1948 marks the year of the Nakba, a catastrophe that displaced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, resulting in the loss of land and a dramatic shift in legal and geopolitical status. The U.N. Partition Plan served as a precursor to the Nakba, granting territory to Israel and leaving Palestinian sovereignty inconclusive. Decades of debate over dispossession gave way to diplomatic negotiations, ultimately culminating in the Oslo Accords, which aimed for peace but failed to resolve key issues of statehood and enforcement.
Against this backdrop, Raja Shehadeh’s memoir explores the life of his father and how law itself became a tool of resistance and a means through which Palestinians mobilized for the possibility of liberation.
The story follows the author’s father Aziz Shehadeh, a prominent human rights lawyer and activist from Jaffa, Palestine, now part of Tel Aviv-Yafo.
Raja, the author and son, was not yet alive during the Nakba, but he grew up in Ramallah among many refugees. The early chapters, devoted to his father’s childhood, education and marriage, trace his longing and legal efforts to return to Jaffa, land assigned to the Arab state under the U.N. Partition Plan. None of the Arabs who were forcibly exiled from Jaffa were ever allowed to return, despite their efforts.
The memoir tells much more than the story of one man’s life. Through his father’s work, the reader comes to understand not only the father-son relationship but also the larger Palestinian struggle and the way law itself became an instrument of resistance and a tool for survival in a
landscape where homes and histories were destroyed. Raja describes how, after the Nakba, Palestinian bank accounts were frozen, rendering the Palestinian pound worthless overnight and stripping families of both property and livelihood. Aziz’s legal pursuit of the case to recover
Palestinian assets became emblematic of his life’s mission, earning him recognition as one of the greatest Palestinian lawyers. He later emerged as one of the earliest advocates of a two-state solution, envisioning a path toward Palestinian self-determination.
In 1967, months after the Six-Day War, he published a plan proposing the creation of a Palestinian state that would include Gaza and be rooted in existing U.N. resolutions. It called for a representative national assembly to speak in the name of the Palestinian people, an
internationally supervised referendum to ratify its founding principles, and Jerusalem as its capital.
His plan appeared twice in newspapers and pamphlets before 1970. The proposal was met with condemnation from Jordan, which demanded that he end his campaign for independence. For Aziz, this response only confirmed the notion that the greatest danger for Palestinians was to remain stateless, dependent on the very powers complicit in their dispossession to broker empty peace deals, similar to the recent ceasefire that hasn’t stopped the deaths or food scarcity in Gaza. Later that year in November, he published an essay titled “History Repeats Itself.” In it, he traced the recurring tactics Israel had used in 1948 and 1967 to deflect peace initiatives, consolidate control and extend dispossession under the guise of negotiation.
His fight was not limited to just Israel. It also exposed the repression of Jordan and Britain, whose policies deepened Palestinian disenfranchisement. Jordan outlawed political parties, imprisoned outspoken critics and redirected prosperity toward Amman and Israel.
Some of the book’s most powerful passages are not only about law or policy but about economic, emotional and familial loss. Aziz’s pursuit of justice came at a heavy cost. He was exiled to Europe, imprisoned in Jordan and ultimately stripped of his passport, a bureaucratic erasure of identity that would keep him from attending his son’s graduation at the American University of Beirut. The book also talks about the conditions of those who were able to return to occupied territories and the conditions of apartheid, like permits, checkpoints and resources that were allocated solely to Jewish settlements.
The title of the memoir is illuminated later, when Raja wrote, “Now that I know how much we have in common, what I regret most of all is that we could have been friends”. The line speaks to the recognition of shared defiance of Raja’s mother’s wishes between father and son, each confronting regimes that refused to recognize their existence in pursuit of human rights.
The loss of a normal parental bond is often measured through orphanhood, yet here we see how oppression and exile can fracture a family even when every member is still alive.
Raja’s account of his father’s life and struggles serves as a reminder that peace can only come when it is brokered with Palestinians themselves. Only through such recognition can liberation become a foundation for dignified life and shared prosperity across the region.
