Palestinian Writer Raja Shehadeh’s Diaries Secretly Moved to Scotland

Shehadeh, an award-winning author of more than 20 books, began keeping a diary in 1967, at the start of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, when he was a teenager. According to NPR, the diaries document decades of Palestinian life and offer a front-row view of history, including his meetings with world leaders, his work as a human rights lawyer and his role as legal adviser to the Palestinians during peace talks with Israel. The Israeli foreign ministry did not respond to NPR’s requests for comment about Shehadeh’s fears.

In an interview with NPR’s Daniel Estrin, Shehadeh described diary writing as a daily discipline. “It’s been a daily effort … in order to understand better what is happening around me, in order to record and document what is happening,” he said. He started when he was about 15, just before the occupation. “I was feeling that we are entering into a historic period that needs to be documented,” he said. “So I went about writing everything down that was happening and preserving whatever I could preserve.”

NPR also published excerpts from Shehadeh’s diary during Israel’s invasion of Ramallah in 2002, at the height of the Palestinian Intifada. In an entry dated April 2, 2002, he wrote that the previous night had been “very noisy” and that he had been awakened many times by bombing and shooting. After the curfew was lifted, he drove through streets with “absolutely no one” on them and saw two large tanks parked by his office, blocking the street. He wrote that satellite stations showed Palestinian suffering “like a soap opera” and described then-Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat as a “rebel rouser” who was popular and dramatized everything.

Shehadeh told NPR that his diaries after the 1990s peace accord captured great anger, which he was glad he did not publish. He said it was good to put his frustration and anger in the diaries because otherwise he would not have been able to live in Palestine, as he was so angry and frustrated with the leadership and so critical of it. The diary, he said, helped him vent that frustration without getting into trouble. He said the leadership did not realize that settlements were disastrous and had to be stopped, and that no agreement should happen without all settlement activities stopped. They did not do that, he said.

The diaries also record changes in geography, roads, landscape and the effect of settlements, according to the interview. Shehadeh said he used to walk a lot in the West Bank hills and afterward record what he saw, how he felt and how the land looked. “I was so confused by what was happening and so wanting to understand it, and so writing it helped me understand it,” he said. “I had my own way and my own nonconformity. And so describing my world in words helped me grasp it better.”

Shehadeh cited the destruction of Palestinian journals and private papers during the 1948 Nakba as a reason for his fear that his own archives could be lost. NPR reported that his diaries and archives were kept in his garage in Ramallah and were moved to Scotland, where he has spent many summers. The University of Edinburgh now holds the archives, while the University of Exeter has made thousands of pages available online.