WE COULD HAVE BEEN FRIENDS, MY FATHER AND I
As a young lawyer in the mid-1980s working side by side with his father, the late Aziz Shehadeh, the author did not realize at the time how much Aziz’s early work in securing Palestinian refugee rights mirrored his own. His father had been a lawyer in Jaffa, but in 1948, he was forced to relocate his law office to Ramallah, which was then under Jordanian control. In 1985, Shehadeh, author of Occupation Diaries and Palestinian Walks, and his father were working on stopping an Israeli road plan through the West Bank when Aziz was murdered. As the author recounts, it wasn’t until recently, when he was about the same age as his father when he died, that Shehadeh turned his attention to the “carefully arranged” documents and letters his father left behind. He learned about Aziz’s brave political opposition to Jordanian coercion, which led to several incarcerations in the 1950s, and how the Arab states ultimately used the Palestinians for political gain. “With Palestine lost,” he writes, “my father and others were now reduced by the regime to the status of common criminals.” Shehadeh shows how his father was a visionary for his insistence on a two-state solution, a stance that put him at odds with the Palestinian Liberation Organization. As Aziz always insisted, “the only real victory is when we’ve both won.” The author’s tribute to his father continues with his ongoing effort to find justice for his murder. “The prevarication by the police and the excuses offered for the delay bring back painful memories of the agony my family endured in the course of the original investigation,” he writes. Though brief, the text is poignant and engaging.
