University of Edinburgh Welcomes Raja Shehadeh Archive

By Olivia Snaije, with Publishing Perspectives.

On September 3, the University of Edinburgh held an event to celebrate the arrival of award-winning Palestinian writer and human rights lawyer Raja Shehadeh’s personal archive to the university’s Centre for Research Collections, with digital copies of the archive being stored at the Digital Archive of the Middle East (DAME), based at the Institute for Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter.

Shehadeh began to keep a journal in 1967, at age 15. Today, five million words fill his diaries, chronicling his life as a Palestinian, including his struggle for justice. His diaries, which include copies of military orders issued following the Israeli occupation of the West Bank in 1967, and legal and diplomatic papers, many from the 1940s belonging to his father (also a lawyer), recently arrived in the United Kingdom, box by box, for safekeeping.

Shehadeh’s archive had been stored in Ramallah, in the West Bank, but it had become clear the archive was at risk following Israeli military operations in Gaza that had seen the destruction of libraries, museums and other cultural institutions, and the spread of violence to the West Bank.

The international coordination required for the two-year operation to get the archives to the U.K. could be the narrative of a cultural thriller, and, in fact, a documentary called Journey of an Archive is forthcoming directed by Francesco Amoruso, Yazeed Abu Khdeir and Hannah Papacek Harper.

The team on the ground in Palestine was run by Jerusalem’s Educational Bookshop co-owner Mahmoud Muna, working with the Universities of Edinburgh and Exeter, and coordinated by author and journalist Matthew Teller.

At the event, Muna recounted, via video from Jerusalem, how the archives were transported from Ramallah to a designated studio in a secret location in Jerusalem, along with digitizing equipment. Tens of thousands of documents were photographed, scanned, and backed up by Muna, photographer Yazeed Abu Khdeir, and others.

The process sometimes seemed “endless,” said Muna, who also praised Shehadeh for his behind the scenes work in encouraging agents and publishers to publish Palestinian writers. After completing the first few thousand scans, “we would put the archives into boxes, secure the packages, and send them by courier to the University of Edinburgh,” he said. When a box arrived safely after a week-long journey, the next box would be shipped.

“Preserving and digitizing Raja Shehadeh’s archive has been one of the most complicated and rewarding projects we have ever undertaken as the Educational Bookshop,” said Muna, who with his nephew was arrested and detained by Israeli forces 2025, when his bookshop was raided.

‘An Important Resource for Scholars and Researchers’

Matthew Teller met Shehadeh in 2021 when he was working on his book Nine Quarters of Jerusalem. He had suggested to Shehadeh that they work on his biography together, but soon realized that it was more urgent to preserve Shehadeh’s archive.

Teller contacted James Downs, archivist at the University of Exeter’s Middle East collections and Tom Lea, who runs the Alwaleed Centre for the Study of Islam in the Contemporary World at the University of Edinburgh. Both responded postively. “An archive is one of the last bastions against total erasure,” said Teller.

Shehadeh’s publisher Andrew Franklin, founder and owner of U.K. independent publisher Profile Books, was among the audience in Edinburgh.

“It has been an extraordinary pleasure and privilege to have been Raja’s editor for more than 25 years,” Franklin told Publishing Perspectives. “He is Palestine’s most important prose writer, and a man of exceptional courage. I published a volume of his diaries about the occupation of Ramallah in 2002. That book, When the Bulbul Stopped Singing, was so powerful that it was turned into a play by the Scottish playwright David Greig. So I know how significant the diaries are. It is a huge relief that they are now safe and stored in archival conditions in Edinburgh where they will be an important resource for scholars and researchers.”

The Raja Shehadeh archive at the University of Edinburgh will be free and available to all researchers, scholars and members of the public. Given the vast number of materials in the archives, the project team is looking for additional funding so that the entire collection to be catalogued.

Meanwhile, about 4,000 pages from the archive are now available to the public as PDFs on the University of Exeter site. The archivists have organized them into groups for clarity rather than leaving them as individual pages. Besides legal and political documents, some dating back to the 1930s, there is, for example, a typed English-language draft of a chapter of a book or an article, written by Shehadeh’s father, Aziz, in 1973, analyzing the state of Israeli-Palestinian relations six years after the 1967 Six-Day War. And there are, of course pages from the famous diaries, including the two typed pages that mark the beginning of Shehadeh’s practice of journaling, written in 1967.

Because Shehadeh’s diaries also have personal elements to them, Shehadeh made sure he could approve all private aspects before publication. But anything else “was important to make public,” he said. “I’m 75 and didn’t want to leave without having a place for these diaries.”

Shehadeh said that he hoped another book would come out of the diaries. Certainly the archives will allow for reflection and will be inspirational to scholars, reseachers, writers, and the general public, which may produce further books.

His diaries are an important contribution to the pursuit of justice in Palestine, he said. “I began following the practices of occupation. I described my legal practice and the changing geography. At the time, the world was not ready to believe a Palestinian. All this is available now to see how the disastrous state of affairs has come about.”

Both Matthew Teller and Mahmoud Muna will be on tour in Germany and at the Frankfurt Buchmesse October 11 for the German translation of their book Daybreak in Gaza.

Olivia Snaije is a journalist and editor based in Paris and Barcelona who writes about translation, literature, the Middle East, and the African continent. She is the author of three books and has contributed to anthologies, newspapers and magazines including The Guardian, New Lines Magazine, and The Africa Report.

This first appeared in Publishing Perspectives.