You Can Ask of Land: On Raja Shehadeh and Penny Johnson’s “Forgotten”

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One may think fondly of the great ruins that lend our landscapes their gravity. They are generous to us, these ancient corpses, testifying to the many collisions and detonations that have made our present moments possible, allowing us both scope and gravitas—clarifications so often minimized and made demure by our brief existence. “The eye describes / them as really / alive,” the poet al-Buhturi wrote in “Iwan Kisra”, allowing fantasy to briefly interrupt the relic’s reality. Ruins give us fragments and we do the rest with dreams, the perfect melancholy of remains seducing us into the tranquility of simulacra. Even their sadness wafts with poetry. “But things survive,” we may whisper to ourselves, gazing at the reliefs and the crumbling arches. Ruins can be obedient in that way—in stillness. Their testimony of conflict is dialed down to a whisper, as if to claim that the wrecking instincts of time dwarf those of men. Behind ticket counters and metal scaffolding, lit up in camera flashes and slickly recited explanations, bound in Gordian knots of curious tourists, such ruins don’t reprimand us. 

There is no such innocence or reprieve in the ruins of Palestine. The ongoing devastation of its geography, faithfully documented through on-the-ground reporting and satellite imaging, continuously awakens its voyeurs to their complicity and their vulnerability—the fact that what is being obliterated is not simply a landscape, both physical and psychic, but the very facts and tenets of our collective world. Having systematically honed the tactics of false historicization from the origins of Zionism onward, the Israeli state takes, in each ruin they create, an opportunity to confirm their settler agenda and rhetoric of belonging, to assert their claims as inevitable, and to further cripple Palestinian livelihood and ownership. When land is constituted as something that must be “taken back,” narrativization and the manipulation of memory emerge as among the most compelling practices to continually engage otherwise peace-inclining citizens in a seemingly endless genocide. As Yigael Yadin, archaeologist and former Chief of Staff of the Israel Defense Forces, memorably bragged: “This generation has created a new religion, the religion of history, a belief in the history of its people as a religious faith.” And on the last day god said, Let there be property.

Palestine as a frontier of the memory wars is where Forgotten walks. In this haunted travelogue, the writers and scholars Raja Shehadeh and Penny Johnson attempt to sieve the landscape of their homeland through the surface of annihilation, to see what can be returned to common consciousness. By the time of its final chapter in early 2023 and its publication two years later, the views inscribed in its pages have changed even further, stemmed by Israel’s ever-expanding settlements and their reckless disregard for law or dignity. The text itself carries a subtly mournful awareness of this, reveling in discovery, tenuous with hope, and scrupulous in detail, grounding itself to the moment firmly as if to slightly hinder the future of certain disappearances. Through neighborhood memorials and vanished villages, crumbling sites and relics camouflaged in foliage, Shehadeh and Johnson opt here for the intimacy of witness and the ephemeral companionship of communal remembrance, leaving space for all the answers that have already disappeared. It is a chilling disparity between the information-saturated world we are supposed to be living in, and the enforced alienation of settler colonialism that makes a mystery out of one’s own neighborhood.

Despite the climactic emotionality of its subject matter, Forgotten is measured and contemplative, careful to inform where the knowledge is still available, and honest about the tragedies without being incendiary. Both authors’ vocations come to the forefront in their writing style—Shehadeh as a lawyer, and Johnson as a researcher; they present their visible and historical reality with the utmost coherence and attention to context. As such, there is plenty to be understood and felt in the silence between their learnedness and the painful realities. In a chapter on the Jordan Valley, they describe looking over the waters:

We stood silently on the bank of the fast-flowing, muddy river, fed mainly at this point by waste water and agricultural drainage, looking as far north as possible. There was a bend in the river beyond which we could spy only the greenery that flourished on both banks of the now concealed waters. The narrowness of this holy river, about six meters wide, only reinforced what a ridiculous border this was and yet for more than half a century it has greatly troubled lives and separated us from our own relatives living in Amman.

