We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I, page 1
also by raja shehadeh
Going Home
Where the Line Is Drawn
Palestinian Walks
When the Bulbul Stopped Singing
Copyright © Raja Shehadeh, 2022
First published in Great Britain in 2022 by Profile Books
Production editor: Yvonne E. Cárdenas
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. For information write to Other Press LLC, 267 Fifth Avenue, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10016.
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Names: Shehadeh, Raja, 1951- author.
Title: We could have been friends, my father and I : a Palestinian memoir / Raja Shehadeh.
Description: New York : Other Press, 2022. | “First published in Great Britain in 2022 by Profile Books.”
Identifiers: LCCN 2022027365 (print) | LCCN 2022027366 (ebook) | ISBN 9781635423648 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781635423655 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Shehadeh, Raja, 1951- | Shehadeh, Aziz. | Lawyers—West Bank—Biography. | Political activists—West Bank—Biography. | Palestinian Arabs—West Bank. | Fathers and sons—West Bank.
Classification: LCC DS125.3.S485 A3 2022 (print) | LCC DS125.3.S485 (ebook) | DDC 956.94/2092 [B]—dc23/eng/20221013
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022027365
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022027366
Ebook ISBN 9781635423655
a_prh_6.0_142879845_c0_r0
Contents
Cover
Also by Raja Shehadeh
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
To Be Continued
Acknowledgments
About the Author
One
I could hear him entering the office with his usual gusto. As always, I took a deep breath when my father came in. He stopped at the reception to get the latest messages, then asked, “Has anyone called?” With small, quick steps thumping the ground, he walked past my room followed by his secretary, to whom he was already dictating letters concerning the day’s court hearings. He was wearing a dark suit with a well-ironed white shirt and a black tie and carrying his heavy black leather briefcase. Then he doubled back and peered through the open door to my room. He saw me looking over a map covered in cobweb lines and asked accusingly, “What are you doing? Don’t you have any work to do?” Before I could explain, he had darted into his office to resume dictating.
I stayed in my office, examining the new 1984 military order plus the attached map that my father had seen me with. Road Plan Number 50, as it was designated, was the blueprint for the Israeli occupation authorities’ long-term objective of creating a new West Bank road network that was bound to have a devastating effect on the Palestinian landscape, on traditional towns and villages and agricultural areas. Studying it, I could see where future roads were to be built, how the existing network of roads was to be altered – from a north–south to an east–west grid – and how the Jordan Valley was to get a new road, one that would better connect it to Israel and consolidate it as the country’s eastern border. The implications were massive.
Published by the Israel Defense Forces and the Civil Administration, this is the map of the Regional Road Plan Number 50. The thickness of the lines indicates whether the proposed road is main, regional or local. The scale is 1:100,000 making it very difficult to read.
I gave my father time to finish dictating his letters, then I walked over to his office to show him the new order and map, which had only arrived in the post that day. When I suggested to him that we should submit objections to the proposal, he was not enthusiastic. He didn’t seem to share my sense of foreboding about the impact that the order would have on the land.
The phone rang and he answered: “Aziz Shehadeh here. How can I help you?”
Waving me away, he sank into a conversation with his client. But I continued to think about the new Road Plan. A few weeks earlier I had taken a solitary drive down what we then called the Latrun Road, since it linked the hilly town of Ramallah to the coastal city of Jaffa via the Latrun Monastery. On both sides of the road I could see terraced hills dotted with olive trees in full leaf. The trees on the slopes of these undulating hills were all approximately the same height and they were all olives. As I drove northwest, the hills were awash with sunlight and the trees cast their shadows over the brown earth all the way down to the wadi.
On the hill to my right was a plot that belonged to my client. He had just heard that the occupation authorities had expropriated it and were planning to establish Beit Horon and settle it with Israeli Jews. I couldn’t understand why. What was the point of putting Israeli civilians in the midst of our hills, so close to a Palestinian village? How would these settlers get their electricity and water? They couldn’t depend on the inadequate services from the nearby village. Could they possibly have plans for an alternative infrastructure? It was then that the worrying thought struck me like lightning: what if our Israeli occupiers, who already had total control of the networks serving us, were proposing to construct a superior network for water, electricity and roads connecting the settlements to Israel? That would mean they could cut us off without affecting their own people. We would be completely at their mercy for essential services. When I saw the military order announcing the new Road Plan I feared that the Israeli military was taking the first step to prepare the way for this eventuality.
