‘An act of resistance’: Raja Shehadeh’s Palestinian diaries find a new home

What the report says

Al Jazeera reports that Palestinian writer and lawyer Raja Shehadeh has arranged for his decades of diaries and related family papers to be archived at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. The 75-year-old, interviewed in Edinburgh, said the move is meant to protect a collection that spans nearly 60 years of Palestinian life and now totals more than 5 million words across tens of thousands of pages.

According to the article, the transfer is scheduled for Thursday and follows Shehadeh’s decision in late 2023 to move the archive out of Palestine amid concern that intensified Israeli military activity in the occupied West Bank and the war in Gaza could endanger it. The University of Edinburgh worked with partners including the University of Exeter’s Digital Archive of the Middle East and a Palestinian team linked to Jerusalem’s Educational Bookshop to digitize and ship the material.

Shehadeh said he chose Edinburgh because of his long ties to the city and described the archive’s relocation as a form of resistance. The collection includes papers from his late father, Aziz Shehadeh, and items preserved on unusual materials such as boarding passes and napkins. Al Jazeera says the archive will be held at Edinburgh’s Centre for Research Collections.

The story also places the move in a broader political context, noting debate over the university’s historical association with Lord Balfour and the 1917 Balfour Declaration. Supporters of the project told Al Jazeera that safeguarding Palestinian family records and historical documents is especially urgent given risks to archives in conflict zones.