*** DEBUG START ***
*** DEBUG END ***

We Could Have Been Friends, My Father And I: A Palestinian memoir by Raja Shehadeh

by
07 October 2022

Gerald Butt’s last CT review is of a memoir

RAJA SHEHADEH’s public profile is plain to see: a Palestinian human-rights lawyer and activist, and successful author. In his latest book, Shehadeh reveals a troubling aspect of his private life: his awkward relationship with his late father, Aziz, which has been a cause of grief for the author.

Raja followed Aziz into the legal profession. The latter was a lawyer who was not afraid to take on challenging cases. He succeeded, after international court hearings, in unblocking the banked funds of Palestinians uprooted from their homes — as the Shehadehs had been — when Israel was created in 1948. Three years later, he defended the three men accused of assassinating King Abdullah I of Jordan.

All the while, decades before it became an accepted concept, he advocated the creation of a Palestinian state living peacefully alongside Israel, a point of view that was denounced by nearly all the parties involved, including the Palestinian political leadership. Jordan would not accept any threat to its control of the West Bank, and Aziz Shehadeh was imprisoned on two occasions by the Amman authorities.

In 1985, Raja Shehadeh’s father was murdered. By this time, what could have been a perfect father-and-son lawyer team had drifted apart. “My father didn’t show any interest in my human rights work,” he writes. “He tried to tell me that what was needed was political work to pressure Israel to negotiate. But I was fixed in the direction I had chosen and was not going to listen.”

Later, going through his father’s work files, he realised how little he had understood about his father’s motives and methods. “Why have I never looked up to him or appreciated what he endured?” he wonders. “I took my mother’s side and thought, like her, that he was too rash and foolish to get engaged in activities that led him into trouble.”

Raja Shehadeh believes that, if his father had not been murdered, they could have found common ground again and become friends.

Mr Shehadeh’s book is slim but powerful — rich in recent historical detail with a poignant personal trauma threading in and out of it. This is a Palestinian memoir that will endure.
 

Gerald Butt was a Middle East Correspondent of the BBC and of the Church Times, and Middle East Adviser to Oxford Analytica. This review is the last that he wrote for the Church Times before his death.

 

We Could Have Been Friends, My Father And I: A Palestinian memoir
Raja Shehadeh
Profile £14.99
(978-1-78816-997-4)
Church Times Bookshop £13.49

Browse Church and Charity jobs on the Church Times jobsite

Church Times Bookshop

Save money on books reviewed or featured in the Church Times. To get your reader discount:

> Click on the “Church Times Bookshop” link at the end of the review.

> Call 0845 017 6965 (Mon-Fri, 9.30am-5pm).

The reader discount is valid for two months after the review publication date. E&OE

Forthcoming Events

Women Mystics: Female Theologians through Christian History

13 January - 19 May 2025

An online evening lecture series, run jointly by Sarum College and The Church Times

tickets available

 

Festival of Faith and Literature

28 February - 2 March 2025

tickets available

 

Visit our Events page for upcoming and past events 

The Church Times Archive

Read reports from issues stretching back to 1863, search for your parish or see if any of the clergy you know get a mention.

FREE for Church Times subscribers.

Explore the archive

Welcome to the Church Times

 

To explore the Church Times website fully, please sign in or subscribe.

Non-subscribers can read four articles for free each month. (You will need to register.)