Fascinating glimpse into a troubled soul: review of Where The Line Is Drawn

Profile Books, £14.99

Review by Trevor Royle

THIS book manages to be gloriously uplifting and at the same time profoundly depressing. If that sounds like a contradiction it is not meant to be. Far from it: this is one of the most intensely human and humane books one is likely to read in a very long while, replete with an elevating dignity and suffused with deep melancholy. It will come as no surprise to anyone who knows the area that its subject is Palestine and the fate of the people, Jew, Arab and Christian who inhabit that unhappy place. Ponder its message and prepare to be moved to tears.

Raja Shehadeh is a human rights lawyer by profession, a political activist by persuasion and necessity, a diarist by motivation and a hiker and gardener by way of maintaining his sanity. He lives and works in the ancient Palestinian city of Ramallah and is what might be called a citizen of the world. But, as becomes depressingly clear in this never-less-than-fascinating glimpse into his life, he is also an angry man who is rightly enraged by the lot of his fellow Palestinians and the ways in which they are subjugated and humiliated by the state of Israel, especially through its occupation of the West Bank and the construction of the many settlements that pock-mark the landscape. It is a wearisome story, one which has been told many times but in Shehadeh’s hands it takes on a simplicity and majesty that make it both personal and universal, underlining the paradox in any response to what he has written.

In temporal terms the narrative covers the period between the present day and the fateful year 1948 when the “Nakba” (catastrophe) brought Israel into being and plunged the Middle East into a period of chaos punctuated by wars, confrontation and occasional moments of hope. But this is not a dry recapitulation of facts or a simple recitation of Palestinian grievances. Shehadeh is too wise and too compassionate an observer to be a simple cheerleader for his cause and as he makes clear early in his story, he entertained a youthful admiration for the brand of socialist innovation which empowered the new state of Israel. Rather than being a polemic, this collection of episodes offers an insight into a man’s soul and therefore it is at once fascinating and deeply troubling.

There is no better example of this than the account of his friendship with Henry Abramovich, a Canadian Jew who acts as a weathercock and suffers accordingly as the winds of sodality change in the vortex. Although the relationship is genuine and at times warmly intimate it is also tempestuous and dominated by the social and cultural gap which separates them and which neither seems willing to recognise. To his credit Shehadeh acknowledges this and admits his own intolerance with a person who manages to captivate and irritate in equal measure. Perhaps the fault lies in the way each man interprets the concept of “sumoud”, perseverance against life’s ills. Perversely it is Henry who comes closest when he remarks to his friend that in the Treblinka extermination camp, inmates would say: “Faced with two alternatives, always choose the third.” Or perhaps the friendship was stronger than either man imagined or is willing to admit.

Other attachments crowd into Shehadeh’s story, notably the intense professional relationship with Naomi his editor and mentor, daughter of an Israeli diplomatic, who is the polar opposite of Henry and who brings clarity and calmness to his thinking. And always in the background is the shade of his father, clearly a great man, who laboured long and hard in the Palestinian cause. He infuses one of the most moving chapters in the book – on Jaffa, the coastal town which was the family home and which was lost for ever to become “a crumbling city with a fading charm but disgraced by neglect” – and clearly had a lasting influence on his son’s development as writer and activist.

These episodes all unfold against the backdrop of events in what is ironically called the Holy Land, from the wars which disfigured it in 1967 and 1973 to moments of short-lived optimism such as the Camp David accords, the Oslo agreements and the more recent Arab Spring. Add the Second Intifada at the beginning of this century which prompted five years of violence and the hopes for a lasting settlement seem slim but as Shehadeh insists all will not be lost if people on both sides of the divide find the strength and moral courage to rise above the conflict and learn to forgive one another. Moreover, he insists this willingness must extend from the dispossessed Palestinians who spent their lives in miserable refugee camps to the Israelis who saw friends and family gunned down “in senseless acts of violence in cafes and schools”. Although the thought is left unsaid, the alternative is too terrible to contemplate and that message resounds through this lucid, passionate and unforgettable memoir of a life well led.

Lastly and unusually, a word of praise for the book’s production values which are based on the best European practice – a sturdy jacket-less volume with elegant boards and beribboned spine which will sit happily in any traveller’s knapsack or poacher’s pocket. Take it with you if you are encouraged to follow Shehadeh’s footsteps either literally or metaphorically; it will repay repeated study.