Raja Shehadeh

Raja Shehadeh (Arabic: رجا شحادة, born 6 July 1951) is a Palestinian lawyer, human rights activist and writer. His grandfather, Saleem, was a judge in the courts of Mandate Palestine. His great-great-uncle, the journalist Najib Nassar, founded the Haifa-based newspaper Al-Karmil in the last years of the Ottoman Empire, before World War I. His father, Aziz, was one of the first Palestinians to publicly support a two-state solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

His family fled from Jaffa to Ramallah in 1948. In 1951, Shehadeh was born in Ramallah, West Bank, where he also grew up.

Legal and literary career In 1979, Shehadeh co-founded the human rights organization Al-Haq, Al-Haq was one of the first human rights organizations in the Arab world. It was a co-recipient of the Carter-Menil Human Rights Prize in 1989, and it received the Geuzenpenning in 2009.

During the early 1990s, Shehadeh served as one of three legal advisers to the Palestinian Steering Committee, which guided the official delegation in the U.S.-led peace talks following the Madrid Conference of 1991. Shehadeh played a key role in shaping the delegation’s legal approach. However, the Israeli team barred Shehadeh from directly participating in the negotiations, citing his status as an East Jerusalem resident. Faced with this exclusion and a growing sense that legal arguments were being sidelined by both the Israelis and the Americans, Shehadeh ultimately resigned. He later explained that he saw "no role for a legal adviser, or indeed legal strategies".

In addition to his legal work, Shehadeh has written a number of books about Palestine through the lens of his life. He tells the story of his early life and his relationship with his father in Strangers in the House, a memoir described by The Economist as "distinctive and truly impressive". In 2008, he won the Orwell Prize, Britain's pre-eminent award for political writing, for his book Palestinian Walks. In July 2018, his biography Where the Line is Drawn: Crossing Boundaries in Occupied Palestine was chosen for BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week and narrated by actor Peter Polycarpou.

In 2016, Shehadeh took part in a project, initiated by the organization Breaking the Silence, to write an article for a book on the Israeli occupation to mark the 50th anniversary of the Six-Day War. The book was edited by Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman and published under the title Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation in June 2017.

London Review of Books editor Adam Shatz cited Shehadeh as one of two people who have provided a formative influence of his understanding of the Middle East conflict, writing that "Anguished and somewhat fragile, he is a man who, in spite of his understandable bitterness, has continued to dream of a future beyond the occupation, a kind of neo-Ottoman federation where Arabs and Jews would live as equals."

In 2022, he was elected a Royal Society of Literature International Writer. He was a finalist for the 2023 National Book Award for Nonfiction for We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I. The book was also a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.