The world's leading Palestinian writer, Raja Shehadeh, has been on a mission to save his most personal work: his diaries.
The award-winning author of more than 20 books has been documenting decades of Palestinian life, starting in 1967 at the very beginning of Israel's occupation of the West Bank when he was a teenager.
His diaries capture a unique voice and front row view of history: his meetings with world leaders, his work as a human rights lawyer, and his role as legal advisor to the Palestinians during peace talks with Israel.
Shehadeh, now 75, feared his diaries and archives — kept in his garage in the West Bank city of Ramallah — were at risk of destruction from Israeli military operations. (The Israeli foreign ministry did not respond to requests for comment about Shehadeh's fears.)
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So he took part in a two-year, discreet effort to spirit them to Scotland, where he has spent many summers. The archives are now at the University of Edinburgh, and the University of Exeter in England has published thousands of pages online.
Shehadeh spoke with NPR's Daniel Estrin about his decades of diary writing, and the secret effort to preserve his archives.
The interview text below has been edited for length and clarity.
How keeping a diary consistently for so long impacted who he is as a writer
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. I started when I was...fifteen years old, just before the occupation. It has been a very good discipline because it helped me understand myself and what's happening around me...I was feeling that we are entering into a historic period that needs to be documented. So I went about writing everything down that was happening and preserving whatever I could preserve.
Excerpts from Shehadeh's diary during Israel's invasion of Ramallah at the height of the Palestinian Intifada in 2002
April 2, 2002
Last night was very noisy. I was awakened many times from the sound of the bombing and shooting ...
My mood was not good today. I just got too many telephones. The problem then became that the news spread that my spirits (so it was interpreted are down) so I got more calls from those who thought it is their duty to call me to help raise my morale ...
I am beginning to feel like a prisoner in the house, in solitary confinement ... I am thinking of exercising by pacing around the house ...
Then Samer called to say: now they have lifted the curfew ... I was glad to lift the garage door and to turn my car on ... There was absolutely no one on the street. There was dirt and stones and wind and fog but no cars ...
I continued driving up to the center and then saw two big tanks- how big they look, like elephants in a zoo where they don't belong, parked by our office blocking the street entirely ...
The satellite stations show the suffering of the Palestinians like a soap opera ... [Palestinian leader Yaser] Arafat is a rebel rouser. He is now very popular and he dramatizes everything. The Palestinians rather than be a force of change are a source of drama and emotionalism throughout the arab world ...
On Shehadeh's anger at Palestinian leaders for signing a peace accord in the 1990s that didn't stop Israeli settlement expansion
My diaries after that point showed a great anger which I was glad I didn't publish. I mean, it was good that I put all my frustration and anger in the diaries because otherwise I would not have been able to live in Palestine because I was so angry and so frustrated by the leadership and so critical of it. And so the diary played an important role in helping me vent that frustration without getting myself into trouble.
The leadership...didn't realize that the settlements were the disastrous thing and that they had to be stopped, and no agreement should happen without all settlement activities stopped, and they didn't do that.
On his diary entries documenting Israel's expanding control of the West Bank
I started recording the changes in the geography and in the roads and in the landscape and in the effect of the settlements. I used to walk a lot in the West Bank hills, and after the walks, I would record what I saw and how I 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. I had my own way and my own nonconformity. And so describing my world in words helped me grasp it better.
Shehadeh's fear for the safety of his archives due to Israeli military operations
I n the Nakba (the Arabic word for "catastrophe," commonly used to refer to the displacement and dispossession of Palestinians when Israel was established) in 1948, they destroyed so many of the journals and private papers of Palestinians, and they were never found again. And then in 1982 in Lebanon, in Beirut, they went to the Palestine Research Center and took all the papers and all the journals and everything there and destroyed it. And in 2002, in the re-invasion of Ramallah, they went into so many homes and destroyed the private papers and everything. And so I was worried that they would do the same for me.
In 2023, with the Gaza war and the destruction of so much of the archives in Gaza, I became really worried and thought that I must do something to preserve these diaries. I kept the diaries in the garage. If the soldiers, as they did once, (would) enter my house, go to the garage and see them, they would just throw them all over the place and maybe set fire to them.
The two-year effort to move the archives from the West Bank to Scotland
I was very worried that the Israelis would stop it. So the first step was to digitize...page by page by page by page according to the highest standard with the cooperation of the University of Edinburgh University and Exeter University. And so three people worked day and night to digitize the diary … and all the documents that I had collected as well.
And the second step was to slowly start sending the documents out by ordinary mail without raising any attention to it.
Shehadeh's 40-year quest to investigate the 1985 killing of his father, a prominent lawyer — and the Israeli police investigation files of the killing, which Shehadeh obtained in 2025
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In the archive is the process by which I went about trying to get the police to investigate and the feelings that I had about it, which extended from '85 to 2025.
It was clear that they had not investigated the main culprit, the man who had sent the letter to my father from prison threatening to kill him if he did not withdraw from a case of land that the family thought belonged to them or they were squatting on it. My suspicion, strong suspicion, is because this man was a collaborator, and he wanted to be protected, and Israel wanted to protect him as a collaborator.
This is where it ended. We could not go beyond that.
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The Israeli police revealed all the investigation, but all the investigation was extraneous. It was distracting because the main suspect was not investigated, and that we have found out.
I had always suspected that it was this man who did it, and when I realized through this case that they have actually not investigated him, I felt that my suspicions were correct, and it gave me closure.
About Shehadeh's diary entries documenting Israel's transformation of the West Bank over the years
I understood from early on that it was a matter of...staying put and persevering. Because I realized that what the Israelis wanted was to make life so difficult for the Palestinians in the occupied territories, to make them leave.
The only antidote to that is sumud [Arabic for "steadfastness"]. Staying put and entrenching our existence by building institutions, by making work for people, by making it clear that we are here to stay. And I never changed my mind about this. I always realized that sumud was the most important resistance to what Israel was trying to do.
What Shehadeh hopes his legacy will be
I'm not so worried about legacy, but I'm concerned that, through the diaries, people will understand how things happened and the developments that things went through. That's very important for me, and this would be perhaps a greater way that I would have served human rights and truth than any other way, whether through my writing of books or articles or speeches. The diaries might bring about the results that I haven't been able to achieve in any other way. I think that is the important thing.
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