Edinburgh, Scotland – On May 11, 1967, a studious young Palestinian teenager named Raja Shehadeh sat down to compose his first dated diary entry. On Thursday, his personal journals will be officially transferred to the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Research Collections, where they will be archived. Shehadeh, a softly spoken giant of Palestinian literature with some 20 books to his name, was a pupil at the Quaker school in Ramallah when he began diarising life in the Jordanian-controlled Palestinian West Bank.
He had come to the realisation that he was living through a period of flux that “needed to be documented”. Shehadeh’s account of this event – which ended 19 years of Jordanian rule in his West Bank home – and the many other events that followed in the course of his near-60 years documenting the restive story of Palestine, today account for the bulk of an archive stretching to an excess of 5 million words across tens of thousands of pages. It was late 2023 when the author, lawyer and public intellectual decided to uproot his archive.
Israel’s increased incursions into the occupied West Bank and genocidal war on Gaza convinced him that his collection was under threat of destruction. Today, he revels in its safe deliverance. He has launched 14 of his books at the capital’s annual book festival.
The archive also includes material belonging to his late father, Aziz Shehadeh, a lawyer from Ramallah. The task of transferring Shehadeh’s substantial collection from Palestine to Scotland required the University of Edinburgh to enlist the support of others, like the Digital Archive of the Middle East at England’s University of Exeter and a Palestinian team from Jerusalem’s Educational Bookshop. As a friend of the Palestinian septuagenarian, Teller knew of Shehadeh’s fears for the safety of his archive from the very start and came on board as project director.
Shehadeh’s latest work is Forgotten: Searching for Palestine’s Hidden Places and Lost Memorials (2025), which he co-authored with his American wife Penny Johnson. He is also the founder of the longstanding Palestinian human rights organisation Al-Haq, based in Ramallah. Teller, whose new book, Finding Aladdin: The Hidden History of a Syrian Storyteller, will be published later this year, told Al Jazeera: “There was a lot of discussion about workflow, and I put together a costings … to figure out a way forward.” Working in the shadow of both a rising Palestinian death toll in Gaza and violent Israeli raids on Palestinian properties in the occupied West Bank, not to mention the outbreak of conflict between Israel and Iran in 2025, Mahmoud Muna, the proprietor of the legendary Educational Bookshop in Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem, and a champion of Shehadeh’s work, gathered together his own small task force to digitise Shehadeh’s papers.
He was detained by Israeli police in early 2025 after they raided his bookshop in what Pulitzer Prize-winning author Nathan Thrall called a deliberate attempt by Israeli authorities to ferment a “climate of fear” among Palestinians. The digitisation process proved both mentally and physically taxing. Entries scribbled on the likes of boarding passes and napkins required careful preservation.
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