* * *
—
We called these hills jbal (mountains), because we didn’t know any better. We had no mountains round about and thought that’s what our rolling hills were, for that was how they appeared to us. There was much then that we didn’t know. How could we have imagined that in these remote locations new settlements would be established that would sweep away the olive groves, changing the entire character of the area we knew and replacing our terraced hills with a concrete landscape, row upon row of uniform houses and straight, many-laned highways, as had already occurred in other parts of the Occupied Territories?
Before 1967, the West Bank under Jordan was an impoverished, underdeveloped place. To build a single house was a big project that took a whole year to accomplish. The idea of taking over an entire jabal, building houses for a settlement and managing to supply it with water and electricity, was beyond us. The most we were able to build were single round stone structures that we called qasrs (castles), because they appeared to us like castles rising in the midst of the hills. They took their water from the nearby spring; there was no running water, no electricity and certainly no connection to a paved road. Water was scarce even within the confines of our existing cities. Every house had to have its own cistern for collecting rainwater to supplement what arrived irregularly through municipal pipes. To manage to bring water to remote areas was unimaginable.
A week after my first look at the Road Plan, I happened to be driving on that same road when I saw down to my right huge excavations: scores of olive trees that belonged to the residents of the nearby village and provided their main source of income were being uprooted. A new road was already being dug in the hills to replace the narrow, winding Latrun Road, which had been there from the days of the First World War and, like all our other roads, followed the contours of the hills. Now that I had seen the latest military order I felt certain that this new road was part of the comprehensive, alternative road network that the occupation authorities had devised. I knew we should waste no time in submitting legal challenges to try to stop the Israeli plan.
Over several days I tried to convey the urgency of the matter to my father and to express what I thought could be the impact of this new order. He listened, but I couldn’t get him to share my concerns. However, I was relieved that he didn’t stand in the way of my determination to challenge the Israeli military.
* * *
—
At thirty-three years of age, I had been a lawyer for five years but I still relied on my father’s counsel and his superior legal knowledge. He directed me to the laws I needed to consult. He was the unrivaled expert on land use and planning legislation. His initial view was that the law did not permit the Central Planning Authority, which was now staffed by Israeli officers, to devise a comprehensive Road Plan for the entire West Bank. In other words, there was no legal basis for the road map attached to the military order.
“The first law that you should study is the 1965 Jordanian Planning Law. It is still applicable. There you can find the different categories of roads and the procedures for challenging each one. Now go and study, and leave me alone to finish my work,” he instructed me, without moving his eyes fro
I made a start immediately.
* * *
—
I found that my father was, as always, right. According to the Jordanian Planning Law, the Central Planning Authority had no power to devise a comprehensive Road Plan for the entire West Bank. This made the plan inconsistent with local law, which outlined the process for building individual roads but did not provide any legal basis for producing a single overarching plan. The proposed network would turn everything upside down. It would also wreak havoc on the landscape, replacing the narrow roads that followed the contours of the hills with wide, many-laned highways. It was clear to me that the new plans were not for the benefit of the local Palestinian population, as the law required. The main objective was to minimize travel time between Israel and the Jewish settlements, thus making them more attractive for Israelis to settle in. The more I looked into it the more I appreciated the enormity of the matter.
Further study of the 1984 Road Plan clarified many other issues that had mystified me, such as why the Israeli planning authorities adamantly refused to grant building licenses for certain structures that fulfilled all the necessary requirements, and why they rejected perfectly proper and meticulously produced plans for the expansion of towns and villages using improper, fake technical objections to justify their stance and stop the plans being implemented. From what I could see from the Road Plan, the rejections had been issued because these structures and the proposed zoning for expanded Palestinian towns and villages went against the vision for the area conceived by the Israeli planners, who were allocating the largest part of the land for future Jewish settlements. The Israeli planning authorities, staffed since the early 1980s by right-wingers committed to the political vision of Greater Israel, didn’t want anything to stand in the way of their long-term schemes. The map attached to Road Plan Number 50 was the foundation of all the land use planning that would ensue. By consulting this map, I learned of Israel’s vision for the West Bank. It was all there in the cobweb-like network of roads traversing the territory from east to west and along the Jordan Valley. It was imperative that we did all we could to block it before the plans became a reality.
First, we had to encourage local farmers whose lands would be affected to submit objections. However, although this might force the Israeli authorities to change the route of individual roads, it would not make them cancel the whole plan. Something more had to be done.
