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

Edinburgh, Scotland – On May 11, 1967, a studious young Palestinian teenager named Raja Shehadeh sat down to compose his first dated diary entry.

“My dearest diary,” began the 15-year-old in English, “today’s expieriences [sic] that I am about to write in one of your wanderfull [sic] pages is sad, very sad, indeed the bees are responsible for making it sad.”

The bees had been banished from all of the neighbouring gardens, the teenager confided, and the only remedy to this sadness was to “make a treaty with [the bees] and let them take all the honey from your garden provided they don’t disturbe [sic] you and of course you will not have the right to kick them out either … I will not be able to stand seeing these poor creatures being kicked out.”

Was this a child’s rallying cry against the dispossession of the Palestinian people?

“Absolutely,” said Shehadeh, now 75, speaking to Al Jazeera from Scotland’s capital.

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”.

“I also realised it was a very confusing period, and that writing about it helped me understand better what was happening,” said Shehadeh, whose maiden diary entry came just weeks before the Six-Day War saw Israel capture from Egypt, Syria and Jordan the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights and the West Bank, respectively, among other territories.