Wednesday 17 September 2008

Compassion Fatigue and Palestinian Walks

Here’s a phenomenon quite particular to our late-capitalist modernity: Compassion Fatigue, the unwanted offspring of middle-class postcolonial guilt. So significant that it even has its own wikipedia entry.

What is described by this phrase? I characterise it as the process by which our attentions are constantly drawn to – that is to say, by which we are made Aware of – a multitude of Issues about which we subsequently express Concern, and the eventual weariness that accompanies repetition.

This concept should not serve to veil a negative judgement on those whose compassion reserves become exhausted, nor should it be seen as a derisive retort to those who annoy us with (some would say) sanctimonious appeals to our goodwill.

No, we can say with confidence that people are genuinely Concerned about Issues and believe that raising Awareness can help in some small way. We are convinced, perhaps, that if everyone knew what atrocities and indignities were suffered daily by our fellow men and women, such suffering would surely have to cease.

And yet this is, of course, the central fallacy that is both exposed and sustained by Compassion Fatigue. We are in fact experiencing exposure to an overabundance of Issues; an Awareness glut. Through consuming newspapers and magazines, documentary and television, charity appeals and the advice of Concerned friends, we bear witness to an extraordinary exhibition of mistreatment, conflict and disaster – to the extent that whole regions or even continents can become identifiable by a single image of human misery.

Just as poverty, famine and malnutrition appear as native products of sub-Saharan Africa, so Israel/Palestine is imagined as a conflict zone and nothing more. We cannot permit such anomalies, such divergent interests as the Jerusalemite heavy-metaller or the love story between two young people from Jenin, or indeed, the lawyer from Ramallah who enjoys nothing more than a ramble in his homeland’s historic hills.

It’s harsh, but true: when you utter the words ‘Israel’ or ‘Palestine’ – or worse, combine the two – and if your voice should betray the barest trace of self-righteousness, or even mere earnestness, the people you are trying to reach are fairly likely to just switch off.

Israel/Palestine is one of those Issues that both bores and divides, because people are either tired of hearing about a problem that appears so intractable, or they are pretty much fixed in their view on the situation. The task of recruiting new Concerned people, or shaking others out of their preconceptions and prejudices, can seem impossible.



Which is why a book like Raja Shehadeh’s Palestinian Walks deserves consideration. Structured around six walks in the hills of the West Bank undertaken by the author over a period of many years, this book provides an unorthodox route into Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land, and may thus avoid the shortcomings of more overtly polemical, historical or legal accounts and their tendency to ‘preach to the converted’.

Shehadeh intersperses rather straightforward accounts of his journeys through the landscape with memories from his childhood, past conversations, details from legal cases in his professional work, autobiographical reflections and more random observations. These aren’t woven together by any means seamlessly, but the narrative’s sometime awkwardness is all the more charming for it. Its strength is the author’s flatly descriptive style which belies a kind of restraint, a reluctance to sermonise uncommon in other writings set in the same political geography.



The subtitle of the book is Notes on a vanishing landscape, and at a reading this week in Stratford’s St John’s Church, Shehadeh confirmed that his efforts may be understood as an attempt to chronicle a pastime that is becoming increasingly constricted in an environment that is ever more degraded and forcibly fragmented. The six walks – the six sarhat, an Arabic word connoting freedom and lack of restraint – map the shift that has taken place over the last twenty-five years as Israeli settlements have expanded, land appropriation has continued, military checkpoints have multiplied, and the Separation or Apartheid Wall has been built. It is a shift “from sarha to suffocation”, as the author puts it, away from “a land that was open and free” to one in which the simple urge to leave one’s house and walk into surrounding hills must be stifled. We need not speculate about the psychological effects of such physical confinement; they are manifest in the frustration, weariness and occasional auto-destructive violence exhibited by Palestinians living in the West Bank.

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As an aside, Palestinian Walks is a particularly interesting text to read in conjunction with Meron Benvenisti’s Sacred Landscapes: The Buried History of the Holy Land since 1948. A central theme that emerges from Benvenisti’s book is the importance of the cult of ‘knowing the land’, knowing Eretz Yisrael. Its physical occupation through settlement is incomplete if there is not a simultaneous appropriation of the knowledge of that landscape; its symbols, its histories, its names. He describes the process by which the Palestinians’ local knowledge – which recognised every wadi, every stream and every tree – has been systematically erased as a key strategy in reducing the Palestinians’ claims to the land. First the Zionist cartographers renamed and Hebraeised these features of the landscape, and then the inhabitants of the land were increasingly denied access to it, through massacres, expulsions, or the physical strangulation that the checkpoints embody today.

In this context, Shehadeh’s attempt to record (in walks and words) a direct connection with precisely located, identifiable parts of the landscape, must be understood as an important political exercise, and one with considerable potential for empowerment. The youth at present have little memory of the relative freedom Shehadeh is able to remember, and cannot imagine the natural beauty that surrounds their towns and villages since they have such limited access to it – they are more accustomed to seeing the hills as a place of danger and insecurity. For Palestinians to retain their claim to the land, even as the population may be growing faster among the diaspora than within Palestine itself, it is this identification with the physical landscape that must be promoted and maintained if ‘Palestine’ is to be anything more than an ethnic marker or origin myth.

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