Raja Shehadeh

Presenter0:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Discs from BBC Radio 4. For rights reasons the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

Presenter0:10

For more information about the programme, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.

Presenter0:35

My castaway this week is the Palestinian author and human rights activist Rajah Shahada. Born in Romalla in the West Bank, his life and writing has been dominated by displacement, struggle, and a search for justice, not least in his quest to uncover who murdered his father. Aside from chronicling the unhappy history of his family and his homeland, he also co founded the Palestinian human rights organization Al Haq.

Presenter0:58

Which monitors and documents violations by all sides in the Middle East conflict, publishing reports and detailed legal analysis on its findings.

Presenter1:07

Amid the heavy weight of his work, he somehow has found time to nurture a glorious garden growing grapevines and pomegranates.

Presenter1:15

He says of his work

Presenter1:16

When you write your thoughts and feelings and emotions, then

Presenter1:20

You can move on to new ones. Otherwise, they will keep rotating in your mind and you will go in circles. So tell me, Raja Shahada.

Presenter1:28

As you have chronicled so much of the life of the people around you, through your writing have you managed to find a degree of clarity about what you think should be happening?

Raja Shehadeh1:39

It's a constant challenge, but it's an important challenge to meet because if you're going to live a happy life and a fruitful life, you have to find what gives you comfort and how to manage understanding what is happening and saving yourself from getting too angry. And the lighting I think has helped a lot, but also my garden. There's a front garden which I now have mainly roses because they don't take too much care and shrubs. And then I have herbs. And they're lovely because especially at this time, every morning and every lunch time we make salads and eat fresh herbs and it's great.

Presenter2:16

You have chosen to stay living in Ramallah. You've written a lot, very successfully, about the changing landscape around you. What does it look like now?

Raja Shehadeh2:27

The way it looks is is is rather sad because many of the lovely hills have been destroyed by settlements and also expansion of Ramallah into the hills, but mainly the settlements which are literally on every hilltop. And it has caused me a lot of pain to see this change. But I don't want to sound heroic for living in Ramallah and under occupation, because I think it's sometimes more difficult to live outside an area of conflict and worry about those who you care about, who are still there. It's much easier to be living in this place of conflict most of the time. Of course, Syria perhaps is an exception these days. And I think the mistake that most people make is that they feel that the sum total of the high points which are reported, and only the high points of a conflict are reported, make up the life. And that's not true, because even under great conflict, even during wars, ordinary life goes on, people get married, people have children. So normal things do happen.

Presenter2:41

Yeah.

Presenter3:29

So, Raja Shahada, let's turn to the music then. We'll go to the first one. Tell me about this. Why have you chosen this and what is it?

Raja Shehadeh3:36

I've chosen Feyruziran. We and the Moon are neighbors. We used to, as a family, go with other families to the Dead Sea.

Raja Shehadeh3:46

Especially during times when it was full moon, it was a very poetic time and a very happy time. This was before the occupation of 467. The Dead Sea was not a border as it is now between Israel and the West Bank and and Jordan. And the Feyrouz song reminds me of those happy times when we used to spend the evening under the full moon.

Speaker 34:15

Baytu Khalfit Laala.

Speaker 34:19

Get lime nebula.

Speaker 44:22

Uh

Speaker 34:22

Yism Allah Nahnawil Amar Jira Arifirmaidma Qutarikibar Midma Ajmanil Allah.

Presenter4:41

That was Feyrouz and Nehna Well Anar Giran.

Presenter4:44

So tell me, Raja Shahada, a little bit about the importance and the meaning of land. And I'm talking here not just about negotiations over pieces of land and incursions and so on. I'm talking about the land around you, the land that you walk in. You've written a lot about walking at where you live. And walking for you seems to play a particular importance in rooting you.

