Listening to Raja Shehadeh
Born three years after his family fled Jaffa, Raja Shehadeh built a life on staying put. He talks about steadfastness as resistance, October 7 as catastrophe, and why he no longer believes Israelis and Palestinians can share one state.
Rev. J. Mark Davidson
7/16/20263 min read
Raja Shehadeh is a Palestinian attorney, author, and activist. He was born in 1951 in Ramallah, three years after his family fled Jaffa in the Nakba. He studied law in London in the mid-1970s and returned to Ramallah to practice law. He discovered that Israeli authorities had established a system of laws that consolidated the occupation, ensured Israeli domination over Palestinians, and enabled settlers to steal Palestinian land. In 1979, he co-founded Al Haq, a highly regarded, independent Palestinian human rights organization. He is the author of more than twenty books. He was interviewed in The Sun in its July 2026 issue: “To Remain: Raja Shehadeh on Living Through Destruction in Palestine.” Here are several of his most salient comments:
With Israel’s genocidal destruction of Gaza, and an accelerating ethnic cleansing campaign in the West Bank, relations between Israeli Jews and Palestinians have never been more severely strained. But Shehadeh grew up remembering a time when they were not this way. His father had “very good relationships” with his Israeli Jewish friends and colleagues before the Nakba. There was a shared enthusiasm about peaceful co-existence. But Shehadeh soon concluded that Israel was never interested in peace: “They were not preparing for peace…If Israel were interested in peace, it would have taught its children that Arabs and Jews used to live together peacefully, and that if it was possible in the past, it is possible now.” Instead, as is well-documented, decades of systematic oppression have created a situation where “we are already living in Greater Israel, from the river to the sea, with just a few pockets of Palestinian habitation left.” Fascism in Israel has set the stage to finally “take over the West Bank and make life so difficult for Palestinians that we are forced to leave. There are constant settler attacks on Palestinian villages. Settlers come to burn and kill, and the army comes with them, not to protect villagers from the attacks, but to protect and help the settlers.” California congressman Ro Khanna was personally subjected to harassment from American-armed, arrogant settlers and Israeli soldiers on a recent trip to the West Bank. His indignation and pointed comments have given many previously indifferent Americans a small glimpse into the systematic oppression Palestinians have been subjected to for decades. The trip to the West Bank seems also to have pushed the congressman, among the most progressive voices on Palestine in Congress, to do more to stop US military aid to Israel and to overhaul the US-Israeli relationship.
Raja Shehadeh also spoke eloquently about sumud, “steadfastness” in Arabic. He describes it as “not giving up on our right to this land and making sure that, instead of packing up and leaving, we stay put, even when the circumstances are difficult…The land is a part of my identity. It’s not that I can’t love any other place, but this place has a special meaning to me, and that meaning is being threatened in a violent way.” Shehadeh sees sumud as resistance: “Despite the incredible difficulty of just moving around with all the checkpoints and roadblocks, people travel from Nablus to work in Ramallah every day. The trip takes them hours, yet they still work, still go to school and university. It’s bad, but people have not given up…Living here, in itself, has a meaning, a purpose, an objective, it’s heroic in its own way.” For Shehadeh, sumud is a creative “third way” between “mute submission and blind hate.” It means practicing the power of staying put, literally holding their ground, and refusing to be moved.
Raja Shehadeh also offered his reflections on October 7, and two-states vs. one democratic state. In the early days after the Hamas attack, Shehadeh hoped that Israelis would “realize that walls and barbed wire gates could not protect them, and they would perhaps seek another, more peaceful, way.” He conceded that was totally naïve and unrealistic, but he “didn’t think for a minute that the Gaza war would turn into what it eventually became. It was much worse than I expected. I started to doubt that we can live together after the genocide in Gaza.” His assessment of the Hamas attack is that “it brought disaster on the Palestinian people.” On the question of two states or one democratic state, he had some interesting things to say.
I don’t believe we can be under one umbrella with Israel at this time. Israelis have had much more experience running a state than Palestinians. We would be completely overwhelmed. And Israel has its own problems with the ultra-Orthodox Jews and with settlers and extremists. We wouldn’t be able to deal with that. I think it would be better to have two states, or at least start with self-determination for Palestinians and an end to the occupation. Then we could slowly build a new relationship between the Palestinian and Israeli peoples….We need self-determination for Palestinians as well as for Israeli Jews, and we need a new, peaceful relationship between the two groups.
Agree or disagree, this interview with Raja Shehadeh, an important Palestinian voice, one among many, reminds us again of the profound value of listening and the wide range of issues and concerns that must be woven into the tapestry of a just and lasting peace.