Raja Shahadeh

Anger imprisons you.

And I didn't want ever to be angry to the point of being immobilized.

And I think I take this after my father.

My father was always active, always trying to find a solution, a way out.

And I think I have the same attitude.

I always try to find a way out and try always to look at the other side, the others, and try to put myself in their place and how would I feel if I were in their place and try to understand them.

And so I see them as fellow human beings rather than as an object.

Well, I think the first thing is to document and make clear what is the situation and avoid mystification.

And I think the colonization works by mystifying, by making people lose a sense of who they are and how did they get to the point that they got to now.

I realize now that the people who are

younger than me, who were born in the, let's say, 90s, never knew the land as it was before.

Never knew what the hills looked like before the settlements were built all over them.

Never knew the roads before they were distorted and became settler roads and full of checkpoints.

And so one of the objects of my writing has been to describe the landscape as it was before that, and to try and paint a picture of the beauty of the land before it was distorted by these settlements.

And then also, they might not be aware how we got into the situation, the legal situation that we are in now.

And that is important, I think, to remove the mystery

and explained exactly that it was a slow process, which was deliberate, and that is also part of what my work has been trying to do.

What are some of the other parts?

Well, other parts are how now the present generation of Palestinians have never met an Israeli who is not a settler or a soldier.

And there were times when Israelis came over to Ramallah and to other places in West Bank and to Gaza, actually, and went to restaurants and had businesses with the Palestinians.