Raja Shehadeh
رجا شحادة
Writer and human rights lawyer
Ramallah-based writer and lawyer, founder of Al-Haq, whose memoirs record the vanishing landscape of the West Bank.
Raja Shehadeh was born in Jaffa in 1951; his family moved to Ramallah, where he has lived ever since, through decades of occupation. Trained as a lawyer, he co-founded Al-Haq — Law in the Service of Man — in 1979, the pioneering Palestinian human rights organisation that documented violations in the occupied territory and became an affiliate of the International Commission of Jurists. Alongside his legal work he built a parallel life as Palestine’s leading prose writer in English.
His books move between memoir, law, and landscape. Palestinian Walks (2007), which won the Orwell Prize for political writing in 2008, records seven walks through the West Bank hills across three decades, as settlements, roads, and barriers steadily erase the terrain he loves. Later works, including Occupation Diaries and We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I — about his father Aziz, a lawyer assassinated in 1985 — extend the same patient, exact witness to Palestinian life.
Selected works
- Strangers in the House (2002)
- Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape (2007)
- Occupation Diaries (2012)
- We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I (2022)
Sources
Further reading
An external biography or archive holding more on this life than the entry above.
Connected in the archive
14 connected records14 records elsewhere in the archive are linked to this one, each by a piece of evidence you can read below.
born in — 1 record
- Jaffaيافا
Evidence — From a recorded field in this archive: birthplace: "Jaffa, Palestine" → Jaffa (Central coast, historic Jaffa District)
named in this record — 2 records
One record names the other. A pointer for reading, not a claim that they belong to each other.
- Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Palestinian Walks (2007), which won the Orwell Prize for political writing in 2008, records seven walks through the West Bank hills across three decades, as settlements, roads, and barriers steadily erase the terrain he loves.
- Ramallahرام الله
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Raja Shehadeh was born in Jaffa in 1951; his family moved to Ramallah, where he has lived ever since, through decades of occupation.
on a related subject — 11 records
Filed near each other — the same Mandate district, or the same uncommon subject tags.
- Al-Haq — Defending Human Rights in Palestine
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Shared tag: "West Bank".
- B'Tselem — The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Shared tag: "West Bank".
- Defense for Children International — Palestine (DCIP)
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Shared tag: "West Bank".
- Human Rights Watch — Israel and Palestine
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Shared tag: "West Bank".
- Ta-Nehisi Coates on Palestine and 'The Message'
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Shared tag: "West Bank".
- The West Bank is not a bystander — trauma among Palestinian undergraduates during the war on Gaza
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Shared tag: "West Bank".
- and 5 more
Cite this page
Every claim above carries its sources — citation is the point.
- Chicago
“Raja Shehadeh.” Figures, FALASTEEN.AI. Accessed 22 August 2026. https://falasteen.ai/figures/raja-shehadeh.- MLA
“Raja Shehadeh.” Figures, FALASTEEN.AI, 2026, https://falasteen.ai/figures/raja-shehadeh. Accessed 22 August 2026.- BibTeX
@misc{falasteen-raja-shehadeh, title = {Raja Shehadeh}, howpublished = {\url{https://falasteen.ai/figures/raja-shehadeh}}, organization = {FALASTEEN.AI — A Living Archive for Palestine}, year = {2026}, note = {Accessed 2026-08-22} }