Raja Shehadeh5:04

Well, first of all, the land in Palestine in general is a very attractive land, not in a dramatic way. It it doesn't have the kind of beauty that uh the Swiss Alps, for example, have. We have in a sense one of everything, one real mountain, which is in in Syria actually, one major river and one lake, Lake Tiberias. Uh I'm talking of historic Palestine. And for many, many years I've taken walks on these hills. For me, writing and walking are very connected. I find walking very conducive to thinking. But more recently, because of the colonization essentially of these hills by the settlers who claim a greater love for the land and are in the process destroying it by cutting through the hills with roads, putting settlements where the land should not be disturbed really.

Presenter5:57

But but you yourself wrote about an encounter with an Israeli that you met while you were walking in the West Bank, and you said in that writing that you were surprised that he loved the land apparently as genuinely as you do.

Raja Shehadeh6:09

Yeah, I think we should not fight on who loves the land more. It's just that that competition over the land is harmful to both our interests. Yeah.

Presenter6:18

You walk alone?

Raja Shehadeh6:19

Yeah.

Raja Shehadeh6:21

No, I used to walk with one or two friends and a lot with my wife, but more recently it's become better to walk in larger groups because of the possible unfortunate encounters that you can have.

Presenter6:33

Right, these are m military encounters.

Raja Shehadeh6:35

Military encounters, yeah.

Presenter6:36

And and what happens? Do you decide to give up and go home, or do you think we keep walking?

Raja Shehadeh6:41

Mm-hmm.

Raja Shehadeh6:42

It's the poetry of the thing. At one point I actually was with a BBC interviewer after my book, The Pelson Walks, was published. And we started early in the morning and had a very, very nice walk. And then we got to a village and somebody accosted us and said, What are you doing here? Where are you from? At first I started answering him, but then I thought, Who is he to interrogate me? So I told him, Where are you from? And he said pointedly, Unlike you, I am really from here.

Raja Shehadeh7:14

In other words, you don't belong here, but I belong here, and you claim to be from here, but it is a false claim. And then he called the army and and he tried to block our path. So it destroyed a a very pleasant morning walk.

Presenter7:29

How do you feel after encounters like that? Do you feel shaken that you feel angry? Angry.

Raja Shehadeh7:32

Sheikh.

Raja Shehadeh7:34

Angry.

Presenter7:34

Yeah. Angry. And how do you get rid of the anger?

Raja Shehadeh7:37

I write this story.

Presenter7:37

Yeah.

Raja Shehadeh7:40

And get it out of my system and move on.

Presenter7:43

You are a non-practising Christian. You you were born and brought up a Christian. The non-practising bit, how much of that is a reaction to what goes on around where you live?

Raja Shehadeh7:53

I suppose it must, because it's very difficult to be religious when you see how religion is misused, but that's not the fault of religion, that's how people misuse it. But I think I I lost my faith when I was uh sixteen, so it didn't really start with the politics. I like the story of the talents, that you you're given talents and and you're supposed to make the most out of them, and if you do, then that should please God if there is a God.

Presenter8:18

Let's have some more music, Raja Shahada. Tell me about your second disc of the morning.

Raja Shehadeh8:22

We didn't have much access to music, but every once in a while a musician would visit, and at one point Duke Ellington came on a world tour and he performed at our school, and that I think must have been the first time I ever heard jazz.

Speaker 48:49

Don't mean a thing Him it ain't not that sweet

Speaker 48:54

Do what, do I, do what, do what, do what, do what, do what, do what Don't mean a thing, all you gotta do is swing.

Speaker 49:03

Two who want to wanna

Speaker 49:08

Makes no difference if that rhythm's sweet or high.

Speaker 49:13

Is that rhythm everything? Everything you got?

Speaker 49:18

Don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing. Do I, do I, do I, do I, do I, do I, do I, do I Did it Dano Deep Bee Dano Bedoo Deep Lando?

Raja Shehadeh9:27

Did it?

