“I believe that peace between the Israelis and Palestinians remains possible,” Raja Shehadeh, writer, lawyer and human rights activist, told The New York Times.

The comment appears in an interview conducted by David Marchese and published by The New York Times. Shehadeh framed his view not as optimism about current conditions but as a conditional stance: progress could be made, he said, only if long-standing assumptions were rethought.

Shehadeh, whose career combines legal work and writing on rights and territory, set a cautious tone. “For it to prevail, much would need to be fundamentally reconsidered,” he said, tying the possibility of peace to wide-ranging changes rather than incremental fixes. Such transformations involve not just political dialogues but also addressing community-level issues.

The interview was presented by David Marchese, identified in the piece as the author, and appears alongside work by a range of contributors to the paper. Names listed with the publication include writers Kwame Anthony Appiah, Susan Dominus, Nitsuh Abebe, Charley Locke and Laura Wexler, and investigative journalists David Enrich, Steve Eder, Jessica Silver-Greenberg, Matthew Goldstein, Claire Hogan, John Pappas, Stephanie Swart and Zach Caldwell. The Times has also featured contributions from former lawmakers Jeff Flake, Joe Manchin and Tina Smith.

In the interview, Shehadeh balanced historical perspective with insistence on structural change. He spoke from the standpoint of both a legal practitioner and a chronicler of the region, arguing that hope must be matched by concrete rethinking of the political and social frameworks that have produced repeated deadlocks.

Marchese’s conversation with Shehadeh places those arguments in a wider editorial context, one that includes essays and investigations by the other contributors named above. The interview format allowed Shehadeh to lay out both a conviction that peace is feasible and a warning about the scale of reform he deems necessary.

Shehadeh’s remarks put a premium on re-evaluating assumptions rather than on simple prescriptions. He emphasized that acknowledging the depth of the obstacles is not the same as surrendering to them; instead, it is a precondition for designing different approaches. His belief is that there is a parallel for mobilizing political action in favor of peace.

The interview draws on Shehadeh’s long engagement with legal and human-rights work, a perspective he used to criticize established patterns while still insisting on the possibility of political solutions. His voice in the piece is that of someone who has documented contested landscapes and who sees policy and narratives as intertwined.

As the conversation concludes, Shehadeh returns to a tempered but direct assertion that sets the interview’s tone: peace is not impossible, but the path to it demands reexamination of fundamentals rather than surface-level adjustments.

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Original reporting: view the original article.