SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
The world's leading Palestinian writer 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 the story of a secret international effort to preserve them.
DANIEL ESTRIN, BYLINE: Raja Shehadeh is the most widely read Palestinian writer in English, with over 20 books published. And the award-winning author has been keeping a diary for more than 60 years, every single day since he was a teenager. He started writing it just 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: Including the first military order posted throughout the West Bank as Palestinians came under Israeli occupation. Shehadeh, then 15, ripped the order off the wall. He's kept it in his files all these years and continued documenting every day of occupation 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.
ESTRIN: His diaries capture a unique voice and a front-row view of history - his meetings with world leaders, his work as a human rights lawyer and 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. He tells me he only divulged that anger to his diary.
SHEHADEH: 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: But it was that moment, the Israeli raid in 2002, that he began to fear that his archives, his lifetime of documenting, were in danger. Israeli soldiers raided his home in Ramallah.
SHEHADEH: 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.
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.
ESTRIN: That led to a two-year discreet effort to get Shehadeh's archive out of the West Bank.
SHEHADEH: Oh, I was very worried that the Israelis would stop it. So the first step was to digitize.
ESTRIN: A team of university archivists from Scotland and England, together with a Palestinian bookseller in Jerusalem, 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 without raising any attention to it.
ESTRIN: They were mailed to a place he spent many summers over the years, Scotland. The Israeli foreign ministry did not respond to a request for comment about Shehadeh's fears his work was at risk. The archives are now at the University of Edinburgh and available to the public. Shehadeh says the diaries are important to understanding Palestinian history.
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 is staying put in the West Bank. Daniel Estrin, NPR News, Tel Aviv. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
