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'The Interview': Raja Shehadeh Believes Israelis and Palestinians Can Still Find Peace
20 Dec 2025
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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From The New York Times, this is The Interview. I'm David Marchese. The writer, lawyer, and human rights activist Raja Shahadeh, who's 74, has spent most of his life living in Ramallah, a city in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Since he was a much younger man, he's been writing about what it's been like for him and other Palestinians to live under Israeli occupation.
That work, which is defined by precise description and powerfully measured emotion, has won him widespread acclaim. His 2007 book, Palestinian Walks, Forays into a Vanishing Landscape, won Britain's Orwell Prize for political writing. And here in the United States, his book, We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I, was a finalist for the 2023 National Book Award.
He's also a co-founder of Al-Haq, a human rights organization that has documented abuses against Palestinians in the occupied territories for over 45 years. To read Shahadeh's work, including over the years several pieces for the New York Times opinion section, is to be exposed to a thinker with a long and stubbornly optimistic view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
One who believes that peace remains possible. He also believes that for peace to have any chance of prevailing, there's so much from the dominant stories told about the region to how we talk about the conflict in the first place that needs to be reconsidered.
But at the end of another brutal year of strife and suffering, with a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas holding but a plan for what's next still unclear, I thought it might be helpful to speak with a writer who has a real sense of the ways in which the past need not predict the future, and the ways in which it should. Here's my interview with Raja Shahadeh.
Mr. Shahadeh, thank you for taking the time to speak with me today. Please call me Raja. Raja, thank you. I appreciate it. Just to start, your mother and your father, who's a lawyer, were from Jaffa, which is now part of Tel Aviv, Jaffa area. But when they lived in Jaffa, it was part of the British mandate, Palestine. Can you tell me about how your family ended up in Ramallah in the West Bank?
In 48, in April, the Hergun, the terrorist organization, started bombing Jaffa. They bombed the center of Jaffa, and it was getting dangerous, but they decided to stay. And then Jewish terrorists started bombing the Manshi, which is a suburb of Jaffa.
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Chapter 2: Who is Raja Shehadeh and what is his background?
And so I learned to look at the horizons also and think that I'm looking at Jaffa. Although I had never been to Jaffa, of course, because I was born after the Nakba, after 1948. And so I had a sense of Ramallah was not the real home. It was just a temporary home. And it was an exile's consciousness. The expectation was always that we will be returning.
You use the term an exile's consciousness. How would you characterize that?
I would characterize it by the feeling that where you are is not home. Where you are is temporary. And the real home is somewhere else, where you came from. You don't feel you belong to the place that you are in.
You know, it's striking to me in reading your works that you often express anger over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But at the same time, I never get a sense from your work that anger consumes you, that the anger has curdled into a hate or is the prism through which you view the situation in Israel and the occupied territories. So what is your relationship with anger?
How have you not let it define you?
Yeah.
I think anger is a very negative thing, and I've been always careful not to resort to anger. And I feel that always there's hope and there's a possibility out, and anger is a dead end. Anger imprisons you. And I didn't want ever to be angry to the point of being immobilized. And I think I take this after my father. My father was always active, always trying to find a solution, a way out.
And I think I have the same attitude. I always try to find a way out and try always to look at the other side, the others, and try to put myself in their place and how would I feel if I were in their place and try to understand them. And so I see them as fellow human beings rather than as an object.
I think it's fair to say that justice or the pursuit of justice is one of the great themes of your work. And given that, particularly now, when politics that are based in raw power are so ascendant, what is the role of a justice-driven writer?
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Chapter 3: What does Raja Shehadeh mean by 'exile's consciousness'?
In, I think, November 2023, you wrote a piece for the New York Review of Books in which you described having two plumbers come to your home in Ramallah. This was one older plumber and one younger plumber. And you wrote about seeing the younger man looking at videos of October 7th on his phone and smiling about what Hamas was posting that day, which I think the idea of...
someone feeling pleasure about that day is horrifying to a lot of people. And so how did you understand expressions of happiness about what happened on October 7th?
Well, it was immediately after it happened, and so we didn't have much information except what was being streamed live of the breaking the barrier. And the idea that the people of Gaza who had been imprisoned for 15 years were able to break the barrier was something that brought great happiness to this young man.
And I understood his happiness because it was something like the breaking out of a jail, And so at that point, we did not know all the details of what was happening and some of the horrors that were happening. And so I understood his happiness because of the bravery and the fact that it was possible to break through the barrier.