Presenter9:38

That was Ella Fitzgerald saying Duke Ellington's It Don't Mean a Thing If It Ain't Got That Swing and Memories for You, Raja Shahada, of that extraordinary visit by Duke Ellington when you were at school, just a boy. So you were born then in 1951 in Romana, as I said. Your parents were dad and Aziz had been living quite a comfortable life in Jaffa. Very comfortable life. And that life had been lived comfortably in Jaffa until 1948. That's right.

Raja Shehadeh9:55

Yes, a very comfortable life.

Raja Shehadeh10:01

That's right. Jaffa gets very hot and humid in the summer and so they had the summer house in Ramallah. When the hostilities began, they decided it's b safer to be in Ramallah because it was getting rather dangerous actually, physically dangerous. So they decided towards the end of April to take that short drive down to Ramallah, a short drive from Jaffa. And my father always thought that if the worst happens, which is the partition, Jaffa was going to be on the Arab side.

Raja Shehadeh10:28

So they will always be able to go back. And they took very few things with them and they were never able to go back.

Presenter10:33

Because, of course, this was a displacement that led up to the declaration of the State of Israel in nineteen forty eight. They were never allowed to go back, and there is a poignancy really in the fact that this summer house, as I understood it,

Presenter10:44

You could look across the landscape, could you? And you could see to Jaffa. How did your parents and and your grandmother was there too? What did they say about the life, this life that they could see but could no longer touch?

Raja Shehadeh10:57

As time moved on, it was the only good life. Everything good was in Jaffa. Nothing was good. It was mythologized. It was mythologized. And I grew up thinking of Jaffa as a heavenly place and looking across the horizon at these lights, thinking these were Jaffa and, in fact, they were Tel Aviv, not Jaffa.

Presenter11:01

So it was mythologized.

Presenter11:03

Yeah.

Presenter11:15

And what do you remember about your childhood in Ramallah?

Presenter11:19

It was a heavy

Raja Shehadeh11:20

Happy childhood in many ways. Although I was physically poor, I didn't eat very much because I had problems with lactose intolerance which they didn't know about. So every time I got diarrhea and they needed to feed me more, they would give me milk or milk products and which only made it worse. I was anemic. So I I always felt on the brink of death and my mother was very anxious. But otherwise the hills and the fields were our playground.

Presenter11:34

Which only made it

Raja Shehadeh11:47

There were no dangers. We could in the summer spend all the time outside.

Presenter11:51

And the atmosphere in the house, was there a sense of tension and longing and a feeling that life would only be lived once you got back to where you needed to be? I think a lot of that.

Raja Shehadeh12:01

Also because they had been used to living well and lost everything and had started all over.

Presenter12:07

You wrote about your grandmother's desire to somehow keep a hold on the the dignified and rarefied life that she had had in Jaffa. She she had a a bone china was it a teacup?

Raja Shehadeh12:18

Teacup. That was very important standard of life. And and she claimed that the tea tastes better in these cups than otherwise. And I think she's right.

Presenter12:28

I'm so glad you said that. It's time now for another piece of music. Tell me about your third piece this morning.

Raja Shehadeh12:34

Well, the third is Remsky Korsakov Shahrazad. And prior to sixty seven, Egypt was the cultural center of the Arab world. The best films were made there, the novels, the radio was good, and they had a reading of the Arabian Nights, and they would end every programme with Shahrazad. She would start yawning and the music would fade out and we would be left in suspense about what is going to happen in the story until the next series.

Presenter14:04

That was part of Rimsky Korsakoff's Scheherazade, Opus 35, played there by the London Symphony Orchestra and conducted by Pierre Monteau. Now I would like you, Roger Shahada, to explain something to me. You you attended the American Quaker School, and I also read that you took part in military drills that were run by the Jordanian army whilst you were there. How did those two things live side by side? They seem something of a contradiction.

Raja Shehadeh14:27

Well, it was completely a joke that we g took part in military exercises because all we did was to march around the campus and learn how to salute as we marched and how to receive a message from the officer and go back to our grouping. Just before'sixty seven, things started heating up because there was feeling that war was imminent.

