Walking, telling and resisting in Raja Shehadeh's Palestinian Walks

This essay examines the Palestinian experience of internal exile in Raja Shehadeh’ Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape (2007). For Shehadeh, as the essay argues, walking in the lands and documenting Israeli colonialist policies show the extent to which Israel was seeking to ruin the natural and social landscape of Palestine. The essays shows how the life of internal exile for the Palestinian writer drives him to “speak truth to power”, resisting the grim reality which Israel created for the Palestinians. But “speaking truth to power”, in Shehade’ Walks, effects a political commentary on the stock of critical consciousness which the committed intellectual reserve for the unceasing efforts to achieve peace and justice whether such efforts demand criticising foreign colonial powers and ideologies or one's own society and culture.