Raja Shehadeh: “Israel is trying to make another Nakba”

The author and human rights activist on losing Palestine.

Photo by Suzie Howell For the New Statesman

For the first time in more than nine months, Raja Shehadeh was a long way from home. When I sat down with the 73-year-old Palestinian author and human rights lawyer in the lounge of a west London hotel, he told me his trip to the UK marked the first time he had strayed more than a couple dozen kilometres from his home in Ramallah in the West Bank since Hamas’s attack on Israel on 7 October.

“I had the ceremony in the US for the National Book Award [last November]; I was a finalist, and I couldn’t travel” due to the lack of flights out of the region, he told me. “Also, when something like this happens you don’t want to leave. It’s too intense and you want to be close by.” He lowered his voice. “And if you leave when you don’t need to leave, you will take it with you.”

Shehadeh is a slight, gentle presence; his voice is so soft that I nervously nudged my recording device closer to him several times during our conversation. Dressed in a thick jumper despite the heat, he was clearly worn out after a day of giving interviews when we sat down for tea late in the afternoon.

Shehadeh’s trip to London marks the publication of his book, What Does Israel Fear from Palestine?. The slim, powerful work is divided into two parts. The first recounts the formation of the state of Israel in 1948 – an event that led to the Nakba, or “the catastrophe” to Palestinians, when up to half of the Arab population were driven out of their homes – and the history of the Israel-Palestinian conflict until last year. The second half covers the siege of Gaza after 7 October and escalating violence in the West Bank, both of which stunned Shehadeh in their ferocity. He writes that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, boasted at the outset of the war that he would “turn Gaza into a deserted island”. Initially, Shehadeh writes, he “reasoned that political leaders usually speak with such bravado”. Yet, “as the war progressed I could see that they meant every word”.

The book details the devastating consequences of the siege. There is the staggering loss of life: writing earlier this year, citing figures from the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry, Shehadeh states that the Israeli army has killed 30,000 Palestinians since 7 October. A recent Lancet study suggested that, directly or indirectly, “up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza”. Then there is also the destruction of Palestinian cultural, education and heritage sites. Shehadeh presents the argument, made by others, that such destruction is an attempt to divorce Palestinians from their cultural memory and, therefore, their connection to the land.

Shehadeh, who is keenly aware of the “immense suffering” of the Israeli hostages and their families, surely knew that a book titled What Does Israel Fear from Palestine?, published in the wake of 7 October, could stoke controversy. Yet, he told me, “the reception of this book has been very good. It’s [being published in] eight countries and seven languages – Germany even has bought the rights,” he said, raising his eyebrows in acknowledgement of the country’s pro-Israel stance. For Shehadeh, any potential controversy was worth it, if it meant that he could write at length about the Nakba, and what it cost Palestinians.

By the time Shehadeh was born in 1951, his family had already fled from the city of Jaffa during the Nakba and settled in Ramallah. He comes from a distinguished Christian Palestinian family: his grandfather Saleem was a judge during the British Mandate for Palestine; his father Aziz, a lawyer who ran his own firm, was one of the first Palestinians to publicly advocate for a two-state solution. In 1985, Aziz was murdered: his throat was slit outside his house after he arrived home from work one evening; the culprit was never found. (Shehadeh’s relationship with his father was the subject of his 2022 memoir We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I.)

Shehadeh moved to Lebanon to study at the American University in Beirut and then to London to study law, before returning to Ramallah to work as a lawyer. In 1979 he co-founded the human rights group Al-Haq, which documents human rights violations in the occupied West Bank, and in 1982 he published his first book, The Third Way: A Journal of Life in the West Bank. (He writes in English, having grown up devouring the work of EM Forster and DH Lawrence.)

In 2008 he won the Orwell Prize, a prestigious award for political writing, for his book Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing, an account of six walks he took around the West Bank over 26 years. They become increasingly dangerous as time passes, and the number of Israeli settlements in the West Bank grows dramatically.

Shehadeh told me that he still loves to walk, but moving around the West Bank as a Palestinian has become increasingly difficult since October, as the Israeli military has tightened its control over the occupied territory. “I haven’t been to Nablus and Bethlehem for months,” he said. It’s not just the proliferation of security checkpoints and roadblocks that have stopped Palestinians travelling freely; the rise in violence from Israeli settlers in the West Bank has also meant many Palestinians feel less safe there.

“They want to take over the parts of the West Bank that were given to the Palestinians,” said Shehadeh. “The Israeli government is trying to make another Nakba for the Palestinians. They want to drive the Palestinians out. But you see, the problem with Palestinians is there’s no place for the Palestinians to go – and that is why it’s not going to work.”

He mourns what has been lost, over the years and in the past nine months. “The land [and] the hills around were places of great memories for me and very important for me. And now they’re being settled [by Israelis] who are changing the nature of the land. And young Palestinians will never know their land.”

Shehadeh told me global protests supporting an end to the war in Gaza – as well as a free Palestine – have ignited his sense of hope. “I feel very heartened by the fact that there are not only protests, but also a willingness to listen.” But he remains cautious. “I remember the First Intifada [in the late 1980s], when [there were also] a lot of protests, and then they died out. But I’m told by people who are closer to the action [that these protests] are much more established and much more pervasive, and I shouldn’t worry.”

In June the UK asset firm Baillie Gifford cancelled all of its literary sponsorships following protests against its investments in the fossil-fuel industry and in companies linked to Israel. Shehadeh – who, along with his wife, the American writer and editor Penny Johnson, is a regular at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, which was, until recently, sponsored by Baillie Gifford – told me he thought the backlash was misguided. “Sometimes you can go too far in protest and [when it’s a] minor player…” he said. “It has limited the possibilities of many festivals, which were doing very good things and that’s a pity.”

With Netanyahu and his hard-right government intent on continuing the war, and given the political disarray among Palestinian parties, Shehadeh knows peace is unlikely to be achieved without “the full force” of external pressure. Though the international community has let him down before, he clings to the possibility of peace. As he writes in What Does Israel Fear from Palestine?, “Looking back at the history of the region, it is only after great upheavals that hopeful consequences follow.”

“What if this war should end,” he wonders, “not by a ceasefire or a truce, but with a comprehensive resolution to the century-old conflict between the Palestinian and Israeli people?”