The River, they explain, has been splintered, with 70 percent of the Jordan Valley designated as “Area C”—solely under Israeli control. As for riparian rights to the River, they are divided only between Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Israel, the latter holding the largest share. Driving up to the banks, Shehadeh and Johnson pass long strips of barbed wire and markers hinting at the 500 land mines that had once been buried in the area; it’s telling that they understate this site as “not a welcoming place,” which only hints at the brutality of what Israel does when it really wants to restrict access. Finally, upon arrival, they’re confronted with a sign that defines the place as “where the Israelites crossed the Jordan River after forty years of wandering in the desert, and where Elijah ascended to heaven in a fiery chariot.” Notably, the river’s prominent importance as the supposed site of Jesus’ baptism—a notion common across many trans-national religions—is demoted to a casual reference to Christianity. In this and other instances, Forgotten points to what the obliviating methodology of Israel-ified history truly hides: the history of co-existence, and Palestine as a gathering place for migrants and pilgrims, of religious tolerance and peace between Arabs and Jews.

Fuzzing up the past to push one religion’s party line is common enough across the faiths, but Israel’s obfuscation is not limited to history. Something which Shehadeh and Johnson reference but do not elaborate upon, it can be understood that the Jordan River is excluded from the water accords of the 1995 Oslo II Agreement (a significant omission, considering its valuable reserves and the now-famous call “from the river to the sea”), but “Palestinian water rights in the West Bank” are explicitly recognized. Yet, as researcher Jan Selby demonstrates in Water, Power and Politics in the Middle East, these accords simply initiated the formalization of the region’s resource management so as to subsidize water to Israeli settlers, enabling resource access to new settlements in illegally seized areas while rationing the water for Palestinian communities. Under the presumably sensible wording of the now-dead Agreement, which stated its conviction to “meet the immediate needs of the Palestinians,” the Israeli administration fortified their grasp on the land that was intended to be only temporarily under their control, enabled the construction of even more settlements, deprived those whom they intended to deprive, and offloaded the maintenance labor and administrative debt onto Palestinians. In terms of revising and reinterpreting facts for one’s own benefit, there is hardly a more blatant example than Israeli conduct in the immediate aftermath of 1995’s call for peace. 

History is beholden to revision like anything else, but the epistemology of historical study must distinguish itself from the scientific mode by first being suspicious of extant order, and, second, detached from its own potential consequences, such as the catalysis of a replacement order. If revision must be continuously undertaken in the purview of being corrective, with the humility of an interpreter bound to their own time and biases, then its only responsibility is to pursue truths regardless of ideological tendencies (insofar as this is possible). To undertake historical revision with a fully-formed political objective is nothing less than the most purulent of fictionalizations, and to do so with the nationalist euphoria that animates Zionism is what defines their project as baseless in secular law and powerful only as religious hypnosis. This fervent faith-addled ethos, when paired with technological finesse and refined strategies for psychological domination, has resulted in a strangely hybrid archaic-contemporary mechanics of warfare in which something as irrelevant as Biblical law is used to both evade and justify the reality of a secular colonial project and its resultant human suffering. Any spatial explanation by the occupation, as detailed through sites in Forgotten and ranging across the region, must then be read not as an iteration of fact or as any result of research, but as religious creed.

In Sacred Landscape, Meron Benvenisti describes the first cartographic efforts of Israel in 1949 (in which his father took a leading role). In a brief argument about whether any Arabic names should be maintained in the new maps, noting that these names spoke to a common, syncretic history as well as retaining integral sociocultural information on the landscape, a member of the committee rejected the notion: “After all, the very source of our information from the Arab community is sealed: the Arabs are no longer there.” 

