The year was 1998 and the city was Bethlehem. After years of reporting from Palestine and other "trouble spots" in the Arab world I returned not to cover the "troubles," but to help build and rebuild a society. The UNDP’s TOKTEN Programme and the Bethlehem 2000 Project, under the stewardship of Dr. Nabeel Kassis, gave me a unique opportunity to “do good.” Happy and excited, I came to Palestine to work with the millennium project in Bethlehem. For almost 18 months I worked with an earnest and dedicated team of developers and welcomed a seemingly endless stream of visitors. Most went to Jerusalem, Nablus, Hebron and Jaffa. Some went as far as Acre, and a few made the trek to Nazareth.

Those who came all had some sort of connection to Palestine, either through family or political and/or religious affiliation. The Holy Land that was Palestine was finally open to visitors and tourists as a result of the stalled but still not dead Oslo Peace Process.

The only problem was no one knew how to read the names, the landscape, the signs or even the architecture. “Things looked Arab, Islamic, but I did not know what they were - there are no signposts - it is all about Jewish history, or what the Romans, British or Turks did, at best. Where is Palestine, where has it all gone?” asked one friend after a day tour to Jaffa.

While cities and sites under nominal Palestinian rule were being developed, this was only part of the Palestine visitors were coming to see. What about Jerusalem? What about Acre? These questions came to haunt me. I thought about suggesting an agreement to the Israeli ministry of tourism, proposing that they include the Arab, Islamic, even Byzantine and Roman history in full scale with Jewish history to every signpost at historical sites. What could possibly be wrong with that, now that we had agreed to give 78% up to them? Alas, my questions were never answered. We were busy celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ in Bethlehem and then, of course, the peace process unravelled, Al-Aqsa Intifada began and all was naught. However, even as the conflict raged and the youth of Palestine were felled by bullets, my pre-occupation with the question of where Palestine was did not disappear.

The Israeli women at the checkpoints never did accept my answer that I was not going to Israel but simply to Ramallah or Bethlehem. “But Ramallah is in Israel,” one of them finally said to me three months after the Al-Aqsa Intifada had begun. “Aha,” I thought, “at last an honest person.” This is how it is - “Ramallah is in Israel!” Very well, I thought, now that we have all pretences out of the way, let us make the invisible visible and speak truth to power.

To be honest, the road to Oslo was not only long, but painful and often awkward. There were meetings and conferences, but there was rarely truth. Real “reconciliation,” as there was in South Africa, was absent.

Palestinians were less and less able to come to Palestine and bringing Palestine to them seemed impossible. Speaking about our historical relationship with Akka and Yaffa, Al-Naqab and Asqalan, not to mention rights to our property there, was, to Israelis, rude and insolent if not right-out incitement. But perhaps, I thought, both the truth of the past and the reality of the present could meet. I decided that, no matter what, I would try to do what the Palestinian educator Mounir Fasche had preached like the bible: turn things upside down and make the hidden visible for all to see.

Palestine: A Guide became a personal journey that along with half a dozen talented colleagues became a book. There were detractors who wanted to follow the guidelines of political correctness that were endlessly shifting, like lines in the sand. They wanted me not to offend. With time, the detractors disappeared. All were busy dealing with re-occupation, assassination, air strikes, closures, checkpoints, a “small” massacre here, a strike on militants there, the wall that came down on us like a mad medieval reality. But for me, where Palestine was and where it had gone was still the question. Palestine: A Guide is more of a journey than a guidebook although it contains many of the elements of a traveller’s guidebook. It takes readers to what is and was Palestine.

When discussing structure, a main problem was how to organize the book. According to the partition line, the armistice lines, along the map that was Oslo, along the lines of the Sharon Plan? I gave up and said why we don’t divide it into three parts; Palestine: North, South, and Centre. It was agreed. Since there is no Palestinian state anyway, we refer to historical Palestine as Palestine until there is another kind of a Palestinian state, wherever, whenever…

The book is scheduled to be in bookstores by the end of March and hopefully it will be the tool of enlightenment that it is meant to be. A mixture of popular and religious history is woven into the Palestinian narrative of the places, and the majestic photographs, taken by George Azar, reflect Palestine as it is today: the homeland of the Palestinian people as it exists inside an Israeli empire. Taufic Haddad writes brilliantly about the refugee camps, the past and present of the people as well as the areas of Arab Beisan and Tiberias. Christiane Dabdoub-Nasser, the author of Classic 

Palestinian Cookery writes about the culinary traditions of each area. Inea Bushnaq, author of Arab Folktales, writes about our literary and folkloric traditions; Haifa Shawa Al-Masri writes about our traditional dress and jewellery. Interlink Books is our publisher, who insisted it could not be longer than the 512 pages that it is.

The book is in and of itself a reconciliation. Palestinians with Palestine, Arabs with Palestine, Jews with Palestine and the world with Palestine. Palestine is what it is, a homeland shinning through the powerful grip of those who wish to forget, those who use it, those who feel guilt and remorse, those who gave it away and those who have nowhere else to go. It is dedicated to those who may only dream about seeing it.

Mariam Shahin came to Palestine as a UNDP TOKTEN volunteer in 1999. Her book, Palestine: A Guide will be published in March 2005 by Interlink Books. She can be reached at mmshahin@nets.com.jo