Raja Shehadeh’s Diaries Crossed the Border

Palestinian writer Raja Shehadeh arranged for decades of his diaries to be moved secretly from the West Bank to Scotland. The papers record life under Israel’s occupation, which he has documented since its early years, and he feared that the same political conditions described in the notebooks might eventually consume the notebooks themselves. The available account places the archive in Scotland but does not publicly establish the repository, the precise custody agreement, or who controls access.

These are not papers assembled after the fact to illustrate a finished history. They were written across the long duration of occupation, when an entry could preserve an encounter, restriction, journey, loss, or change in the landscape before anyone knew what later significance it would carry. Their value lies partly in that proximity: the diary records what one person noticed before public narratives settled around it.

Safety changes the address of authority

Moving the archive was a practical act of preservation. It was also another displacement. Scotland offers distance from the immediate threats Shehadeh feared, but distance determines who can open a box, request a scan, recognize a place name, or dispute a catalogue description. Exile has acquired an accession form.

A responsible catalogue should preserve the original order of the diaries, identify dates and physical condition, document every transfer, and distinguish Shehadeh’s own labels from later archival descriptions. Digitization could widen access, but only if the scans are complete, searchable where appropriate, stored in more than one location, and accompanied by durable metadata. Translations should remain linked to the original pages so that an interpretation does not quietly replace the record it interprets.

Ownership is equally material. A gift, deposit, loan, and conditional transfer give different powers to a repository and different rights to an author, family, or public. The agreement should say who approves publication, what protections apply to living people named in the diaries, whether Palestinian scholars can obtain remote access, and whether duplicate copies may be held by a Palestinian institution. Otherwise, preservation can protect the object while rationing the encounter.

The Scottish custodians also need a continuity plan. Directors retire, budgets contract, software becomes unreadable, and institutions revise collecting priorities. The archive therefore needs documented provisions for migration to new formats, independent backups, notice before restrictions change, and a successor repository if the present arrangement ends. Safety should not depend on one sympathetic administrator remembering an unwritten promise.

Shehadeh has solved the immediate problem of keeping the diaries alive. The remaining work is to publish enough of the custody terms and catalogue for Palestinians to know what survives, where it survives, and how they may reach it. The unresolved question is not whether Scotland can shelter the archive, but whether shelter abroad can be designed without making the Palestinian public a guest in its own historical record.