A RIFT IN TIME

Tracing the journey of his great-great uncle through once-open multiethnic Ottoman borders, a Palestinian writer finds their shared activism in “resistance politics."

Shehadeh’s great-great uncle, Najib Nassar, was a Christian journalist from Haifa in the pre–World War I Ottoman Empire, where many ethnic groups lived together amicably and the borders were fluid. The rise of nationalism, especially Turkish nationalism and Zionism, the author writes, destabilized and fragmented the region. As the editor of the newspaper Al Karmil, Nassar advocated for Arab independence “within the Ottoman structure” and worried that “the collapse of the Ottoman Empire would open the gates for the colonization of the Levant.” Nassar favored the Allies against the German/Austrian/Ottoman alliance in World War I and went underground in March 1915, often taken in by Bedouins and eluding arrest for three years. After the war ended, he argued that the British mandate in Palestine favored Jewish immigration. The author, a human rights activist, alternates flashbacks to his own threats of arrest, either by Israel or by the Palestinian Authority, with the retelling of his great-great uncle’s story. Delineating his family’s narrative of displacement, he notes that they have grown to “feel and act like fugitives in our own land.” He crisscrosses the territory spreading out from the Rift Valley—where throughout history armies of Canaanites and Hebrews, Greeks and Romans, Muslims and Crusaders, Ottomans and Europeans have all battled—and describes the vast, troubling changes.

A sorrowful, occasionally bitter disquisition on the loss of Palestinian agency.