Presenter14:51

We should just remind people, of course, it was it was the Six Day War that took place in in nineteen sixty seven that you're talking about. Jordan lost control of Ramallah, which was then occupied by Israel. Can you tell me how this act of world importance affected your family?

Raja Shehadeh15:06

The war itself, although it's called Six Days' War, took less than three days, and we felt very little of the war in Ramallah. There was no resistance whatsoever. And in a blink really, it s started and ended, and we found ourselves under occupation.

Raja Shehadeh15:23

Ev everybody was in shock. My father was in shock at the beginning and then immediately got himself out of the shock and decided it's time to end this conflict by making peace with Israel on the basis of a two-state solution. And he was visited by some Israelis and he immediately told them his ideas and they said, could you write them down and we'll present them to the government? And he did and I typed the proposal for him.

Presenter15:51

How old are you playing?

Raja Shehadeh15:51

I was sixteen.

Raja Shehadeh15:54

He became very active politically. He he managed to get quite a good number of people from all around the West Bank and Gaza who together with him submitted and were ready to do this. But the Israeli government was uninterested.

Raja Shehadeh16:10

Did your father take you?

Presenter16:10

You along to these meetings? Were you present? Did you see him speak?

Raja Shehadeh16:13

Not in the very beginning, but later on I was always with my father when he went to meetings. And he, I think, was one of the few and very, very early people who genuinely believed that peace with Israel would be best for Israel and for Palestine and would transform the region, because he thought that we had things to offer, they had things to offer, and together we can do brilliantly.

Presenter16:37

Up until that point what contact had your father had with Israelis?

Raja Shehadeh16:41

Well, he was a lawyer already in the Richmander time, and as a lawyer he he had contacts with Jewish lawyers and Jewish judges and had close friends who were Jewish. And some of these people after the sixty seven came to look him up and see if he needed anything. And so he immediately reestablished contact

Presenter17:00

And did he talk politics at home with you? Did he say to you, this is why it is important, and this is something you should think about and believe?

Raja Shehadeh17:05

This is what I fought him about. He didn't do this in a full manner. He he just assumed so much. And I think what he did, which was good and maybe bad, was to make me aware that it's not all Israelis are one. And through him I met some excellent, brilliant, progressive, interesting Israelis. And so I was never of the opinion that all of Israelis are one thing. However, what was happening to most people was that they were dealing with the indignity of defeat by having thoughts of resistance and a lot of armed resistance. And so many of my classmates and friends ended up joining the resistance. And I was always cynical and didn't think much of it. The outcome has never been good because armed resistance was not the right way to go about resisting the occupation. It wasn't then, it isn't now. But that's not the whole point. The important point is that people, when they are defeated, they need to resist. And that helps them regain their feeling of self and dignity.

Presenter18:11

Time for some more music, Raja Shahada. Tell me about what's next. This is your fourth.

Raja Shehadeh18:16

Next is Rachmeninoff's piano concerto, number two. And that is reminiscent to me of the time when my father was given the privilege that not many had to go back to Jaffa and see the places that he had left and had not seen for nineteen years. And for me, there has been a total division between where we were and where the horizon was and Jaffa was. For me to imagine my father crossing that dividing line was something mysterious. And in a sense, reconciling that private world of the mind and of my emotions with the public reality has been a long struggle which I tried to do through my writing. I sat waiting for him to come back to hear his news and thought what is an appropriate music to listen to and I thought of Rachmeninoff.

Presenter20:18

That was Lang Lang in the orchestra of the Marinsky Theatre playing part of Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerta No. Two in C minor. Uh Raja Shihadi, you said just going into that piece of music that it was very difficult for you to reconcile the public picture, the importance of what was going on politically and socially with your own experience of your life and your relationship with your father. You've written about this particularly when it came to and I found this very poignant about as a young man wanting to shave for the first time.

Presenter20:46

You found your father was not only unsympathetic to this rather important moment in any young man's life, but that

Presenter20:52

When it was clear you were borrowing his shaving tools, he he didn't even engage with that as a topic.

