Palestinian Writer Raja Shehadeh Moves Decades-Long Diaries to Scotland to Safeguard Them

Award-winning Palestinian author and human-rights lawyer Raja Shehadeh, now 75, arranged a covert operation to relocate his personal archives from the Israeli-occupied West Bank to Scotland. Over the past two years he first digitized the material, then worked with a British writer, university archivists from Scotland and England, and a Palestinian bookseller in Jerusalem to photograph every diary entry and document. The images and the original papers were sent piece-by-piece through ordinary mail and are now housed at the University of Edinburgh, while the University of Exeter has made thousands of pages available online.

NPR

Shehadeh began keeping a diary at age 15, just before Israel occupied the West Bank in 1967, and has continued the record for nearly six decades, covering daily life, settlement expansion, and his own role as a legal adviser in peace talks. He first feared for his papers after Israeli tanks entered Ramallah during the second Intifada, an event he notes occurred on April 2, 2002, when soldiers searched homes and destroyed private documents. The 2023 Gaza war, which destroyed many archives there, revived his anxiety that a similar raid could obliterate his own collection. He has said that writing helped him process his anger toward Palestinian leaders who signed a 1990s peace accord that failed to halt settlement growth.

NPR

The Israeli foreign ministry declined to comment when asked about Shehadeh’s concerns that his archives were at risk.

NPR

The transferred archive provides scholars with a front-row view of the occupation’s evolution, including rare police files released after Shehadeh secured them, which he believes confirm his long-standing suspicion that the Israeli police deliberately ignored the main suspect in his father’s 1980s killing. By preserving these documents outside the West Bank, the effort safeguards a primary source that chronicles both public events and personal narratives of Palestinian life under occupation, offering future researchers material that might otherwise have been lost.

NPR

• 1967: Shehadeh begins diary as a teenager.

NPR

• April 2, 2002: Israeli tanks roll into Ramallah; his home is searched.

NPR

• 2023: Gaza war prompts renewed fear for his archives.

NPR

• 2024-2025 (approx.): Digitization, photography, and mailing of the archive.

NPR

• 2026: Archives arrive at the University of Edinburgh; online publication begins.

NPR