Rift in Time

by Raja Shehadeh

Raja Shehadeh is the most celebrated Palestinian writer working today. To his surprise, when researching his family history, he discovered a great uncle who had also been a writer entangled with the authorities, and who, like Raja, had dedicated his life to the freedom of the Palestinian people.
Najib was a journalist and romantic living in Palestine, then part of the Ottoman Empire. When he voiced his opposition to Ottoman participation in the First World War, a death sentence was put on his head. So he fled, living on the run and off the land for nearly three years.
The quest for Najib, the details of his life, and the route of his great escape consumed Raja for two years. As he traces Najib's footsteps, he discovers that today it would be impossible to flee the cage that Palestine has become.
A Rift in Time is a family memoir, but it is also a reflection on how Palestine - in particular the disputed Jordan Rift Valley - has been transformed. Most of Palestine's history and that of its people is buried deep in the ground: whole villages have disappeared and names have been erased from the map. Yet by seeing the bigger picture of the landscape and the unending struggle for freedom as Raja does, it is still possible to look towards a better future, free from Israeli or Ottoman oppression.

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, History, Travel, Middle East, Biography Memoir

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

Raja Shehadeh (Arabic: رجا شحادة) is a Palestinian lawyer, human rights activist and writer. He is the author of Strangers in the House (2002), described by The Economist as “distinctive and truly impressive”, When the Bulbul Stopped Singing (2003), Palestinian Walks (2007), for which he won the 2008 Orwell Prize, and A Rift in Time (2010). Shehadeh trained as a barrister in London and is a founder of the human rights organization Al-Haq. He blogs regularly for the International Herald Tribune/The New York Times and lives in Ramallah, on the West Bank.

Reviews

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author of this book is the uncle of my Jordanian roommate, which is the reason I happened to stumble onto this view of history through the eyes of a family that has experienced it firsthand. Flashes of insight from Edward Said's articulation of exile helped make sense of the experiences of Najib, who is the great great uncle of the author. Najib's travels through Palestine while running from Ottoman authorities are researched, walked, and contextualized in a setting of transition during the ending of the Ottoman Empire. For the student of Middle Eastern history, it gives a perspective both broad and personal as it describes some of the slightly older recent history that is often overlooked in the wake of the events of 1948 and 1967. The book has a significant poignant moment in that it describes the history and the land as it was before 1948, culminating in the death of Najib 2 months before the occurrence of the "Nakba" or "Day of Catastrophe" of 15 May 1948 - Israel's Independence Day and subjugation of indigenous Palestinians.

If there was one weakness in the book, it's that Shehadeh can be a bit over-descriptive for my taste - particularly in the sections where he describes in vast detail the geography of the land he is walking. The style of the narration makes it difficult to mentally visualize the land without having been there.

Yet this is an important historical perspective. Many of these first hand narratives are beginning to become a thing of the past, and much of Western history, following the lead of Zionist ideology, is eliminating the viewpoints, landmarks, architecture and literature of the Palestinians.

[Teresa · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't do politics....perhaps a lifetime in Northern Ireland has been partly responsible for that! My faint knowledge of the Middle East conflict is restricted to vague images of Yasser Arafat and the 80s trend of wearing that little tassled scarf - oh and I can also recognise the Palestinian and Israeli flags as they are frequently flown in Nationalist and Loyalist areas, dare I say, in order to wind each other up...

So, it was with slight trepidation that I picked up A Rift in Time, Raj Shehadeh's memoir of his great-uncle Najib Nassar. Raj is a prominent Palestinian lawyer and human rights activist. He lives in Ramallah on the West Bank, currently under military occupation by Israel. In this book, he retraces his uncle's footsteps during his time on the run from the Ottoman authorities between 1915 and 1918. Najib came under suspicion of espionage and treasonable activities as he voiced opposition to the Ottoman participation in World War I and spent three years in hiding in different locations, depending on the generosity of friends and foes alike.

Raj's present day journey, following in his uncle's footsteps, lacks the fluidity of Najib's adventures, given that he is faced with border restrictions, army checkpoints and other physical obstructions. He finds the landscape ravaged by the intensive farming favoured by the Israeli settlers. Villages which welcomed and sheltered Najib back in the 1900s are now wiped off the map, having been razed to the ground in 1948.

