Raja Shehadeh. We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I: A Palestinian Memoir

(Other Press, 2023)

Publisher’s description: Aziz Shehadeh was many things: lawyer, activist, and political detainee, he was also the father of bestselling author and activist Raja. In this new and searingly personal memoir, Raja Shehadeh unpicks the snags and complexities of their relationship.

A vocal and fearless opponent, Aziz resists under the British mandatory period, then under Jordan, and, finally, under Israel. As a young man, Raja fails to recognize his father’s courage and, in turn, his father does not appreciate Raja’s own efforts in campaigning for Palestinian human rights. When Aziz is murdered in 1985, it changes Raja irrevocably. This is not only the story of the battle against the various oppressors of the Palestinians, but a moving portrait of a particular father and son relationship.

Reviews:

‘A slim volume, it manages to weave together several threads: a biography of the writer’s late father, Aziz Shehadeh, who was one of the most impressive Palestinian lawyers of his generation; a tender inquiry into why the two men were not closer, despite sharing a vocation and cause; and a moving lament for what might have been, had they been afforded more time together (…) With profound humanity, his work maps out the vicissitudes of a life lived in the shadows of Israeli occupation. The result is a quiet and deeply felt book that illustrates how being dispossessed and being occupied are not merely legal or political conditions, but, perhaps more profoundly, psychological and emotional ones too’ – New York Times