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Introduction
A Small Stone on a Dusty Road
This book is a search for hidden or neglected memorials and places in historic Palestine, now Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and an investigation into what they might tell us about the land and the people who have lived, and are living, on our small slip of earth between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. What have they memorialized and what lies unseen and abandoned – and why? We grapple not only with questions of Israeli resistance to acknowledging the Nakba – the 1948 catastrophe for Palestinians – but also the complicated history of Palestinian commemoration in our own time. These are some of the questions we seek to answer in this book.
When the pandemic began, we joked that we were used to lockdowns and curfews, having lived in the Palestinian city of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank for so long, a lifetime in Raja’s case and four decades in Penny’s. After the 2002 Israeli military re-invasion of the West Bank, Ramallah was under Israeli military curfew for a whole month so we were, we thought, experienced.
However, as the pandemic months turned into years, our humor inevitably turned sour. In the late summer of 2021, we had been stuck in our Ramallah enclave for far too long. Even excursions outside Ramallah had become fraught with complications. Since the signing of the Declaration of Principles between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1993 and the subsequent 1995 Oslo Accords, the West Bank has been divided into three areas – A, B and C – with Area C, under sole Israeli control, constituting 60 percent of the West Bank and home to ever-expanding Israeli settlements. These divisions were originally planned to last for a five-year interim period leading to a final peace agreement but they remain in force today. And “Oslo,” as Palestinians call the whole period in shorthand, has now gone on for three decades with no end in sight.
Since the 2002 re-invasion, Israel has restricted Palestinian movement even more severely, both between the West Bank and Israel, and inside the West Bank itself, installing hundreds of checkpoints and road barriers. In the present tense (and tense it is), our Palestinian enclaves are becoming more and more like ghettos. For us, in this claustrophobic time, travel outside the country had been one of the ways to break our isolation, relishing walks in the Scottish Highlands without any obstructions except for the weather. The pandemic put a stop to that.
Our search began accidentally in the summer of 2021 when we took a walk on an obscure path along the wall separating the West Bank from Israel. It was time to leave Ramallah, even for a day. We decided we must at least take a walk and that short walk started us on a much longer journey that took us on explorations of ancient and contemporary sites that helped us better understand what was taking place in our contested territory. 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. As we discovered, the confinement of Palestinians behind checkpoints is not only intended by Israeli planners and settlers to restrict movement but is also designed to alienate the new generations who have no memory or experience of historic Palestine, and thus are becoming strangers in the land.
With 144 (and counting) Israeli settlements and more than 100 of what Israelis call “outposts” having been built in the West Bank since 1967, it has become harder to find safe areas to walk in our hills and valleys. One must choose paths carefully. That day, we began walking on an obscure, dusty road leading to Beit Nuba, an agricultural hamlet to the west of Ramallah just on “our side” of the separation (apartheid) wall dividing us in the occupied West Bank from the state of Israel, a structure that Israel began constructing in June 2002 and is now 700 kilometers long. Our friend and companion, the photographer Bassam Almohor, drew our attention to a small, smooth, gray rock erected by the roadside, which he photographed. A Palestinian flag, its colors still bright, along with an image of an AK-47 gun attached to its flagpole, was painted on the left-hand side. The inscription honors the three “martyrs of the Egyptian Arab Army who were martyred in the battle for Latroun, 1967.”
This memorial stone held a story we did not know. What were three Egyptians doing fighting in Latroun in the June 1967 war – that brief war, with its lasting consequences, when Israel occupied the West Bank, Eastern Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip as well as the Golan Heights? That the Egyptian army fought (and lost) in the Sinai, in brutal battles with great loss of life is well known – but what happened in Latroun in the center of the country?
This simple plaque set us off on a journey across historic Palestine, with the sad exception of the Gaza Strip, to which we had no access. We were looking for, and reflecting on, lost, forgotten and hidden memorials, monuments and places, some infused with our personal memories, others from a millennium ago or more. We were curious to discover what was memorialized and what was left unmarked or erased from the landscape of Palestine. What began as short excursions to relieve our sense of confinement developed into an exploration of many lost places and forgotten memorials, raising deeper questions on wider issues relating to the current reality in the small area of the world where we live.
