ELISSA NADWORNY, HOST:
One of the world's leading Palestinian writers has been on a mission to save his most personal work - his diaries documenting decades of Palestinian life under Israeli occupation. NPR's Daniel Estrin has this conversation with the award-winning author and the story of his secret effort to preserve his archives.
DANIEL ESTRIN, BYLINE: Raja Shehadeh is the most widely read Palestinian writer in English, with over 20 books published. The award-winning author has been keeping a diary for nearly 60 years. He started writing it as a teenager, right before Israel occupied the West Bank in 1967.
RAJA SHEHADEH: 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.
ESTRIN: He saved the first military order posted throughout the West Bank as Palestinians came under Israeli occupation. Shehadeh was 15 years old when he ripped the order off the wall. He's kept it in his files all these years and continued documenting the occupation ever since.
SHEHADEH: (Reading) It's April 2, 2002. It was very noisy last night.
ESTRIN: Like this entry, when Israeli tanks rolled into his city, Ramallah, during the second intifada, the Palestinian uprising.
SHEHADEH: (Reading) I saw two big Israeli tanks, like elephants in a zoo, where they don't belong, parked by our office on the main street, blocking the street. When I approached, the tank turned its guns towards me.
ESTRIN: His diaries capture a unique voice and a front-row view of history for nearly six decades - his meetings with world leaders, his work as a human rights lawyer and as a legal adviser during peace talks with Israel. He also writes about his anger at Palestinian leaders for signing a peace accord in the 1990s that didn't stop Israeli settlement expansion.
SHEHADEH: And 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.
ESTRIN: He spent years documenting Israel's expanding control of the West Bank.
SHEHADEH: 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 out in the West Bank hills, and after the walks, I would record what I saw and how I felt and how the land looked.
ESTRIN: What was compelling you to write?
SHEHADEH: I was so confused by what was happening, and so writing it helped me understand it. You know, I had my own way and my own nonconformity. And so describing the - my world in words helped me grasp it better.
ESTRIN: It was during the second Intifada and the Israeli raid on his city in 2002, that he began to fear for his archives. Once inside Ramallah, Israeli soldiers searched his house.
SHEHADEH: They went into so many homes and destroyed the private papers and the - everything. And so I was worried that they would do the same for me.
ESTRIN: His fears recently resurfaced.
SHEHADEH: 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 mean, I kept the diaries in the garage. If the soldiers, as they did once, entered my house, go to the garage and see them, they would just throw them all over the place and maybe set fire to them.
ESTRIN: So over the last two years, he began a discreet effort to get his archive out of the West Bank without Israel finding out.
SHEHADEH: Oh, I was very worried that the Israelis would - they would stop it. So the first step was to digitize.
ESTRIN: A British writer organized a team of university archivists from Scotland and England, and together with a Palestinian bookseller in Jerusalem, they photographed every one of Shehadeh's diary entries and documents.
SHEHADEH: And the second step was to slowly start sending the documents out by ordinary mail.
ESTRIN: The Israeli foreign ministry did not respond to a request for comment about Shehadeh's fears his archives were at risk. He had them mailed to a place he spent many summers - Scotland. The archives are now at the University of Edinburgh, and the University of Exeter has published thousands of pages online. The archives also chronicle Shehadeh's 40-year quest to solve the mystery of his father's killing. The Israeli police never investigated the man he suspected the most.
SHEHADEH: And my suspicion - some suspicion is because this man was a collaborator, and he wanted to be protected. And Israel wanted to protect him as a collaborator.
ESTRIN: Just last year, he got Israel to release the police files. He believes the man who killed his father, who was never charged, was an informant for Israel.
SHEHADEH: And so this is where it ended. We could not go beyond that.
ESTRIN: He has written about his father's killing in some of his books. The recently released Israeli police files are in the archives too. He says they validate his belief that the police purposefully overlooked the main suspect.
SHEHADEH: When I realized through this case that they have actually not investigated him, I felt that my suspicions were correct, and that gave me closure, yes, it did.
ESTRIN: So much of what you write about, and I'm quoting one of the books that you've published, about witnessing the slow transformation of our country and the destruction of our future in it - as you look back on your diaries, how much did you understand in real time about where things were headed for Palestinians?
SHEHADEH: 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.
ESTRIN: Raja Shehadeh's archive may now be in Scotland, but the 75-year-old writer will not leave the West Bank. Daniel Estrin, NPR News, Tel Aviv. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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