And so history goes: to conquer, to divide. The rewriting is not only textual but corporeal. As Shehadeh and Johnson make way, they are confronted at all turns by the land in splinters. They describe: “Checkpoints, closures and a regime of exclusions (sometimes called ‘permits’) have deprived new generations from gaining an impression of the country as a geographic unit. . . . Without even a memory of how the country used to be, young Palestinians are trapped in small enclaves in the West Bank, separated by checkpoints and walls, or imprisoned in Gaza.” As such, some of the most effective passages in the text stem not from their arrivals but their attempts to find eminent landmarks on Israeli maps, of trespassing barriers, of taking alternative backroads when the proper ones are barred from Palestinian access, of deciphering official statements, of no longer sensing the tracings of villages that have been turned into high-rise housing or rebranded with the name of a billionaire, of bare-bones knowledge being all that’s left of sensual experience. In Hollow Land, Eyal Weizman explicates the immense infrastructural efforts that it takes to draw “provisional borders through sovereign three-dimensional spaces,” a convoluted system of tunnels and bridges resulting in an eviscerated landscape that is “the physical embodiment of the many and varied attempts to partition it.” The resulting chaos of constantly shifting borders, access points, bureaucratic obfuscation, and new disappearances is perhaps why the search for “ruins” feels at times at odds with the descriptions of traveling through the contemporary Palestinian landscape; the entirety of the region is a ruin. 

Mourning at the edges of ruin is a pervasive theme in Arabic poetry, to lament all that has been lost, to be joined to history, to awaken to the ephemeral. One is empowered by imagination there. But living in a state of ongoing ruination is to be reminded of one’s capacity to forget, to have one’s capacity for empathy disabled by tactics of invisibilization. It’s worth noting that Forgotten is written in the calm register of a lecture instead of a scream, which does not diminish its authors’ agony, but arouses in its reader the stark realization that this litany of annihilations is not some extraordinary aberrance; rather, it is the result of everything going according to plan. This is what should disturb us. The reifications we’ve managed to cohere, across centuries, about what constitutes fact and what constitutes belief, are now being unraveled to serve the dehumanization of Palestinians. Everything that Forgotten witnesses and describes, from the Israeli authorities’ refusal to assign legal protection to Muslim holy sites, to civil engineering projects condemning villages to a slow death by bureaucracy, to massacres and ethnic cleansings being celebrated as noble victories, fuels an intentional bifurcation of reality that delineates Palestinian anguish as belonging to Palestinians only. In Shehadeh and Johnson’s words: ‘‘The contradictions between their world and ours was too much to bear.” And so their text, as much as it commemorates and mourns, ultimately poses a challenge: Are you capable of listening past the script? Are you a member of a shared world? Are you listening to the reality of Palestinian landscape and history as it speaks to you—as it is being sacrificed for fabrications? 

Trying to untangle “the renewed growth of totalitarianism” in Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno wrote: “Only the conscious horror of destruction creates the correct relationship with the dead: unity with them because we, like them, are the victims of the same condition and the same disappointed hope.” Among the many destinations of Forgotten, Shehadeh and Johnson rarely venture anywhere that isn’t public because the eradications are taking place out in the open, creating a precedent and a legacy for what can be destabilized and made schizophrenic. The ruins may not be our city, but our sense of what a city is. They may not be our people, but our sense of what we can impose on one another. This may not be our desire, but—no—it is. Desire for home, for safety, for what Shehadeh and Johnson call “a usable past”: these are universalities, however much Zionist rhetoric will have you believe otherwise. Words of communality appear repeatedly throughout Forgotten’s peregrinations: “common” and “shared” are our debts to the earth, pasts, traditions, afflictions. Israel’s motive is to leave nothing behind of Palestine, and so blind us to the fact that Palestine is a part of our actuality. 

Over the past few years, millions of Palestinians—as well as those who stand with their cause—have never stopped wondering what it would take to gain the empathy of the occupiers and their allies. It seems that nothing can reach them. Not the innocent dead, not the displaced, not the confined, not the starving, not the devastation of heritage, not the erasure of history, not the reverberations that violence always sends rippling far into the future. If such visceral articulations of pain, grief, and rage do not even waver the convictions of their perpetrators, then perhaps it is worth pointing to these gaps that are being torn before us in our global intelligence, the hard-won ideas and advances that are now being buried by an empire’s propaganda. If, under Zionist logic, hyperbolic links of faith and predestination are sufficient to impose a whole new nation—however violently—upon where another already stands, they should at least acknowledge that they are wielding the weapons of obfuscation and annihilation, discontinuing reality, nullifying their historical claims by crippling the very motive of history to rationalize present existence, severing the land from the people who have been, for centuries, giving it meaning with their lives.