At a time when contested memorials make global headlines – a statue of arch-colonialist Cecil Rhodes was toppled at the University of Cape Town while a statue of Rhodes still stands at Oxford University, despite growing protests – we decided to explore our world, whether the ruins of the past or more recent memorials to events that have faded even from our own intimate recollections.
We began in the first days of 2022, emerging from the lost pandemic years to a Palestine that was both familiar and newly strange. We emerged conscious of our years, feeling older and more vulnerable, and with a haunting sense of time and mortality. “Old men should be explorers,” T. S. Eliot wrote, and (aside from replacing “men” with “people”) we heartily agree. There was much to retrieve and to learn about the forgotten or half-forgotten memorials of those fallen in our many wars and conflicts, the disappearing or hidden places we only half-know, and that younger 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. This was not an exercise in nostalgia but a search for a usable past that might take us beyond our fragmented land and occupied lives; always hoping for evidence of the common past in the land that we and our adversary share unequally.
The stories we found were interwoven with our own. Sometimes we chose places and memorials, sometimes they seemed to choose us, as the voices of those lost in war, conflict and, even more painfully, massacres, whispered in our ears. We were especially curious to investigate whether and how the 1948–49 Nakba (“catastrophe” in Arabic), that war that erased Palestine and which Israel is yet to recognize, was commemorated among Palestinians in Israel.
Both Palestine’s ancient and recent past also accompanied our contemporary wanderings, from Bronze Age ruins of a once-great city at Tell Balata near the city of Nablus (chapter 1) to a haunted mosque in western Jerusalem that only one hundred years ago welcomed worshippers to the shrine and tomb of a companion of the Prophet Muhammad (chapter 5).
There is no place where archaeology is more politicized than in Israel. In a nearby Palestinian village that has become the name of a major Israeli checkpoint, we stared into the dark ruins of a sophisticated Bronze Age system of water retrieval and examined a more “recent” building that had been a Byzantine church then mosque then Crusader church (chapter 2): the ruins of Palestine move through the ages. In our own city of Ramallah, we discovered ruins from the Bronze Age to the Byzantine era and wondered at what we did not see in our surroundings (chapter 13).
Our visits also included areas that demonstrate Israel’s persistent attempts to bury the Palestinian presence on the land pre-1948, its adamant refusal to recognize the Nakba, and its continuous attempt to create a new geography, such as in the eradication of Manshiya, the once lively quarter of the Palestinian city of Jaffa near the Mediterranean Sea, which has been obliterated, its ruins concealed by a seaside park (chapter 8).
The loss of our own freedom of movement drew us to the connections Palestine once had with the world around it. At the ruins of Khan al Tujjar (chapter 4), a once major site in the Galilee where caravans from Syria and beyond rested on their travels to the Palestinian coast and on to Cairo, we stepped through weeds and waist-high thorns to discover its neglected ruins, with only a small sign in Hebrew to mark this spot.
And as our explorations drew to a close, we would return to that small gray stone on that dusty road as Israeli newspapers reported startling revelations from a story that had been suppressed for half a century. We later visited the long-hidden burial site of other Egyptian soldiers and discovered what it has become.
There is never just one story to the memorials and places we explore. The very existence of Palestine is replete with contestation and denial. On the way to Jericho, at a place dedicated to the Good Samaritan, the Israeli Civil Administration – the arm of the Israeli occupation that controls our lives and also controls archaeological sites – the small Museum of the Good Samaritan displays beautiful mosaics. Most have been taken from the territories occupied in the June war in 1967, some from the Gaza Strip, some from Hebron and other sites in the West Bank. They are displayed without context. What we can perhaps hope for is that our journeys in this book provide pathways to understanding that speak to the diverse groups who have lived, and are living, in our common world.
