Palestinian Writer Raja Shehadeh's Diaries Find New Home at University of Edinburgh

Edinburgh, Scotland – On May 11, 1967, a Palestinian teenager named Raja Shehadeh wrote his first diary entry. Those were the naive English lines of a 15-year-old boy about the sadness of bees being driven from the garden—but beneath lay the deeper grief of loss and dispossession felt by Palestinians.

Fifty-eight years later, Raja Shehadeh, now 75, continues to write. His collection has grown to tens of thousands of pages, more than five million words, chronicling the upheavals of Palestinian history from before the 1967 Six-Day War to the present. On September 3, the entire archive will be formally handed over to the Centre for Research Collections at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland.

Shehadeh, one of the most prominent Palestinian writers with about 20 books to his name, started his diary as a student at the Quaker school in Ramallah. He realized he was living through a transformative era that needed to be recorded. “I realised this was a very volatile period, and writing about it helped me understand what was happening better,” he told Al Jazeera.

The decision to move the archive to Edinburgh came in late 2023, as Israel intensified attacks in the West Bank and launched its military campaign in Gaza. “I went to see the archive last week. I saw it kept in a safe place with double locks and air conditioning... I felt very relieved,” Shehadeh said.

Transferring the vast collection from Palestine to Scotland was no simple feat. The University of Edinburgh enlisted help from several partners, including the University of Exeter in the UK and the Digital Project Group based in Jerusalem. Mahmoud Muna, owner of a well-known educational bookshop in East Jerusalem, and his colleagues digitized the entire archive under threat of danger. Notes written on airline tickets and tissues were carefully preserved. After digitization, the materials were packed and sent via regular international mail—a deliberate approach—and all eight shipments arrived safely in Edinburgh.

Shehadeh views placing the archive at the University of Edinburgh as a symbolic act of resistance, given the university's link to the 1917 Balfour Declaration. The declaration, issued by Lord Balfour, then the university's chancellor, expressed British support for a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, setting the stage for the conflict that continues today. “Balfour tried to erase the existence of Palestine. My archive and my father's are proof of the failure of that intention,” he said.

Kholoud Al-Ajarma, deputy director of the Alwaleed Centre at the University of Edinburgh, stressed: “The natural place for these materials is Palestine. But in the current situation, physically saving what can be saved is of utmost importance.” According to her, the university hopes to turn the collection into “an open resource for researchers and students.”

The collection includes not only Raja Shehadeh's diaries but also materials from his father, lawyer Aziz Shehadeh, a prominent figure in Ramallah. Among these are handwritten letters, poems, and even diaries written on identity papers. Raja Shehadeh, who recently published a new book, “Forgotten: Searching for Palestine's Hidden Places and Lost Memorials,” co-authored with his wife, American writer Penny Johnson, affirmed that while the archive has moved, he retains full intellectual property rights—and his diary habit will not stop: “My day is not over until I have written all my thoughts in my diary.”