We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I by Raja Shehadeh review – truth and memory in Palestine | Autobiography and memoir

For these not compelled to reside them daily, the realities of Israel’s occupation of Palestine may be conveniently repackaged with no matter euphemism suits the prevailing political temper, from “peace initiative” to “rising tensions”. For the previous couple of years, the buzzword has been “normalisation” – the goal of the US-brokered Abraham accords of 2020 by which various Arab states, led by the UAE, discarded their pink line of independence for Palestine and established official relations with Israel. The Palestinians themselves weren’t invited to the talks, and the star US negotiator, Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, described their 70-plus-year historical past of violent dispossession as “nothing greater than a real-estate dispute”. The brand new tactic for coping with the injustice on the coronary heart of the area’s fashionable historical past was merely to behave as if it didn’t exist.

The backdrop to this sudden reversal is a altering Center East wherein religion within the US is shrinking, hostility to Iran is rising and repressive Arab regimes now discover they’ve extra in frequent with the occupiers than the occupied. Normalisation has not solely opened up Dubai’s luxurious accommodations to Israeli influencers, however given Gulf autocrats entry to preferential weapons offers, intelligence coaching from the Mossad and Shin Wager and Israel’s world-leading surveillance expertise. Earlier this 12 months, a New York Occasions investigation concluded that gross sales of the infamous Pegasus adware – which a significant media and NGO undertaking revealed has been unlawfully utilized by states to focus on rights activists, journalists and political opponents – performed an “unseen however crucial function” in securing the 2020 deal. Within the new regional established order created by normalisation, Joe Biden may final month fly the beforehand forbidden direct route from Israel to Saudi Arabia, after probably the most cursory and noncommittal of calls on the Palestinian management within the West Financial institution.

Whereas Kushner was overseeing his self-proclaimed “historic breakthrough”, the Palestinian human rights lawyer and author Raja Shehadeh was sifting via the historical past it might favor to erase. In 1985, Shehadeh’s father, Aziz, himself an eminent lawyer and activist, was murdered outdoors his residence in Ramallah. He left behind an archive of meticulously catalogued recordsdata spanning his many years of authorized battle for the Palestinian individuals – and the non-public calamities that started in 1948, when he was compelled from his comfy residence and authorized follow in Jaffa to change into a refugee within the Jordanian-controlled West Financial institution. When Shehadeh lastly unpacked them throughout lockdown, they informed a narrative wherein the expertise of repression could have been easier, however the double-dealing and cynicism have been the identical. We Might Have Been Associates, My Father and I weaves the archive into a robust rebuttal of the present try and sever right now’s state of affairs in Palestine from its roots.

Over the previous twenty years, Shehadeh has change into one in all Palestine’s best-known writers. His 10 books tread and retread the geographical and emotional territory of his homeland from the altering vantage factors of age and expertise. Additionally they grapple repeatedly together with his advanced and infrequently tough relationship together with his pushed, distant father, from whom he reluctantly inherited not simply his vocation however the narratives of exile and oppression that got here with it. At simply 160 pages, his new memoir distils these sprawling themes into a private and political battle for justice. It’s a mark of Shehadeh’s brilliance that this newest revisiting is stuffed with surprises: it’s even in tone, however jet-fuelled by implicit emotion; there’s no standard suspense, however it’s completely gripping.

It’s additionally a stinging corrective to the whitewashing of Britain’s imperial historical past and its repercussions. The largest villains of Shehadeh’s account are what are referred to as in Arabic the Ingleez – the colonisers who oversee the disaster of 1948 and supply the blueprint for all of the repression that follows. Worst of all, for this lawyerly household, they’re “propagators of false justice”: able to twist and corrupt any laws they haven’t beforehand rewritten in their very own pursuits. The defining second of Aziz’s profession is the 1953 case wherein he takes on Barclays Financial institution following an order from the Israeli authorities to freeze its Palestinian prospects’ accounts, then switch their property to Israel. His inconceivable, hard-fought victory turns into a private touchstone, a cipher for “years and years of accrued rage” on the “conceitedness, deception, deviousness and assumed superiority” of the previous colonial energy.

However his triumph is short-lived within the face of a parade of latest oppressors and antagonists. There’s Jordan: on the time it seizes the West Financial institution in 1948, it’s a brand-new state simply rising from British management and fast to make use of the brutal techniques it, like Israel, has inherited. On account of Aziz’s advocacy, the Jordanian regime first exiles him to Lebanon, then throws him within the distant desert jail of Al Jafr (inevitably, constructed by the British – “It at all times got here right down to the Ingleez,” he muses, shackled, within the jail van), then strikes him off as a lawyer. There are the opposite Arab nations, completely happy to alternately trumpet public solidarity for the fantastic explanation for Palestine, and privately guarantee its individuals stay disempowered and subservient. There may be the ineffectual, compromised UN and the nightmarish double-bind its paperwork traps the Palestinians in: “So long as the refugees obtained assist from UNRWA they weren’t even recognised as refugees.”

And naturally there may be Israel, perpetually stalling over negotiations whereas utilizing “brutal strategies of torture, home demolitions and deportation” to incrementally create “information on the bottom”: the three or 4 million Israelis now residing in 500 West Financial institution settlements with segregated roads, infrastructure and companies. Nearer to residence, there’s the politically and ideologically fragmented Palestinian group, and the quite a few opponents of Aziz’s pursuit of a separate state. Closest and most painfully of all, faultlines run via Shehadeh’s household too: he sides together with his mom towards his father’s inconvenient activism; he falls sick on an sad go to to see Aziz in exile in Beirut. “For a very long time I assumed it was father’s politics that distanced me from him,” he writes. “Now I’m conscious {that a} extra essential motive was the politics inside the household.”

This isn’t a polemical e book. Shehadeh’s writing is evident and pared-back; it wears its energy calmly. However his masterly, remorseless choice and accumulation of element builds an unanswerable case towards Palestine’s historic and present oppressors. It additionally, lastly, re-establishes the connection that’s the memoir’s emotional centre of gravity. “Now that I understand how a lot we’ve got in frequent, what I remorse most of all is the truth that we may have been mates,” Shehadeh writes. The perception is a victory of types, nonetheless certified and bittersweet. However there’s no decision right here – the e book closes with him as soon as once more being blocked from accessing the Israeli police file into Aziz’s homicide. And past its pages, the identical previous story continues: in Could final 12 months, the human rights NGO Al-Haq, co-founded by Shehadeh in 1979, submitted a file to the Worldwide Prison Court docket detailing warfare crimes and crimes towards humanity it stated had been dedicated throughout that month’s Israeli assault on Gaza. In October, the NGO found that it had been focused with Pegasus adware. Shortly afterwards, the Israeli navy designated al-Haq a “terrorist organisation”, banning it in each Israel and its West Financial institution residence.