Raja Shehadeh

"Provides a rare historical insight into the tragic changes taking place in Palestine"--Jimmy Carter (from cover).

"The Israeli army invaded Ramallah in March 2002. A tank stood at the end of Raja Shehadeh's road; Israeli soldiers patrolled from the roof tops. Four soldiers took over his brother's apartment and then used him as a human shield as they went through the building, while his wife tried to keep her composure for the sake of their frightened children, ages four and six." "This is an account of what it is like to be under siege: the terror, the frustrations, the humiliations, and the rage. How do you pass your time when you are imprisoned in your own home? What do you do when you cannot cross the neighborhood to help your sick mother?" "When the Birds Stopped Singing is a book of the moment, a chronicle of life today as lived by ordinary Palestinians throughout the West Bank and Gaza in the grip of the most stringent Israeli security measures in years. And yet it is also an enduring document at once literary and of great political import, that should serve as a cautionary tale for today's and future generations."--Jacket.

This is a memoir of exile - being a 'stranger in his own land' - and also a memoir of a remarkable father and an account of a political education. It offers a way to understand the problems of the Middle East - and a wonderful personal story by a writer of edge and subtelty.

It is often the smallest details of daily life that tell us the most. And so it is under occupation in Palestine. What most of us take for granted has to be carefully thought about and planned for: When will the post be allowed to get through? Will there be enough water for the bath tonight? How shall I get rid of the rubbish collecting outside? How much time should I allow for the journey to visit my cousin, going through checkpoints? And big questions too: Is working with left-wing Israelis collaborating or not? What affect will the Arab Spring have on the future of Palestine? What can anyone do to bring about change? Are any of life's pleasures untouched by politics?

"A moving account of one man's border crossings-both literal and figurative-by the award-winning author of Palestinian Walks, published on the fiftieth anniversary of the Six Day War In what has become a classic of Middle Eastern literature, Raja Shehadeh, in Palestinian Walks, wrote of his treks through the hills surrounding Ramallah over a period of three decades under Israel's occupation. In Where the Line Is Drawn, Shehadeh explores how occupation has affected him personally, chronicling the various crossings that he undertook into Israel over a period of forty years to visit friends and family, to enjoy the sea, to argue before the Israeli courts, and to negotiate failed peace agreements. Those forty years also saw him develop a close friendship with Henry, a Canadian Jew who immigrated to Israel at around the same time Shehadeh returned to Palestine from studying in London. While offering an unforgettably poignant exploration of Palestinian-Israeli relationships, Where the Line Is Drawn also provides an anatomy of friendship and an exploration of whether, in the bleakest of circumstances, it is possible for bonds to transcend political divisions"--

Award-winning author Raja Shehadeh explores the politics of language and the language of politics in the Israeli Palestine conflict, reflecting on the walls that they create - legal and cultural - that confine today's Palestinians just like the physical borders, checkpoints and the so called 'Separation Barrier'. The peace process has been ground to a halt by twists of language and linguistic chicanery that has degraded the word 'peace' itself. No one even knows what the word might mean now for the Middle East. So to give one example of many, Israel argued that the omission of the word 'the' in one of the UN Security Council's resolutions meant that it was not mandated to withdraw from all of the territories occupied in 1967. The Language of War, The Language of Peace is another important book from Raja Shehadeh on the world's greatest political fault line.

Feeling like an outsider when she visits her relatives in Puerto Rico for the first time, eleven-year-old Felita tries to come to terms with the heritage she always took for granted.