I went to consult my father and told him what I had come up with. He was silent for a while, thinking, then he said, “You’ve missed the most important point. International law does not allow an occupier to make long-term investments in an occupied territory. Clearly, with this plan, that’s precisely what Israel is doing.” He looked up at me with his winning smile.
Agreeing that this was a crucial point I had missed, I was keen to start writing a legal brief immediately, putting down all these objections to the plan. But did he really think there was any possibility of drawing up a convincing case against the plan under international law?
“More study will be needed before we’re ready to do that,” he said.
I mentioned that I had been reading about Namibia’s struggle for independence and the significance of the opinion given by the International Court of Justice at The Hague on a question submitted in 1970 by the Security Council of the United Nations. “Could we possibly interest the Security Council and ask them to formulate a request for an opinion from the ICJ on the legality of the Israeli Road Plan?” I asked.
My father always enjoyed the challenge of a new legal question and I could see his eyes lighting up at my suggestion. When I left his office I noticed that he was getting up and walking towards the shelf across from his desk, where he kept the references on international law, to begin the research for this new legal approach.
* * *
—
For weeks we worked together on the legal brief. We found good arguments as to why this was an appropriate question for the International Court of Justice on which to express its opinion to the UN General Assembly. What remained was the question of how to secure a resolution from the General Assembly to direct the question to the ICJ. This would need the cooperation of the Palestine Liberation Organization, which has observer status at the UN and enjoyed strong support among the members of the General Assembly. It was possible that it could muster a majority from the General Assembly for a decision to request such an opinion from the ICJ. When I suggested to my father that we send the brief to the PLO and ask for their support, I found that his enthusiasm waned.
For many years my father was a strong advocate for the establishment of a Palestinian state next to Israel as a solution to the conflict. His proposal was fiercely opposed by the PLO, as well as by Israel and the Arab states. By 1980 he had given up on the prospect of this ever happening. He then dedicated himself to pursuing a number of initiatives involving education, health and the development of the legal system. But invariably his projects were blocked by Israel. When he and other colleagues worked on promoting a separate Bar association from that of Jordan, which was paying a stipend to West Bank lawyers to remain on strike, their efforts were blocked by Jordan.
When it wasn’t Israel or Jordan who did the blocking, then it was the PLO. Because of factional rivalries, the PLO prevented many of these vital projects from succeeding, including those which Israel, after strenuous efforts on the part of the promoters, reluctantly approved. With large amounts of money in its coffers, the organization was able to wield significant power in the civil society of the Occupied Territories and pull strings as it suited them. While Israel sped ahead, we lagged behind, blaming everything on the occupation, watching as our society became worse off than when we had been under the stifling Jordanian rule. There was a scramble for the land and we were not doing everything possible to win it.
When my father and I finished our brief, which was published by Al Haq, the human rights organization I helped establish, I managed to secure my father’s approval that we attach a copy of the map and send it to the PLO. To my utter dismay, they expressed no interest in pursuing this important development. I should have realized, from the failure of past attempts to draw their attention to the extensive alterations that were taking place to the laws in force in the Occupied Territories, that this challenge would not engage the PLO, whose leaders had staked everything on their success in liberating the entire country. What surprised and distressed me further, though, was my father’s growing lack of enthusiasm for the case that I had put together, even though his name, along with mine and my uncle’s – my father’s brother, Fuad, was a partner in the law firm – appeared on the brief. I could not understand why this was. Had he given up on using the law to resist Israel’s occupation?
* * *
—
Many years later, I have come to I realize that the emotions I was experiencing as a result of Israel’s transformation of our world must have been similar to those that my father had experienced after 1948. He witnessed the division of the Palestine he knew between Israel and Jordan after he was forced to leave his home and law office in Jaffa and settle in Ramallah, which came to be under Jordanian rule. It must have felt just as incredible to him that this change could happen, and prove to be permanent, as the changes that I was witnessing under Israeli law seemed to me. And yet we never spoke about this, and nor did the similarities in our experiences bring us any closer together.
Although obviously we didn’t know it at the time, our work on the 1984 Road Plan was to be one of the last times that my father and I worked together. On December 2, 1985, he was murdered. With my father’s sudden death, I lost any chance of talking to him about his many years of struggle and of understanding him better.
Sadly, I was still in competition with him. Not being aware of the extent and the sheer number of battles he had fought during his life, I could not understand the measure of his anger, disappointment and unhappiness. In time I could have come to appreciate all this and show more kindness and understanding towards him. He was healthy and took good care of himself. There was ample reason to believe that he still had a good number of years ahead of him. Yet with his untimely death there was no more opportunity for any of that.