Raja Shehadeh20:58

Well, he was so busy and so into his own world, and I was into my own world, and my expectations of him were unmet. I wanted recognition and time, and he didn't have time for me. I didn't know, in a sense, how to be a man, because everybody else was exercising their manhood by the popular rhetoric of aggression and hatred towards Israel and military resistance. And from my background, none of this was possible.

Presenter21:29

And so the writing allowed you to stop going round in circles of what resentment about that or a a degree of low-level anger, or what was it you felt towards your father?

Raja Shehadeh21:39

confusion and curiosity and trying to understand what was the nature of our relationship. And every time I wanted to write on another subject, I would be called back to the need to write about our relationship before I could venture anywhere else.

Presenter21:57

You had studied then at Beirut University in Lebanon, and then in nineteen seventy three, I think it was, you you came to London to study law. Given that your father was a lawyer, were you taking his advice about your studies? Was it important to you that you followed in his footsteps? Indeed, was it important to him?

Raja Shehadeh22:12

All of these are true. I very much wanted to be a writer from early on, and he was very worried that I'll never make ends meet in my life if I become a writer.

Presenter22:21

Which is a reasonable worry for a moment.

Raja Shehadeh22:22

Which is a reasonable worry. And now I appreciate that because now that I have another source of income, I don't have to make my writing a source of income, and that gives me great freedom to write whatever I want to write, rather than as a way of life.

Presenter22:35

When you were qualified as a lawyer then, in nineteen seventy six you were called to the bar and you worked within your father's office. You were being then what? A lawyer by day and at that point a writer by night.

Raja Shehadeh22:46

The human rights activist.

Presenter22:47

Death

Raja Shehadeh22:47

Yeah. Because I came and was appalled at the state of things and the changes in the law that I realized would be detrimental. And so I felt I must do something about it. And I started writing, but then realized it's not enough to do this on my own. You have to have an organization.

Presenter22:47

Yeah.

Presenter23:03

Time for some more music, Raja Shahada. Tell me

Raja Shehadeh23:05

How about your fifth disc?

Raja Shehadeh23:06

Well, I was waiting for my bar exam results and I wanted a distraction and there was the Wagner Rheingold being performed and I was totally unfamiliar with Wagner, but I thought it could be appropriate music that could take my mind away from my anxiety about the bar exam results. So I took a ticket and during the interval I ran down to check the lists of the people who have succeeded and I did succeed. So the n second part and third act were much more pleasurable than the first.

Speaker 424:14

This right is fine the middle, and it's called the Swaffer's Cannon.

Presenter24:20

Ah, Canvas Canning Paul!

Speaker 424:29

Hey, let me connect.

Speaker 424:33

Here you are in Bus Master Never Home.

Presenter24:42

The Arya Rheingold, Rheingold, from part of Wagner's Ring Cycle played by the Vienna Philharmonic, conducted by Sir George Schulte. So, Roger Shahada, it was nineteen seventy nine when you decided to add this third string to your bow by founding uh the Palestinian Human Rights Organization Al Haq.

Presenter24:59

We've heard a lot about your father, and I'm wondering what his response was. For example, did he worry about your safety?

Raja Shehadeh25:05

He did, and that worry was made more acute by the fact that he was being called by the military governor and warned about my activities as they became better known. In nineteen eighty we published a small volume called The West Bank and the Rule of Law, which described the changes in the law that Israel was making and the human rights situation. And though it was a modest contribution, it was a hit and like a bombshell that fell on Israel because nobody knew about any of these matters at that time. And so they became concerned and called my father and said, you know, you better restrain your son.

Presenter25:34

But any of the

Presenter25:44

You've written about the devastating murder of your father in the middle of the nineteen eighties, nineteen eighty five, I think it was. You yourself you were abroad, were you in Africa at the time you were traveling?

