The secret quest to preserve Palestinian writer Raja Shehadeh's diaries

Palestinian author Raja Shehadeh has moved a deeply personal record of his life and work to Scotland in a confidential effort to protect it. The material at the center of the effort is his collection of diaries, written across years in which the West Bank has remained under Israeli occupation. The decision reflects his concern that the conditions he has chronicled could also endanger the papers themselves, placing their survival beyond his control.

Shehadeh is widely regarded as one of Palestine’s foremost writers, and his private journals form part of a much larger body of work on Palestinian experience. Rather than treating the archive simply as a store of old documents, the preservation effort places special weight on writings made close to the events and periods they describe. The diaries preserve a record created over time by someone living through the history he set out to document.

His record began in 1967, when he was still a teenager. That was the year Israel began occupying the West Bank, a starting point that gives the diaries a long chronological reach. Through them, Shehadeh has documented Palestinian life over successive decades, alongside the political reality that shaped daily life in the territory. The span of the papers reaches back to the beginning of the occupation and continues through the years that followed.

The archive therefore links an individual writer’s observations with a prolonged chapter of regional history. Diaries can preserve immediate concerns, routines and perceptions that may not appear in official records or later accounts. In Shehadeh’s case, the papers are tied to a career spent recording life under occupation from its earliest period onward. Their value lies not only in their age, but also in their continuity across changing circumstances.

Shehadeh has written more than 20 books and has received awards for his work. That public career makes the private material significant beyond the author’s own household: it sits beside published writing that has brought accounts of Palestinian life to readers over many years. The diary collection, however, was described as his most intimate work, making its preservation a distinctly personal undertaking as well as a literary concern.

Moving the archive abroad was a protective choice, not merely an administrative one. Scotland became the destination because Shehadeh feared the occupation could swallow up the collection. The secrecy surrounding the transfer underscores the sensitivity he attached to safeguarding the diaries and the risks he believed they faced if they remained vulnerable. It also suggests that the fate of records can become inseparable from the circumstances in which they were created.

The available account does not set out the full contents of the archive, identify a Scottish institution holding it, or specify when the transfer took place. Those unanswered details matter for understanding how the papers will be stored, who may eventually consult them and what form their preservation will take. They also leave open questions about whether the archive will be catalogued or made accessible in the future.

The move brings into view a difficult balance common to endangered cultural records. Keeping documents safe can require distance from the communities and places that produced them, while retaining them nearby can leave them exposed to the forces that make preservation urgent. Shehadeh’s decision centers protection of the original diaries amid that tension. It does not erase their connection to the West Bank, where the long record began.

What follows will determine the archive’s broader historical role. Future information about its custody, conservation and possible access could show whether the papers become a resource for readers and researchers as well as a secure personal record. Whatever those arrangements prove to be, the collection spans a writer’s sustained effort to bear witness to Palestinian life since 1967, beginning when he was a teenager and extending across decades.

Source: NPR World