I found it useful to have a map of the area at my side especially when Shehadeh was moving through different areas, Haifa, Ramallah, Jericho, Tyre, Beirut, the Jordan Valley as it made it easier to follow his journey and that of Najib. As a result I had a better understanding of the shifting borders and how the political landscape has changed although I remain bewildered as to how around 750,000 Palestinians became refugees and were not allowed to return to their homes. Admittedly, Shehadeh's account has a habit of jumping from one century to another, from one country to another and it can be difficult to keep track of things but then we are dealing with a very complicated situation.

Here is a man who yearns for political agreement achieved by peaceful means and he recognises that the past is important and we can draw lessons from it, but we must also put the past behind us and strive for an egalitarian society.

[Andy Hart · Rating 4 out of 5]

I met Raja at Glasgow's literary festival in March 2011, where he was speaking shortly after publication of this book.
A charming, shy and slight man, the power of his message is all the more compelling. This book chronicles his vain attempts to follow in the footsteps of his great-uncle who was a fugitive from arrest by the Ottoman power during the Great War. It is a sad tale of a disappeared Palestine and of a land and people destroyed by avarice, brutality and - worst of all - by Western complicity and ambivalence.

[Ren · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Those able to succeed in looking with new eyes might share my experience when writing this book, of a momentary rift in time, a respite from the terrible confines of the dismal present. After all, change only comes thanks to those, like Najib, who are capable of imagining a different world." p.232

Author Raja Shehadeh uses this book as an opportunity to explore the parallels between himself as a Palestinian lawyer advocating for Palestinian detainees in Israeli military courts at the turn of the twenty-first century, and his great-great uncle, a journalist during the period of Ottoman collapse just before and after World War One.

Like his uncle, Shehadeh faced persecution from the state for advocating for what he believed to be right. In his uncle's case, that was publishing articles in opposition to Ottoman involvement in World War One, and in his, a convoluted 1996 dispute over a client's business venture (though Shehadeh seems to imply that this is simply a fabricated excuse to arrest him because of his work challenging Israeli land acquisitions).

This incident prompted his attempt to follow the trail his uncle took when on the run from the Ottoman authorities, and he uses this journey to highlight the border shifts, destruction of Palestinian villages, and the damage to the land itself that have taken place in the intervening years. He is unable to visit many of the places his uncle, Najib, noted in his memoirs because they have been demolished or because as a Palestinian, he no longer has the right to go there, forced to look from behind barbed wire at lands his ancestor traversed freely (albeit under threat of arrest and possible execution).

We cut back and forth between Najib's timeline and the present as Shehadeh traces his uncle's journey, and the events that led up to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the Nakba of 1948, and beyond.

This is a book filled with immense sadness and anger, especially when Shehadeh focuses on the present-day timeline.

"Driving from Ramallah, we had passed numerous other borders, borders within borders within borders. Everywhere I looked I could see borders, barbed wire, and watch towers. [...] By creating this surfeit of borders, Israel has made a mockery of them and finally brought home the point that the only real borders are those which we come to accept. I hope I will never acknowledge that my tiny area of the West Bank has become separated into 227 geographical areas. " p.54-55

This is a memoir, and so of course Shehadeh filters the story of his uncle as well as his own through the lens of his emotions, his rage towards Israel and those that aided in its creation palpable in the sections where he describes the (legal!) processes by which Israel slowly pushed Palestinians off their land. But his sadness is palpable too, especially when he's describing the land itself; the flora, the water, the mountains, and how he feels Israel is slowly destroying it.

(Side note: as I'll explain, I understand why he used the imagery of the degradation of nature by Israel, but, while visceral, I would critique his recurring implication that the 'Israel: bad' narrative is best exemplified by their misuse of Palestine's natural resources. It's not like places without colonialism always treat their own land well in our Capitalist hellscape. The misuse of the land has less to do with colonialism --at least directly-- than with the access to market capitalism colonialism granted Israel rather than Palestine).

The descriptions of nature act as the emotional core of the story, your investment as a reader hinging on how much he can make you care about it. It was an interesting choice, but one that I think was pretty effective given that (especially at that time) Palestinian displacement was the focus of the conflict.

