You're listening to the LRB podcast, and I'm your host, Adam Shats.

My guest on this week's episode is a man I've known and admired for nearly two decades,

the writer and lawyer Raja Shahadeh, who's joining us from Ramallah in Palestine.

Raja founded the Palestinian Human Rights Organization Al-Hak in 1979,

and he's the author of numerous memoirs about life under occupation,

including strangers in the house,

Palestinian walks, and going home. His latest book, We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I,

which has just been published by profile books, is among his most powerful. It's a reflection on the political and emotional consequences

of the Nakpa and on the place of law in the Palestinian struggle for freedom and independence.

But it's also a story about Shahada's own family and the most moving book about the bonds between

fathers and sons that I've read since Philip Roth's

patrimony.

Raja, thank you for joining us on the LRB podcast.

It's a pleasure, Adam.

Raja, this was obviously a very difficult, emotionally taxing book to write.

And for understandable reasons, it's a book you couldn't face writing for some time.

Your father, the lawyer Aziz Shahada, a man who had been active in defending Palestinian rights since the 1930s, was murdered in 1985 by a man who was later revealed to have been an Israeli collaborator.

By then, you were also a lawyer, but your relations with your father had been troubled,

and when your mother gave you a cabinet of his files, you weren't inclined at first to look at them. When did you finally summon the will

to open those files and what moved you to do so?

Well, Adam, I have been aware the last year of my father's life that he was working

on putting his papers in order. And he was a very meticulous man and man of detail.

...