We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I is an account of the lives of two men: Aziz Shehadeh, a lawyer who fought for a Palestinian state and the right of Palestinians forced from their homes to return, and his son Raja Shehadeh, the author, also a lawyer, who in this text grapples with his relationship with his father and his influence on the author's own trajectory as a lawyer and activist. Raja considers the distinctions both men have, at different times, made between legal work, political work, and human rights work, and the similarities between some of their experiences that they never got the chance to discuss. Aziz was murdered in 1985, and at the time of publication the author still had not successfully obtained the release of the documents pertaining to the police investigation that was shut down before it was finished.

Content warnings: war, colonization, forced displacement, deportation, murder, forced institutionalization, violence, grief