But later on, when I realized what was happening and what had happened and some of the crimes that were committed, it was a different feeling that I had, of course.
Bravery is a word that you used in a way that was interesting to me in your book called Language of War, Language of Peace, written in the aftermath of the 2014 Gaza War. And you— referred in that book to the bravery of the Hamas fighters who were standing up to the mighty Israeli army.
How do you reconcile the bravery that you saw, and I think bravery is widely understood to be a positive attribute, with the fact of Hamas's violent religious extremism and total lack of regard for human rights, even in Gaza?
I think the fact that Hamas was making attempts at fighting back the Israelis is a legitimate thing, because the international law allows the occupied people to fight and struggle against the occupation. And they were struggling against a power that is much, much stronger than they are. And yet Hamas, of course, also
is not very responsive to human rights at times, and that I think is something to be condemned. So the attempt at taking a stand against Israel is legitimate, but the excesses that go on with that are not acceptable to me. And so, for example, in October 7, I thought that they were right to try and break through the barrier, and they were not right to commit atrocities against the civilians.
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Chapter 4: How does Raja Shehadeh view anger in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?
And we're out here talking to people about games. You play New York Times games? Yes, every day. Do you have a favorite? Connections. It just makes you think. I feel like it gives me elasticity. Create four groups of four. This is actually a pretty cool game. What's your favorite game? The crossword. The crossword? I do it with my brother.
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Raja, how are you today? I'm very well. I'm glad to see you again. So, you know, something that I was thinking about coming out of our first conversation was the way you use words like apartheid or genocide. These are highly contested terms, and sometimes I wonder if the impulse to debate those terms can risk turning arguments about the conflict into arguments about semantics. So I
I wonder for you, are there any downsides to using terms like genocide and apartheid, or maybe the contentiousness is why you feel you need to use them?
You know, I've been following the Israeli development of the apartheid regime in the West Bank since 1979. and documenting the changes that led to it. And so I'm very familiar with how it came about. And I didn't use the term apartheid because I didn't want to alienate the readers and do exactly what you're saying, focus on the term rather than on the facts.
But now that it has become very clear that the situation is one of apartheid, I think it's very important to use the term. And likewise with genocide. I didn't use genocide until I became very clear that the definition of genocide exactly fits the case in Gaza. And then I thought it's important to use the term because it has consequences, legal consequences, which I would like to see take place.
What are some of those legal consequences? Well, it's a crime. And those who perpetrated the crime should be punished. And that's very important because otherwise they will repeat the same actions. And in a way, because nothing has happened to Israelis who advocated genocide in Gaza, they're repeating similar tactics in the West Bank every day. And so it goes on and on and on.
And the only way to stop it is by taking legal action against them. And it hasn't happened yet.
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Chapter 5: What role does justice play in Raja Shehadeh's writing?
And when people have no protection against Israeli brutality by the army or the settlers, then they say, what's the use of being nonviolent when violence is committed against us? then the answer is the only way to do is to fight like Hamas. And that's what young people come to conclude. What would then disempower Hamas?
I think if there is peace and if there is an attempt at negotiating with Hamas so that it changes its policies and positions, then there is a possibility for change. But Israel is bent on destroying Hamas through force and not through negotiations and through peaceful means. And that is not going to work at all. It will perpetuate more and more violence.
Do you think Hamas could accept negotiations that don't involve the dissolution of the state of Israel?
I can't speak for Hamas, but I know that in 2017, they proposed something which went along these lines of accepting the state of Israel, and Israel did not respond at all. It said this is public relations. It didn't take it seriously.
And you mentioned the sanctions against Al-Haq, the human rights organization you co-founded. And I want to ask a question about that.
So when the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, released a statement announcing the sanctions, the justification he gave was that Al-Haq has directly engaged in efforts by the International Criminal Court to investigate, arrest, detain, or prosecute Israeli nationals without Israel's consent. Is that correct?
Yeah.
Well, the Haqq has been involved in helping the investigation by the ICC, by the International Criminal Court of Israeli crimes. And that is something that we have been hoping for all along, that it will come to a point when we can take the case to the highest court in the world. And so we gladly supported the investigation.
And to be sanctioned because of our attempts at going into a court of law is very strange and very problematic for a country like the United States, which proposes to be a country for the rule of law and for human rights.
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