Strangers in the House: Coming of Age in Occupied Palestine

By Raja Shehadeh, Steerforth Press, 2002, 238 pp. List: $25; AET: $18.75.

Reviewed by Pat McDonnell Twair

At times, passages in Strangers in the House read like poetry, yet Raja Shehadeh provides a painstaking account of the theft of a nation and his family’s loss of considerable property in Jaffa when it was overrun by Israeli gunmen in 1948.

In this candid memoir, the Christian Palestinian attorney who, along with Jonathan Kuttab and Charles Shammas, co-founded Al-Haq (“Law in the Service of Man”) in 1979, discusses his lifelong struggle to live up to his father’s expectations. His coming of age was further complicated by distrust from fellow Palestinians because Shehadeh’s father publicly called for a two-state solution days after the June 1967 Israeli takeover of the West Bank and Gaza.

What distinguishes this book from so many others written by Palestinians of the author’s generation is the literary quality of his writing. Yes, we have Edward Said, but Shehadeh’s family remained in Palestine—albeit transplanted from Jaffa to his maternal grandmother’s summer house in nearby Ramallah.

Staying put, Shehadeh writes, is the biggest act of Palestinian heroism: “in our case [bureaucratic hassles] were not random, occasional, or intermittent. They were persistent and constant, part of a policy to make the life of Palestinians so difficult that it would seem better to leave than to stay and suffer. In our determination to stay put lay our heroism, not in acts of daring or even in military operations taken in resistance to the occupation. These were carried out by the smallest minority. The majority was resisting through staying put.”

Shehadeh fondly describes his maternal grandmother, Julia, the family matriarch who looked down on his attorney father as an outsider, as he was not from Jaffa, where her father had owned the splendid Nassar Hotel.

Julia never forgave her son-in-law when he made a surreptitious trip back to Jaffa weeks after it had fallen. He was to bring back her expensive furniture, but returned only with a porcelain Buddha. He had chosen to leave everything else intact until they returned.

Shehadeh’s reflection on how his father must have felt when he entered Jaffa, which seemed like a ghost town, is poignant:

“He told us how he had lingered at the locked gate of the sumptuous house of the Dajanis, which he had always admired. He gripped the pickets and peered for a long time at the garden inside. He had always aspired to own such a garden and was saddened by the sweet peas, full of pods and beginning to droop. The proud garden was trying its best to hold its own, to cover up for the neglect of its owners, who were not there to water or prune or weed. It occurred to him how welcoming a garden can be, as if it were saying: I care, I have made all this appealing for you…; But when it is abandoned and is seen from behind a closed grille, a garden appears stranded: an oddity in midlife prepared with the expectation of continuity and leisure, not flight and abandonment. Why did the Dajanis plant the garden if they were leaving? How could they stand to be away and leave behind such glory?”

The author’s grandmother may have scorned her son-in-law, but he was a prominent attorney. He was hired by the families of three men charged with assassinating Jordan’s King Abdullah, great-grandfather of the current king. This led, however, to the Hashemite regime suspecting his loyalty. The elder Shehadeh was part of a delegation to a Refugee Conference in Lausanne which tried to negotiate with the Israelis the return of Palestinians. One of his successes was to regain Palestinian funds in Barclays Bank accounts which the Israeli government seized in 1948.

Shehadeh discloses that his father stopped lamenting for Jaffa and all that he had lost when he made a second trip there shortly after the 1967 war. For 20 years he had stared from his Ramallah home toward the sea and the twinkling lights of his beloved Jaffa.

But now, once more in Jaffa, he saw the familiar lights, and was told they shimmered from Tel Aviv.

“It was at this point that my father must have realized that the glittering lights to which his eyes had been riveted for all these years were not the lights of Jaffa but those of Tel Aviv. For as the sun set, Jaffa lapsed into slumber and darkness. It was Tel Aviv that glowed with the glitter of the night-lights.”

Shehadeh’s father then broke with the past and drew up papers outlining steps to found a Palestinian state. Subsequent radio broadcasts from Damascus hinted that his father was a traitor to the cause of liberating Palestine.

The author traveled to India, passed the bar in England and, in 1976, became the first Western-educated attorney to return to practice on the West Bank.

Shehadeh’s eyewitness descriptions of Israeli torture of Palestinian youths are disturbing, but it was this systematic cruelty that led him to found Al-Haq, the first organization to document human rights violations and report on Israeli-implemented legal changes in the West Bank. The callousness of Israeli military judges and their disdain for Palestinian lawyers were the material for his books The Third Way: A Journal of Life in the West Bank and The West Bank and the Rule of Law.

His struggle for Palestinian human rights did not win approval from his father, however, who felt it took too much time from his son’s legal practice. What was the use, he argued, of condemning Israeli actions when Israeli settlements were continuing? Ironically, the Palestine Liberation Organization, Israel and Jordan suspected him of carrying out subversive political actions against each of them. Israeli security, the author states, could not conceive of a Palestinian activist who was not engaged in politics and the PLO. On the other hand, the PLO regarded human rights work as a distraction inspired by the CIA, and Jordan feared Al-Haq would develop into an alternative bar association for striking Palestinian lawyers.

Shehadeh’s memoir ends in tragedy: the murder of his father by an assailant who was never identified. The author relentlessly hounded Israeli authorities seeking information on the mysterious man who had stabbed his father in the driveway of his home.

Father and son never came to terms with each other. Shehadeh leaves the reader with many questions. Who was the man who killed his father? Why did the Israelis protect his identity? Was he a collaborator, or simply a thug his father was about to try in a court of law?

This is a haunting book chock full of historical facts and the anguish all Palestinians share.

Pat McDonnell Twair is a free-lance writer based in Los Angeles.