Given that 'A Rift in Time' was first published in 2010, and must now, in 2024, be read with fresh pathos in light of the current, ongoing slaughter taking place in Gaza, I wonder if he'd shift that focus if writing this narrative now. Or if he'd even be able to write this story now, considering the even tighter restrictions on movement Palestinians are facing (never mind the constant bombings, collapse of the healthcare system, and unconscionable lack of access to food and water they are experiencing now).

As Shehadeh concludes in 'A Rift in Time', the book is as much a critique of the idea that institutions will always uphold what is just and put a stop to what is not as it is a biography of his great uncle, Najib -- a particularly poignant point right now as we witness in real time how the law is being used as a shield to justify the massacre of tens of thousands of innocent people. As we witness how the sympathy of major world governments hinges (maybe, but let's be real, maybe not) on something as anticlimactic as a trial that comes down to the definition of the word 'genocide.'

The banality of evil indeed.

Of his (and perhaps also Najib's) disillusionment, he writes:

"Both Najib and I were non-combatants who saw our role in the realm of advocacy: I through the law, my great-great-uncle through journalism. In retrospect I realise that we both attributed too much significance to our form of struggle. [...] It soon became evident that Israel was bent on seizing Palestinian land and was using a veneer of legality to conceal its actions. [...] To my great dismay, law and legality did not prove to be decisive weapons in our battle against Israeli colonialism." p.213

At the close of 'A Rift in Time', he notes with bitterness that he "used to think that it was Kafka's novel The Trial that most aptly described our situation under occupation, with the myriad military rules that confine us. Now it appears that to some Israelis we've become like Gregor in the short story Metamorphosis, waking up one day to find that we've become disgusting creatures whose closest neighbors have to keep us confined in a cage." (p.222)

In light of everything he describes here and everything that's come after, it's very clear just how tragically prescient those two allusions were. In particular, the truth of the comparison of Palestinians to Gregor from Metamorphosis is heartbreaking.

'A Rift in Time' could easily be torn down by anyone engaging with it in bad faith as one-sided, lacking nuance, and perhaps even a bit reactionary. This would be unfair given the obvious pains Shehadeh took to point the finger at governments and policies and never at people. But he's only human, and he's someone so directly impacted by the subject matter-- something that's been going on his entire life and all around him-- it would be extraordinarily unreasonable to expect him to imbue every word, every turn of phrase with due context and nuance, so let's extend the man some grace.

This is a raw, deeply personal, humanist text written by a man clearly trying his best to speak truth to power despite no longer believing that that power is obliged to listen, and I respect what he was able to accomplish in 'A Rift in Time' even if it wasn't perfect.

[Phyllis · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very powerful yet easy read that demonstrates the changes that have been made in the landscape and the maps of the Palestine-Israeli areas. Anyone interested in genealogy will have an appreciation of the problems the author faces in locating information about his great great Uncle. Najib, the great great uncle was born in 1865. He opposed Ottoman participation in WWI and was forced to live on the run for nearly three years. Najib believed that the Ottoman Empire was a multi-ethnic system and discouraged colonialism. As strange as it may seem our author finds that Najib was buried in an orthodox cemetery in Galilee.

[Jean Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a book difficult to read in some way because of the pain and loss that the author describes as he tried to trace of steps of his great-great uncle in his wanders in what was his native land of Palestine. Fascinating how the author and this distant relative were in so many ways alike in their love for the land and the people.

[Joseph Reynolds · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not as good as Palestinian Walks, but still good. Shehadeh is a very talented writer. Some of the Ottoman passages give a real flavour to the time period. It's more like a 3.5 star.

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Several months ago, I reviewed Palestinian environmental and land-rights lawyer Raja Shehadeh’s book Palestinian Walks for Silk and Chai—a memoir containing accounts of six sarḥāt (or wanderings) into the disappearing Palestinian wilderness, amid its calculated destruction and fragmentation by the Israeli military and settlements. Shehadeh is a remarkable literary voice in defence and in lamentation of that wilderness. Despite his preferred (if critical) allusions to Thackeray, Melville and Twain, I might have likened him instead to Wallace Stegner. Yet given his status as an indigenous Christian inhabitant of Palestine, I think I may have to revise that assessment. Perhaps his writing in Palestinian Walks bears a more meaningful resemblance to Nicholas Black Elk or Leslie Marmon Silko.

