Palestinian writer moves archive from Ramallah to Scotland
Palestinian writer and human rights lawyer Raja Shehadeh moved his diaries and personal archive from Ramallah in the West Bank to Scotland after a two-year non-public operation. The writer feared that the documents stored in the garage of his home could be destroyed during Israeli military operations.
As NPR World reports, Shehadeh's archive is now kept at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. The University of Exeter in England has also published thousands of pages from the collection online.
Diaries since 1967
Shehadeh, who is 75, has kept diaries since 1967, when he was a teenager. In them, he recorded the everyday lives of Palestinians, his work as a human rights lawyer, meetings with world leaders, and his work as legal adviser to Palestinians during peace negotiations with Israel.
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The entries describe, among other things, the incursion of Israeli forces into Ramallah in 2002, changes to the landscape and roads in the West Bank, as well as the impact of settlement expansion. According to Shehadeh, keeping a diary helped him make sense of events and document them.
Digitization and mailing
Initially, three people, working with the University of Edinburgh and the University of Exeter, digitized the diaries and other collected documents page by page. The materials were then gradually sent by regular mail in order not to attract attention.
The archive also includes documents on Shehadeh's years-long efforts to secure an investigation into the 1985 murder of his father, lawyer Aziz Shehadeh. In 2025, the writer received files from the Israeli police investigation. According to him, police did not investigate the role of the man he considers the main suspect; Shehadeh also expressed suspicion that the man may have been protected as a collaborator.
