Short answer: No. Raja Shehadeh, a Palestinian human rights lawyer and author from Ramallah, has spent nearly five decades opposing Israeli occupation policy in his legal work and his writing. He is not a supporter of Israel or Israeli government policy. He has, however, explicitly and repeatedly distinguished his criticism of Zionism and Israeli policy from antisemitism, saying he holds no enmity toward Jews as a religious group, and he continues to say a negotiated Israeli-Palestinian peace is possible. As of August 2026, that remains his clearest public position.
What Raja Shehadeh has actually said and done
- 1979: Shehadeh co-founded Al-Haq, a Ramallah-based Palestinian human rights organization affiliated with the International Commission of Jurists, which documents alleged Israeli human rights violations in the occupied territories, according to Encyclopedia.com.
- 2008: He won the Orwell Prize for "Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape," a memoir about the changing West Bank landscape under occupation, per The Orwell Foundation.
- 2023: His memoir "We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I" was named a finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction, according to the National Book Foundation.
- June 11, 2024: He published "What Does Israel Fear from Palestine?," a short book tracing the conflict's history from the 1917 Balfour Declaration through the 1948 Nakba and arguing Israel has resisted ending the occupation, as reviewed by the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.
- August 10, 2024: In an interview with the New Statesman about the Gaza war, which he noted began after Hamas broke through the barrier in southern Israel on October 7, 2023, killing about 1,200 people and abducting around 240 hostages, Shehadeh said Palestinians are "not treated as human beings deserving of human rights" and described Gaza's destruction as "domicide, ecocide and most chillingly genocide," while saying Israel, as occupier, bears responsibility for reconstruction. A separate Political Quarterly review covers the same book and period.
- December 20, 2025: On "The Interview" podcast, Shehadeh said Zionism "made my life impossible" and criticized the 1948 displacement of Palestinians, but explicitly separated that criticism from antisemitism, saying "Jews are just members of religion and it has nothing negative about it and nothing in enmity with me." He added that he still believes peace is possible if both peoples recognize each other's right to self-determination, per the podcast transcript and a matching DNyuz writeup.
Who is Raja Shehadeh
Raja Shehadeh was born July 6, 1951, in Ramallah, into a prominent Palestinian Christian family. His father, Aziz Shehadeh, was an early advocate of a two-state solution, and his grandfather served as a judge under the British Mandate. Raja Shehadeh trained as a lawyer, co-founded the human rights group Al-Haq in 1979, and has built a decades-long career spanning legal advocacy and acclaimed literary nonfiction, including the Orwell Prize and a National Book Award nomination, centered on documenting and opposing the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. He has been a Royal Society of Literature International Writer since 2022. He has no identifiable Jewish-identity connection; he is Christian by family background.
His public record through 2026 shows sustained, sharply critical commentary on Israeli government and military policy, including his stark description of Gaza's wartime destruction in 2024. At the same time, in his most recent major interview, from December 2025, he drew a clear, explicit line between opposing Zionism as a political project and holding any hostility toward Jews as a people or religion, and he continues to say a negotiated two-state peace remains achievable. No reports link him to violence, antisemitic rhetoric, or organized boycott campaigns targeting individuals or companies, as distinct from his general opposition to occupation policy, and no evidence surfaced of any support for Israeli causes or institutions.
The bottom line
Raja Shehadeh does not support Israel or its occupation policies; his life's work as a lawyer and writer has been built around opposing them. He is, however, on the public record explicitly rejecting antisemitism and voicing hope for eventual Israeli-Palestinian peace, which distinguishes his position from anti-Jewish animus even as it remains firmly critical of the Israeli state.
Where we stand
Figures who criticize Israel while explicitly rejecting antisemitism are still a different case from those who cross into it, and we think that distinction is worth drawing out clearly, article by article. If you want to make your own position on Israel unmistakable while these debates play out, our I Stand With Israel collection is a simple, wearable way to say where you stand.
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Last updated August 2026. We update these profiles as the record changes.
