A murdered father, and the history of Palestine

A human rights lawyer charts the history of Palestine through his murdered father’s papers and draws a line to the present

For those not forced to live it day to day, the reality of Israel’s occupation of Palestine can be conveniently repackaged with whatever euphemism fits the prevailing political mood, from “peace initiative” to “rising tensions”. For the past couple of years, the buzzword has been “normalisation” – the aim of the US-brokered Abraham Accords of 2020 by which a number of Arab states, led by the UAE, discarded their red line of independence for Palestine and established official relations with Israel. The Palestinians were not invited to the talks, and the star US negotiator, Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, described their 70-plus-year history of violent dispossession as “nothing more than a real-estate dispute”. The new tactic for dealing with the injustice at the heart of the region’s modern history was simply to act as if it didn’t exist.

A New York Times investigation concluded this year that sales of Israel’s notorious Pegasus spyware played an “unseen but critical role” in securing the 2020 deal.

While Kushner was overseeing his self-proclaimed “historic breakthrough”, the Palestinian human rights lawyer and writer Raja Shehadeh was sifting through the history Israel would prefer to erase. In 1985, Shehadeh’s father, Aziz, an eminent lawyer and activist, was murdered outside his home in Ramallah. He had left an archive of meticulously catalogued files spanning his decades of legal struggle for the Palestinian people – and the personal calamities that began in 1948, when he was forced from his home and legal practice in Jaffa to become a refugee in the Jordan-controlled West Bank. When Shehadeh unpacked the papers during lockdown, they told a story in which the technology of repression may have been simpler, but the double-dealing and cynicism were the same. We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I weaves the archive into a powerful rebuttal of attempts to sever today’s situation in Palestine from its roots.

At just 160 pages, this memoir distils these themes into a personal and political struggle for justice. It’s even in tone but absolutely gripping. It is also a stinging corrective to the whitewashing of Britain’s imperial history. The biggest villains of Shehadeh’s account are called the Ingleez in Arabic, the colonisers who oversee the catastrophe of 1948. The defining moment of Aziz’s career is the 1953 case in which he takes on Barclays Bank following an order from the Israeli government to freeze its Palestinian customers’ accounts, then transfer their assets to Israel. His unlikely victory becomes a personal touchstone.

But his triumph is short-lived in the face of new oppressors and antagonists. There’s Jordan: a brand new state by the time it seizes the West Bank in 1948 and just emerging from British control. Jordan is quick to use the brutal tactics it, like Israel, has inherited. As a result of Aziz’s advocacy, the Jordanian regime first exiles him to Lebanon, then throws him in the remote desert jail of Al Jafr (built by the British), then strikes him off as a lawyer. There are the other Arab nations happy to alternately trumpet public solidarity for the cause of Palestine, and privately ensure its people remain disempowered and subservient. There is the ineffectual UN and the double-bind its bureaucracy traps the Palestinians in: “As long as the refugees received aid from [United Nations Relief and Works Agency] they were not even recognised as refugees.”

And of course there is Israel, perpetually stalling over negotiations while using “torture, house demolitions and deportation”. Closer to home in the Palestinian community are the opponents of Aziz’s pursuit of a separate state and, most painfully, are the faultlines running through Shehadeh’s family. He sides with his mother: “For a long time, I thought it was father’s politics that distanced me from him,” he writes. “Now I am aware a more important reason was the politics within the family.”

This isn’t a polemical book; it wears its power lightly. But his masterly selection of detail builds an unanswerable case against Palestine’s oppressors. It also, finally, re-establishes the relationship that is the memoir’s emotional centre of gravity. “Now that I know how much we have in common, what I regret most of all is the fact that we could have been friends,” Shehadeh writes. The insight is a victory of sorts, but there’s no resolution here – the book closes with him once again being blocked from accessing the Israeli police file into Aziz’s murder.

two daughters who, still in childhood, remain that much closer to the “animal joy” of the book’s title. During Alsadir’s own analysis, one of them was in the habit of knocking on the door and interrupting, and it’s the same here: again and again they intrude with an observation or a request, unwittingly flagging some deep psychic truth and bringing with them air and light. One of the most difficult aspects of motherhood, she admits of herself, “is snuffing out my children’s impulses, teaching them to disconnect from their interiors in order to display proper behaviour”.

Towards the end, she cringes when thinking of all the ways her book might be exposing her. We learn that she’s a musophobe (someone with an extreme fear of mice), that she was once married to a man who called her a pill, that she is an IraqiAmerican and the daughter of an obstetrician. Do we learn more than she wishes to reveal though? Either way, her writing is at its most immediate, most alive, in these snatches of memoir, and they left me wishing for more. (Of course, it’s in the nature of such a profoundly self-aware text that it also leaves you wondering what your own critical response might say about you, the reader – about your unexamined depths, your shallows.)

How best to describe this book? Poet that she is, Alsadir is wary of adjectives – the fewer the better, she believes. Indeed, she goes so far as to dub them “the canned laughter of language”. Better, then, to press it upon you with another of her pocketable quotations, this time from Orwell, who declared that “every joke is a tiny revolution”. The same might be said of Animal Joy. It will leave you feeling enlightened and emboldened, and even make you laugh. Observer