements, the number of illegal settlements in areas under Palestinian control proliferated. In the decades since, Palestinians have found themselves confined to ever smaller parcels of land. Many have been violently forced from their homes (or worse) by Israeli settlers, while the Israeli authorities set up hundreds of checkpoints throughout the region. As Shehadeh and Johnson write, “the Accords ushered in a period that reconfigured the relationship between Israel and Palestine, basing it on walls and separation, control, and the total domination and confiscation of the majority of Palestinian land”.
Shehadeh and Johnson were already familiar with the many Byzantine restrictions Israel placed on the West Bank. These restrictions – the “hidden horrors of the Oslo deal that have become a fact of life” for Palestinians in the West Bank, where designated enclaves are “becoming more and more like ghettos” – are the persistent antagonist in Forgotten. They hinder journeys, obscure views and block access to roads, villages and landmarks – everything.
With more than 600 “dizzyingly complicated” security checkpoints pockmarking the West Bank, travelling as a Palestinian is increasingly difficult. Take just one journey, between Jerusalem and Ramallah, a roughly 21km distance. There are two main checkpoints to choose from: the DCO checkpoint is often “unmanned”, which means it is more popular and the winding road is often clogged with traffic; the Jib checkpoint, on the other hand, is strictly and only available for some Palestinians to use: prominent businesspeople if they have passes; labourers with permits to work in Jerusalem, but only if they are on foot; and residents from a certain neighbourhood, but only sometimes.
In these circumstances, going even very short distances can take hours. A good portion of the narrative – and Palestinians’ lives – is devoted to grappling with the tedious domination of these restrictions. “Under direct occupation, there is always a feeling of something missing. Our memories are not recognised and our lives constrained, whether by direct military occupation or by subtle forms of inequality.” What’s more, the divisions “seem inexorable and unstoppable”. Nor are they contributing to any kind of peace. “The hope of a common future for Israelis and Palestinians… has turned sour and the hatred between the two sides seems to have only grown with time.” Shehadeh, a prominent Palestinian non-fiction author who won the Orwell Prize in 2008 and was a finalist for a National Book Award in 2023, is often praised for his unsentimental writing. Here, his and Johnson’s prose is no less elegant and unembellished, but a sense of melancholy permeates their writing.
Perhaps one of the more complicated realities that Shehadeh and Johnson wrestle with is not just Israel’s hand in erasing Palestinian history, but Palestine’s own role. In one chapter, they travel to Qibya, a village in the West Bank, in search of memorials. In October 1953, Israeli soldiers from a commando unit led by Ariel Sharon, who would go on to become prime minister of Israel, staged a massacre in the village. The attack was nominally in retaliation for the bombing of a Jewish woman and her two children in their home in Israel, though the culprits were never determined. The Israeli soldiers left more than 77 Qibya residents dead, mostly women and children, and burned homes, schools and mosques.
Yet when the authors explore the village some 70 years later, they are disappointed to find a “curiously unmoving” plinth featuring blood dripping from the number 53 as Qibya’s main memorial of the massacre. They visit the head of the municipal council in order to explain their mission and are met with uncomfortable silence. He instead talks about the dire state of the roads, the municipality’s most urgent problem. “It was a reminder that, for the living, there were other preoccupations, and that our search for remembrance of the dead might not be high on the agenda.” More distressing, however, is a conversation with their 20-something niece and nephew – neither had ever heard of the massacre, let alone learned about it in school. “It seems, Qibya has been erased from the school curriculum in Palestine, and for most younger Palestinians the events of that October evening lie forgotten.” You sense that this erasure is as demoralising for Shehadeh and Johnson as the outright denial of Palestinian history by the Israeli authorities.
Shehadeh and Johnson recognise that for many Palestinians it might seem impossible to prioritise memory and record-keeping when consumed with the struggle for statehood or even the day-to-day grind of survival. Yet they also seem to believe that commemoration could be, at least in part, an antidote to the grind. At a particularly low moment in their journey, when they discovered that a site near Ramallah where an Iron Age building had once been found was now the building site for a high-rise property development, it is only “Raja’s memories” of what the place once was “that unseat us from the detritus of the present”.
“Perhaps this is the point behind preserving historical sites,” they reflect in this sombre work. “They act as reminders of other eras, helping us tolerate the contingent present.”
Forgotten
Raja Shehadeh and Penny Johnson
Profile Books, 240pp, £14.99
Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from Bookshop.org, who support independent bookshops
[See also: The return of America First]
Content from our partners
This article appears in the 12 Mar 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Why Britain isn’t working