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

"There’s something so simple, so heartbreaking about the title of Raja Shehadeh’s memoir, We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I. In it, the Palestinian lawyer and human rights activist revisits his strained relationship with his father, a brilliant lawyer displaced from Jaffa by the Israelis in 1948, then later banished and imprisoned by the Jordanian regime for advocating on behalf of Palestinians. Shehadeh describes his father, Aziz, as a “pioneer, ahead of his peers,” a man whose advocacy for a two-state solution put him at odds with both Arabs and Israelis – and may have been the impetus for his assassination in 1985. Writing now, decades later, Shehadeh finds himself sorting through his father’s papers, surprised and saddened by how much of himself he recognizes in Aziz’s work."