Here, in A Rift in Time, Shehadeh embarks on a similar project—in fact, in many ways an extension of the same project: a biography of his great-uncle Najib Nassar (نجيب نصّار). The framing device for the biography is one in which Shehadeh himself is facing arrest by the Palestinian authorities, for choosing to offer defence in a land rights case which is politically inconvenient for their appeasement approach to Israel. Shehadeh likens his plight—his choice to flee from his house before his arrest and take shelter among his neighbours—to that which his journalist uncle Najib faced when a similarly politically-motivated arrest warrant was placed on his head. Najib’s journeys as a wanted and hunted man took him out of Palestine, across the river Jordan, and into hiding as a shepherd among the Bedouins of what would become under British rule the Transjordan.

Read full review at Skeireins .

[Samantha · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a fascinating and somewhat heartbreaking account of then and now in Palestine/Israel. I've been trying to read a variety of perspectives and accounts coming out of that area of the middle east, and I am so glad that I discovered Shehadeh's books. I bought several right away after reading my first. The history interwoven with the personal accounts and experiences gives me a lot to ponder and consider while reading. Although I can never truly know what it's been like over there for all sides of the conflict, Shehadeh shares his experiences in such a way that I can try to understand and wrap my head around what it could be like. One improvement I would suggest is to make the map at the beginning of this book easier to examine in detail. I was very interested in being able to see the maps and get my bearings on the places in their various forms and names, but it did not reproduce well and I was unable to make out much detail.

[Annie Tate Cockrum · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is my third read from Shehadeh and I have found each one to be incredibly compelling and heartbreaking. In A Rift in Time Shehadeh attempts to retraces the steps of his great great uncle who was living under the Ottoman Empire in the mid 1800s, in Shehadeh's present day in Palestine. It is a similar format to My Father and I Could Have Been Friends in that it is a parallel story of both Shehadeh and his ancestor (uncle in this case, father in the other). Shehadeh toes the line of writing history of place with personal history and I've always left his books feeling like I've learned quite a lot. The ongoing genocide in Palestine is horrible and informing myself as best I can about history and current events there feels very important.

[Joe Vess · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book. Like Robert Macfarlane's work, it's a fantastic combination of history, nature, personal experiences of the world, and how they interlink. The narrative of his uncle's escape from the Ottoman authorities gives this a great, fascinating additional angle.

[B · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5

[maia · Rating 3 out of 5]

pretty well done historical work and i definitely learned a lot, unfortunately it is written quite boringly

[Suhayb Al-jawhari · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is great for those who want to generally understand how life was during the end of the Ottoman era. I like to call it a geographical novel, where it illustrates how a certain geographic location looked like, the beautiful landscapes, and the resources that were available then. The book then ties the land to the rise of the occupation of the land, and the change that was witnessed during the transition from Ottoman occupation to British to Israeli. The book made me appreciate the traditions Arabs of Syria or Levant area had, the hardships Najib went through as a journalist who was truthful to himself and to the justice of his people, and the land that I lived on for many years of my life (Jordan) and the opportunity that many people lose, both voluntarily because of their lack of knowledge about the area, and involuntarily due to the occupation and geopolitics of the area. Well written for its purpose, although I thought the writing had more potential. I especially enjoyed the last chapters of the book because of the sometimes poetic, sometimes honest writing. Thank you Raja for a great book.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really 2.5 stars, but I've rounded up to be generous. I really didn't get into the historical aspect of the book at all; the author's ancestor just didn't strike me as a pivotal, critical enough figure to invest in as a subject. The modern travels seemed an outlet for Shehadeh's anti-Zionist demon - he makes a great deal of Israel's 1968 land grabbing in the West Bank, without acknowledging the background of that war. I'll draw the line at whether he's specifically anti-Semitic, but others find him so ... I'm not going to dispute it. His discussion of Arab Christianity, and the story of Protestant missionary success in the late Ottoman period, made for one an interesting part of the story.

[Joseph Reynolds · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not as good as his first book, Palestinian Walks. But still pretty good. It certainly gives a flavour of the time before WW1 and during. The nostalgia for a way of life and a region where there were no borders, is palpable.