Palestinian Walks

Sep 22, 2026

Uploaded by Aldword

Palestinian Walks chronicles John Tordai’s hill walking journey through Palestine over twenty-six years, beginning in 1978 and ending in 2006. The introduction frames the hills around Ramallah, the Jerusalem wilderness wadis, and ravines by the Dead Sea as both personal sanctuary and a landscape shaped by conflict. It critiques how Western travelers and religious-political imaginings have distorted the land, arguing for an open-minded reading grounded in lived experience and observed change.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryLiterature

FormatPDF

Pages158

Reading Time4 h 3 min

AccessFree to download

Introduction

Personal beginnings and landscape change

Pilgrims, travel literature, and distorted imaginings

Biblical and historical imagination of Palestine

Writing an account against “fear and blood”

The drama continues: West Bank planning and settlements

To my nephew and niece, Aziz and Tala, with the hope that they will be able to walk in the hills of Palestine. JOHN TORDAI Palestinian man walking in the Jerusalem wilderness south of Wadi Qelt Introduction WHEN I BEGAN HILL WALKING IN PALESTINE A QUARTER OF a century ago, I was not aware that I was traveling through a vanishing landscape. For centuries the Central Highlands of Palestine, which slope on one side toward the sea and on the other toward the desert, had remained relatively unchanged. As I grew up in Ramallah, the land from my city to the northern city of Nablus might, with a small stretch of the imagination, have seemed familiar to a contemporary of Christ. Those hills were, I believe, one of the natural treasures ofthe world. All my life I have lived in houses that overlook the Ramallah hills. I have related to them like my own private backyard, whether for walks, picnics or flower-picking expeditions. I have watched their changing colors during the day and over the seasons, as well as during an unending sequence of wars. I have always loved hill walking, whether in Palestine, the Swiss Alps or the Highlands and outlying islands of Scotland, where it was a particular joy to ramble without fear of harassment and the distracting awareness of imminent political and physical disasters. I began taking long walks in Palestine in the late 1970s. This was before many of the irreversible changes that blighted the land began to take place. The hills then were like one large nature reserve with all the unspoiled beauty and freedom unique to such areas. The six walks described in this book span a period of twenty-six years. Although each walk takes its own unique course, they are also travels through time and space. It is a journey beginning in 1978 and ending in 2006, in which I write about the developments I have witnessed in the region and about the changes to my life and surroundings. I describe walking in the hills around Ramallah, in the wadis in the Jerusalem wilderness and through the exquisite ravines by the Dead Sea. Palestine has been one of the countries most visited by pilgrims and travelers over the ages. The accounts I have read do not describe a land familiar to me but rather a land of these travelers’ imaginations. Palestine has been constantly reinvented, with devastating consequences to its original inhabitants. Whether it was the cartographers preparing maps or travelers describing the landscape in the extensive travel literature, what mattered was not the land and its inhabitants as they actually were, but the confirmation of the viewer ’s or reader ’s religious or political beliefs. I can only hope that this book does not fall within this tradition. Perhaps the curse of Palestine is its centrality to the West’s historical and biblical imagination. The landscape is thus cut to match the grim events recorded there. Here is how Thackeray describes the hills I have so loved: Parched mountains, with a grey bleak olive tree trembling here and there; savage ravines and valleys paved with tombstones—a landscape unspeakably ghastly and desolate, meet the eye wherever you wander round about the city. The place seems quite adapted to the events which are recorded in the Hebrew histories. It and they, as it seems to me, can never be regarded without terror. Fear and blood, crime and punishment, follow from page to page infrightful succession. There is not a spot at which you look, but some violent deed has been done there: some massacre has been committed, some victim has been murdered, some idol has been worshipped with bloody and dreadful rites. (Notes ofa Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo) It is as though once the travelers took the arduous trip to visit Palestine and did not find what they were seeking, the land as it existed in their imagination, they took a strong aversion to what they found.“Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes,” Mark Twain writes.“ Palestine is desolate and unlove

FAQs

What time period do the six walks in Palestinian Walks cover?

They span twenty-six years, beginning in 1978 and ending in 2006.

Where does the author describe walking throughout the book?

He walks around Ramallah, in the wadis of the Jerusalem wilderness, and through ravines by the Dead Sea.

Why does the author write against the travel accounts and imaginings about Palestine?

He argues that outsiders often focused on confirming religious or political beliefs rather than the land and its inhabitants as they truly are, with “distortions” that he wants to counter through his own lived account.

Sep 22, 2026

Uploaded by Aldword