Strangers in the House, by Raja Shehadeh

In occupied Palestine, a lawyer and his father struggled for truth. Caroline Moorehead acclaims a moving memoir

Three years before Raja Shehadeh was born, his parents left their home in Jaffa for the safety of the Ramallah hills. It was 1947, the British mandate in Palestine was ending, and Arabs feared Israeli attack. Still believing in the UN peace plan, which advocated partition and left Jaffa within Arab rule, they expected to be gone two weeks. They took nothing with them, not even the porcelain tea cups in which his grandmother served tea to her friends.

They never went back. The two weeks, as Shehadeh writes, "stretched forever". By the time he was born, the family had become gareebeh, strangers, exiles from Jaffa,bride of the sea, in landlocked windy Ramallah, on whose heights his father Aziz would stand, looking towards the coast and a past he could not reconcile himself to losing. Jaffa became a suburb of Israeli Tel Aviv. Aziz, an imaginative and tenacious lawyer, spent his life fighting for reconciliation between Arabs and Jews, proposing plans he was forced to watch reviled and abandoned, one by one.

Told almost entirely in terms of the relationship between father and son – intense, mutually dependent, riven by misunderstanding, Strangers in the House is the story of the Arab-Israeli divide as it grew wider and more bitter over the years. Raja, largely to please his father, became a lawyer; but his way of dealing with his alienation was to turn away from political solutions to insistence on the rule of law.

Co-founder of what turned into the remarkable Palestinian human rights organisation, Al-Haq, in 1978, Raja carried his own protest at the destruction of his land to international conferences and into reports on torture, land seizures and unfair trials under the occupying Israelis. By day, he worked as a lawyer; by night, he wrote.

It is is almost entirely through the prism of the two men's work and characters, and the great differences between the hopes of their generations, that the history of Palestine and Israel unfolds. What gives the narrative its focus and power is precisely this rift, in which their country's conflict is mirrored: two courageous men locked in a state of unyielding embattlement.

They might, perhaps, have come to some kind of understanding when the human- rights and political worlds seemed to dovetail at the Madrid peace conference in Madrid in 1991. But in 1985, when Raja was in America launching a book, Aziz was murdered. Going home from his law office one winter's evening, he was knifed and left to bleed to death. Much show was made by the Israeli police of finding his killers. Raza put his faith, knowing his father would have, into their desire to do so. After two years, the family had to accept that the police had little intention of solving the murder, and were probably harbouring those who carried it out for their own political reasons.

Strangers in the House is a sad, dignified book. Shehadeh writes with great clarity and simplicity, but no bitterness, more in sorrow than in anger, about the unhappy history of his family and country. The 17 years since his father's death are covered in just a few pages, but are in some sense present all the time: a constant reminder that all Aziz most feared has come to pass.