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

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/apr/04/raja-shehadeh-international-law-must-prevail

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‘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.”

It feels safe. It is, for the moment – standing solid in a part of the Occupied Territories controlled by the Palestinian Authority. But you could forgive Shehadeh for entertaining a sliver of doubt, even within his four walls. A sense of insecurity has dogged him throughout his life. “I was born at the worst time possible,” he tells me. It was 1951, three years after the family’s exile from their hometown. “My father had lost everything. It was materially very difficult. And he took on the case of the murder of King Abdullah.” Aziz Shehadeh, a prominent lawyer, defended a Palestinian accused of assassinating the Jordanian leader as he prepared to meet Israeli officials in Jerusalem. “He was exiled, he was imprisoned, these were tense times. All this affected me.”

Raja grew up a sickly child, debilitated by lactose intolerance, the effects of which his family innocently treated with nourishing doses of milk and creamy dishes. He fell prey to a series of infections, including diphtheria, and played, when he was well, alone. Though he wasn’t “sportish”, he liked being outside, and seems to have had a Gerald Durrell-like appreciation for things that crawled and crept. “I would follow the ants on the floor and look at things. I loved butterflies. All summer long, I would be out in the fields and the hills. If I went a little way I would consider it a big adventure.”

When he got tired, or became ill, the doors to adventure were not completely closed: there were poems and books. He writes in English, and grew up speaking and reading it, but I wonder about his relationship with Arabic, the language that surrounds him when he ventures outside his courtyard. “There’s nothing wrong with Arabic, it lends itself to beautiful writing,” he says. But early on he was taught to associate English with creativity and experimentation. “In Arabic there is wonderful, very complex poetry and we studied it to admire it, you know, to be awed by it. And we were so awed by it that I was sure that one is either born a poet or not, and there is no in-between. And so when our teacher of English said, “Ok, today I want you to all write a poem”, I was shocked, I thought: but we were not born poets, how can we do that? And he encouraged us, and I found that I could write a poem, and I started writing many poems, in English!”

When he became a man, this bookish child followed his father into the law. Words became his mode of action. In particular, he was determined to record and challenge Israeli military orders and expropriations of land. In 1979 he helped found Al-Haq, one of the first human rights pressure groups in the Arab world. A tumultuous period followed. His relationship with his father, later the subject of a memoir, Strangers in the House, had become troubled and complex. Any hope of resolving it was shattered by Aziz’s murder in 1985. The perpetrator was a Palestinian against whose family he had brought a property case, but the Israeli authorities suggested the killing was politically motivated. It was years before the truth emerged. In the midst of all that came the first intifada, and Al-Haq’s activities ratcheted up, expanding to cover the Gaza strip. After an exhausting and intense period of activism, Shehadeh’s legal career culminated in a disastrous engagement with the Oslo process, during which the Palestinian leadership decided to ignore his work on military orders. Disillusionment and anger followed.

But despite these experiences, he is still proud to call himself a lawyer, and maintains that law is an effective means of self-defence. His latest book, Language of War, Language of Peace, can be seen as part of a lifelong mission to reveal the legal narrative that delimits Palestinian lives. From the outside it is easy to be sceptical. After all, since the foundation of Al-Haq, the situation on the ground has hardly improved. Other forms of resistance may be unconscionable, but attempts to seek redress through the courts can sometimes give the impression of an aircraft in a holding pattern, plaintiffs expending fuel without moving forward. This week Palestine joined the International Criminal Court, though Israel is unlikely to cooperate with any ICC investigations. Shehadeh, for his part, believes that membership will deter human rights abuses. His faith in legal processes is partly a question of temperament. “I always felt that the worst thing that could happen is confusion. I fear confusion and mysteries. Even if I’m not going to prevail, I want to be clear where I stand.” This fastidiousness is married to an optimism which seems, in the circumstances, almost utopian: “I continue to be a believer in the rule of law and in international law. I think that one of the great victories of humankind was the creation of a law that prevails even during war. Now, it doesn’t always prevail, it’s violated, but it’s important to keep trying.”

Related: Ian Black reviews the memoirs of Palestinian lawyer and writer Rajah Shehadeh

In another world, Shehadeh would have been a jobbing commercial lawyer and a nature writer on the side. And that is almost what he has become. His joy in the countryside, in the terraces of olive trees, the plants and animals, is obvious. But like his house, his writing has been shaped by the extraordinary place in which he lives. Palestinian Walks, which won the Orwell prize in 2008, is an unsettling hybrid: part gentle travelogue, part forensic documentation of the indignities suffered by Palestinians as they go about their daily lives. There is the sense of a poet who would like simply to contemplate the flowers if only he were allowed to – but what should be idyllic is constantly interrupted by the mess human beings have made. Illegal blocks of flats sprout on the hillsides, ruining views; religious rows break out between groups of picnickers; the army is called in by suspicious settlers to scrutinise photos of bees and blossoms taken by a hiking companion. The shrinking freedom to simply walk, in the face of harassment and threats to personal safety, is grasped somewhat desperately. But Shehadeh knows that if it is not exercised, even this modest right could disappear.

And he’ll be damned if this pleasure, unthinkingly enjoyed elsewhere in the world, is to be denied him simply because he is Palestinian. Though his usual demeanour is that of the softly spoken intellectual, a natural successor to that vulnerable, introverted child, there are flashes of searing anger, justified by the fate of his family, his friends and compatriots. Not only the seismic shocks, such as the exile from Jaffa or the murder of his father. He relates with fresh indignation how soldiers were billeted with his younger brother during the military incursion in Ramallah in 2002. The family was confined to a single room, denied permission even to use their own toilet.

Shehadeh and his American wife, Penny, who came to spend a year at Birzeit University in the 1980s and ended up staying, don’t have children. “I would have worried too much and I would not have been able to allow the child to be, which is what you need to do.” Although he believes children are resilient, he fears the impact of house searches and checkpoints on young minds. In Language of War, Language of Peace, he quotes Gazan psychiatrist Eyad el-Sarraj: “During the first intifada, studies showed that 55% of the children had witnessed their fathers being humiliated or beaten by Israeli soldiers. The psychological impact of this is stunning. Children who have seen so much inhumanity … inevitably come out with inhuman responses.”

Listening to Shehadeh, and reading his diary entries and memoirs, I am reminded of the fact that every geopolitical story is also the story of families, and individuals. Each mention of an armistice or occupation hides within it the tortured histories of this or that grandmother, niece, nephew, brother or sister. It is also the story of how personhood is forged, how internal and external worlds collide to influence the course of a life. For Shehadeh, the occupation he lives under has proved a sort of double bind. He is tortured by anger at the constant setbacks, but forced by his own capacity for hope to keep faith that progress can be made. I ask whether he has ever considered decisively changing his own story: emigrating, like the friends in Palestinian Walks who moved to Australia and “found that they no longer bothered even to read the newspapers to learn what was happening here”.

Yes, he tells me, there have been a couple of times. During the first intifada, “I began to get so angry and was beginning to worry about getting out of control”. And again, after Oslo, with everything that he had worked for apparently in tatters. “But then I realised very soon that it is not an option. If I leave, my thoughts are about what’s going on there. You can’t really leave.” He laughs and pauses. “It’s also not all heroic. Because it’s a very nice place to live, despite everything.”

Shehadeh has made his accommodation with the facts. He looks out at the beleaguered world around him, but returns to his inner sanctum to draw strength. And as I type this, he sends me an email. “It is a glorious spring this year in Palestine and my garden is doing especially well.”

• Language of War, Language of Peace is published by Profile.