Raja Shehadeh25:53

I was at an ICG International Commission of Jurists meeting in Nairobi and the Secretary General Neil McDermott, who was a great supporter of our work at Al Haq, I remember he came to visit me early morning and broke the news to me and it was completely devastating, completely devastating especially because the news was falsely so that the PLO had murdered him.

Presenter26:19

And so you went home and you you realized how quickly that that it wasn't the PLO and you pieced together what had happened, how.

Raja Shehadeh26:25

And not so quickly, not so quickly. It was a difficult choice to make how to pursue the investigation with the Israelis, whether to have faith that they are really investigating or not. So it was very, very difficult. But at the end I thought we have no choice but to support the Israeli investigation, and we did and got nowhere. Until a scholar from Oxford told me that he has a friend who was in the Israeli cabinet who told him he saw the file and realized what we had suspected was true, namely that a collaborator against whom my father had a land case had murdered him.

Raja Shehadeh27:01

And and Israel knew this all along.

Presenter27:04

And how long was it before you found out?

Raja Shehadeh27:06

Until this was confirmed it was about fifteen years.

Presenter27:10

You had had throughout the years, even though you'd pursued life as a lawyer and you were working in your father's office, it seems to me through your writing a fractious, a difficult relationship with your father. When we lose somebody close to us and our relationship with them is complex, our response to their death can also be very complex. Was that the case for you?

Raja Shehadeh27:27

Absolutely. Very, very, very complex. It just made life so difficult, so complicated. I didn't know what to think, didn't know what to do, didn't know what was incumbent upon me as as a son and somebody in human rights. It it just shook all aspects of my world, my world as a lawyer, my world as a human rights activist, because I saw that even with all the power that I thought we had as people who were s pursuing justice, I couldn't pursue justice for my father and find out who murdered him and get justice done.

Presenter27:59

Was anybody ever prosecuted for your father's murder?

Raja Shehadeh28:01

Never, never. And and all their talk about justice and justice that they demand of the whole world for what happened to the Jews, which I think is of course right demand, they had no linkage between what they should do when they had the power to do it and what they expect others to do. It left a bitter taste that my father was one of the few people and from early on who really believed in peace with Israel, and he was treated so badly at the end.

Presenter28:32

Let's take time for some music then, Raja Shahada. We're going to hear your sixth choice of today. Just tell me about this.

Raja Shehadeh28:39

In two thousand and two there was another invasion of Ramallah by the Israeli army and we were stuck at home for months and we knew it was very important to have exercise, so we would put music and go around and around and one of the music that we played was Vorjak's piano quintet in A major.

Presenter29:54

That was the Goldener String Quartet with Piers Lane on piano, playing part of Dvorak's piano quintet in A Major Opus V, the finale. The we that you referred to as you introduced that piece of music, Raja Shahada, was your wife, Penny. You got married in nineteen eighty eight at what you called an Intifada wedding.

Raja Shehadeh30:11

And we enjoyed our wedding, which was a simple wedding. Everything was complicated. There were curfews. Actually on the way to to the church we had trouble on the way and we could hardly m make it. And so it was bittersweet. Everything was bittersweet. Everything in my life was bittersweet, I suppose.

Presenter30:28

And you don't have children. Was that a conscious decision to devote your life to your work and your home? It was more.

Raja Shehadeh30:35

Yeah.

Presenter30:35

Good

Raja Shehadeh30:35

Conscious than not conscious, because we didn't think having children would would be our way for satisfaction and fulfilment. It was such tumultuous times that we didn't have the peace of mind in a way. And very often I thought it's not fair to bring children in a situation like that, which now I regret because I feel this is a negative way of looking at life. I think there is always hope in new generations, and I didn't have the courage or the confidence in that, which is wrong.

Presenter31:06

Let's have some more music, Raja Shahada. We are on your seventh choice. Tell me about this.

