PALESTINIAN ARCHIVE SAVED

—But Hard Work Begins Now!

An important Palestinian literary, cultural and political archive has been preserved and secured against destruction.

The universities involved hope to eventually start recruiting professional archivists to work on this material. Until then, volunteers in Palestine and the UK, working independently and without backing, must tackle a number of immediate tasks to keep the archive functional and open to the public.

That's why we are seeking funds today.

I am Matthew Teller, a writer in the UK. For the last two years I have been working on this extraordinary project of cultural preservation with a team of British and Palestinian specialists, including my good friend Mahmoud Muna, Jerusalem's finest bookseller.

THE ARCHIVE

The Raja Shehadeh Archive comprises tens of thousands of paper items, as well as voluminous digital records. At its core are the meticulous diaries of our friend, the internationally acclaimed writer Raja Shehadeh.

Starting in May 1967 at the age of 15, Raja – who is now 75 – wrote or typed his personal thoughts, ideas, emotions, reflections and observations in long-form prose, sometimes returning to his diary several times a day to add updates. Around 2001, he shifted from paper to computer, maintaining a phenomenal daily output of original writing that is still continuing.

Today, we estimate that Raja's archive – which is mostly in English – amounts to more than five million words, filling between 50,000 and 100,000 pages. It forms a unique insider account of six decades of Palestinian society, as recorded by one of the world’s best-loved writers, and it has survived intact during years of efforts by successive Israeli governments to undermine and destroy cultural life in Palestine.

The archive also includes papers that belonged to Raja’s father, the international lawyer Aziz Shehadeh (1912–1985), comprising thousands of personal, legal and official documents in Arabic and English spanning decades from the 1930s to the 1980s.

ON A MISSION

For many years, the archive was stored insecurely at a property in Ramallah, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, crammed into filing cabinets in a dusty garage.

With the onset in 2023 of Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, which has included the targeting of libraries, museums and other cultural institutions, alongside attacks by the Israeli army and militarised settlers against Palestinian homes and businesses across the West Bank, it became clear to Raja that preservation of this unique material had become critical.

Raja made the decision to safeguard his archive outside Palestine. For the past two years, specialists from the universities of Edinburgh and Exeter in the UK and Mahmoud Muna's Educational Bookshop in Jerusalem have been working quietly with Matthew Teller to preserve Raja's entire archive.

Mahmoud and colleagues in Palestine digitised every page of the diaries, uploaded files to secure servers in the UK, and then physically transported tens of thousands of pages out of the country – pausing when violence escalated, restarting when they could.

ARCHIVE SECURED

Today in 2026, following these coordinated international efforts, the Raja Shehadeh Archive is safe. Raja’s papers are now held at Edinburgh University. His digital archive is now preserved as part of the Digital Archive of the Middle East (DAME), based at Exeter University.

Under the terms of this gift, Raja and his heirs retain copyright and full control of intellectual property rights. His archive, covering almost a century of Palestinian history and society, is being managed in the UK, but it continues to form part of the inalienable cultural heritage of Palestine. Specially coordinated access for Palestinian researchers is guaranteed.

WHAT WE ARE ASKING

We are now seeking funds to complete the work in Palestine, and begin the process of cataloguing the archive.

Cataloguing is essential. Adding search terms and metadata to archival records makes access possible. Otherwise, scholars and readers simply cannot navigate tens of thousands of pages. Raja's insights would stay hidden within the archive, perhaps discovered by chance, perhaps not.

But cataloguing is incredibly demanding. It requires examining every piece of paper, reading every word, and adding records of dates, locations, subject matter, individuals, and other keywords to every item, both paper and digital, manually, one by one.

What we seek is grassroots funding for individuals who are working unsupported by universities or institutions.

Donations – which will be received by Matthew Teller in the UK – will fund our project partners in Palestine to finish work that has supported the digitisation process up to now, and to start work directly with Raja on the process of cataloguing, via a review and approval workflow that clears archival papers for public release.

WHO IS RAJA?

Raja Shehadeh is Palestine’s leading writer. He is an author, lawyer and public intellectual who co-founded the pioneering Palestinian human rights organisation Al-Haq in 1979, and has written more than twenty books evoking aspects of daily life in Palestine as well as his own family history. He won the UK’s Orwell Prize in 2008, and was a US National Book Award finalist in 2023. He is a regular contributor to the Guardian, the New Yorker, the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, Granta and other global media, and is a Royal Society of Literature International Writer. He lives in Palestine.

WHAT IS THE BOOKSHOP?

The Educational Bookshop is Jerusalem’s leading outlet for internationally published books in Arabic and English. It was founded more than four decades ago, and is still jointly run by the second and third generations of the same family today. Despite experiencing repeated intimidation and harassment by Israeli authorities, including police raids and arrests of family members in 2025, the Educational Bookshop has continued its work, with a popular programme of book launches, author talks, screenings and other cultural activities at its multiple branches. It has become an important social and cultural hub that operates across community lines to defend and promote Palestinian culture in Jerusalem and beyond.