Forgotten: Searching for Palestine’s Hidden Places and Lost Memorials

Human rights lawyer Shehadeh (A Rift in Time) and his wife, women’s studies scholar Johnson (Companions in Conflict), offer an illuminating and poignant journey through Palestine’s past and present. In 2021, driven partly by post-pandemic wanderlust, the authors roamed the West Bank and northern Israel, exploring and uncovering Neolithic stone dolmens, Bronze Age water systems, Byzantine churches, Ottoman-era rest stops, and memorials to Turkish aviators. In addition to recounting those discoveries, they also delve into more recent concealed histories, including the region’s many hidden remnants of the 1948 Nakba, or the mass displacement of Palestinians by Israel (when Shehadeh’s own parents fled “the once lively” town of Manshiya). The authors compare the vibrant histories of sites abandoned since the Nakba—like the old Haifa train station’s now disused lines—with life in present-day Palestine, where the lack of rail service hampers travel between villages. The book also brings into focus Palestinians’ limited rights of movement as the authors recall encountering copious checkpoints, closures, forbidden highways, and confrontations with Israeli settlers (“Unlike you, I really live here,” says one). By cataloging such restrictions, the authors show how the inaccessibility of these bygone sites serves to “alienate the new generations who have no... experience of historic Palestine.” It’s a tender and undeterred love letter to a contested land. (Sept.)