Publishing Company Blog | Raja Shehadeh: ‘International law is being violated

Raja Shehadeh: ‘International law is being violated – but you have to try to make it prevail’

Written By Unknown on Saturday, April 4, 2015 | 4:13 AM

The Palestinian author and lawyer on hope, human rights and gardening in the Occupied Territories

^‘Am I giving you a good picture?” asks Raja Shehadeh from across the table. We are sitting in a bare room in his publisher’s offices, in chilly north London. The author and activist has just arrived and is preparing for a week of speaking engagements, but he has been telling me about his garden in Ramallah. “Well, there are several gardens,” he laughs. The one-storey house which he built with his wife is arranged around a courtyard. “It has a glorious lemon tree in the middle, and then it has beds which I keep always with blooming things and so on, and then a few pots. In front of the house there is a bougainvillea, and there is a garden overlooking our living room which has easy things – roses and plumbago. And I also plant vegetables, I plant potatoes, peas and broad beans and spring onions.” His face creases with delight as he tells me all this in his delicate Arabic accent, getting carried away and, indeed, giving a good picture.

It is one that stands in contrast to the usual idea of daily life in the West Bank. But it would be a mistake to imagine that politics doesn’t cast a shadow over this garden, like everything else. Shehadeh, whose family were forced to abandon their home in Jaffa in 1948, and who has spent much of his life railing against the fragmentation and defilement of Palestinian land, explains: “Nobody can deprive us of the inner courtyard, it’s ours. Nothing can be done to spoil it. We see the sky and we see the moon. We have part of the sky and a little bit of land, and that’s our world.”