Raja Shehadeh31:11

Edward Said established with Daniel Berenboe the West Eastern Divan Orchestra, and part of the programme was that they would hold workshops for the members of the orchestra when they would discuss politics between really establishment type people from Israel and Arabs from various parts of the Arab world, including Palestine. I was very happy for the opportunity to participate in these workshops because I thought this is exactly the kind of project that would have pleased my father. But the best part of it was listening to the rehearsals. And Daniel Berenbohm brought a soprano from the Berlin Stett Opera, and she sang from Tristan and Isolde. And it was so beautiful. It was so beautiful. I never felt transformed by the music as I did then.

Presenter32:56

Lieberstadt from Wagner's Tristram and Isolt, sung by Burgit Nielsson. The music was played by the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Leopold Ludwig. Um there is a passage in your diaries, Raja Shahada, where you write about going up into the road just beyond your home one evening because you you say you felt the need to and I'm quoting here clear your head, an essential exercise in this conflict, which I'm sure

Presenter33:19

will continue to plague us for many years to come.

Presenter33:23

Given that you are sure of that, wh where do you get your optimism from?

Raja Shehadeh33:28

I can't help being optimistic. I think if I were not optimistic, I would not be able to keep on going. But I find very few partners in optimism. And you ask people, are you optimistic about what is happening with the negotiations? Now nobody, nobody has told me yes, we are. The way things are organized now in the Middle East is so artificial and so strange that it cannot be sustained. But ultimately, I think I have a belief in human beings. The natural thing is for all of this to come to an end and for people to realize that they can all live a better life by cooperating, sharing resources, and a belief that they will come to see that peace will serve best all their interests.

Presenter34:15

Do you think it is your work as a writer or your work as a human rights activist that has changed things more?

Raja Shehadeh34:22

I think that the worst thing for a conflict like that is to think of the Palestinians as one thing, to think of the Israelis as one thing. And perhaps, perhaps, my work has helped break through some of these stereotypes and humanize the people and the conflict. I've always thought that my role is to tell the truth and to help people understand by helping them empathize and experience from the inside.

Presenter34:52

Yes, from the inside is important, isn't it? Because you say tell the truth, but of course it's your truth, and there are many truths in the region.

Raja Shehadeh34:58

Yeah, yeah.

Presenter34:58

Uh But to help people

Raja Shehadeh35:00

Empathize.

Presenter35:01

Would I

Raja Shehadeh35:01

With either side is very important.

Presenter35:03

Let's have your final track then, Raja Shahada. Tell me what we're going to hear as your eighth disc of the morning.

Raja Shehadeh35:08

Edward Said was a pianist and had considered early on a career as a pianist, but decided to go into literature. And in one of the final films that was made of him, he played the Schubert fantasy in F minor for Four Hands. And I want to dedicate this to his memory.

Presenter36:44

That was part of Schubert's Fantasy in F minor for Four Hands played there by Diane Walsh and Edward Said.

Presenter36:50

So, Rajah Shahada, it's time now for me to give you the books that you get to take to this island. The Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare. You're raising your eyebrows there as I say the Bible. Do you not plan to take that?

Raja Shehadeh37:01

I think I'll take a break from the Bible on the desert island. It's never been my favorite book. It has complicated our lives so much.

Presenter37:07

That is your choice. You do get to take another book along too.

Raja Shehadeh37:10

Arabian Nights.

Presenter37:11

Right.

Raja Shehadeh37:12

That always will be fun to read.

Presenter37:13

Okay, that is yours then. And we allow a luxury to our castaways. What's yours gonna be?

Raja Shehadeh37:18

pack of seeds to plant things and make a little garden, even though it's a desert, but things can grow in the desert.

Presenter37:24

And um, finally, if the waves were to threaten to wash away your disks, which one would you chase to save?

Presenter37:30

With c

Raja Shehadeh37:30

Keep shared his head.

Presenter37:31

Uh

Presenter37:31

It's yours, Raja Shahada. Thank you very much for letting us hear your Desert Island discs.

Raja Shehadeh37:36

Q.

Presenter38:17

You've been listening to a download from the BBC.

Presenter38:19

You'll find more information on the Radio Four website bbc.co.uk/radio4