Once Upon a Country

by Sari Nusseibeh

  Among Arab Jerusalemites, the movement for political reform was indirectly emboldened by this building and missionary frenzy, in part because many of the reformers were exposed to modern notions in schools run by Europeans.

  Students at the Arab College, and later at my alma mater, the Anglican-run St. George’s, discovered Pan-Arabism, a movement spearheaded by Arab Christians in Beirut and Damascus, and by figures such as Abduh and Afghani in Cairo. These intellectuals, many of them fine poets and thinkers, frowned on old local loyalties of clan, tribe, and sect as leftovers of the feudalism that had arrested Arab scientific and cultural development.

  In Palestine, a main source of the nationalist fervor among Jews was Zionism. As seen in the legends surrounding the Dome of the Rock, Jews had always been an organic part of Islamic Jerusalem. (My cousin Zaki, digging through ancient documents buried for centuries in an old synagogue in Egypt, once discovered letters praising caliph Omar for allowing Jews to move back to the city after centuries of Roman and Christian prohibitions.) Around the end of the nineteenth century, most of the Jews in the city were either East European ultrareligious Jews, or Arabic speakers who had lived with the Arabs for centuries and felt themselves to be a part of Arab culture, language, and life.

  The Zionist movement had very different roots. Theodor Herzl, a journalist and failed Vienna playwright, was an assimilated Hungarian Jew. At the time he wrote The Jewish State, Herzl hadn’t even visited Palestine; he knew it only through books. What he envisioned was a future state for those Jews who would not or could not assimilate into European societies. Arabs, he was convinced, would have nothing to fear. “The Jews have no belligerent Power behind them,” he wrote, “neither are they themselves of a warlike nature.”

  Arabs were unconvinced. A decade after Herzl wrote The Jewish State, the Palestinian journalist Najib Nassar published, as a wakeup call, Zionism: Its History, Aims, and Importance. Fears of a European Jewish “invasion” made the rounds. The mayor of Jerusalem, Zia al-Khalidi, was so alarmed that he sent a missive to his friend Zadoc Khan, the chief rabbi of France. “Who can contest the rights of the Jews to Palestine?” he wrote. “God knows, historically it is indeed your country.” Nevertheless, the “brutal force of reality,” namely that the country was already thickly inhabited by Arabs, precluded mass resettlement by Jews. “In the name of God,” he concluded, “leave Palestine in peace.”1

  In terms of power and social prestige, by the nineteenth century, the Nusseibeh family stood in the shadow of other aristocratic clans in the city, foremost among them the feuding Husseini and Nashashibi families. The decline in our political fortunes that set in with the Ottomans was probably a blessing in disguise. Generally speaking, it forced the Nusseibehs to adopt distinctly bourgeois attitudes. Women shed their veils, while both men and women picked up European languages. Like other patrician families, the Nusseibehs began to move out of the Old City and into the manorial residencies in Sheikh Jarrah and Wadi el Joz. As a sign of the family’s forward-thinking attitudes, one of its members modernized a medieval fortress outside the city walls. In family folklore, the four-story house was called Al-Kasr, or “The Castle.” (The Israelis blew it up in 1948.)

  Another example of the family’s modernity was its cavalier attitude toward the past. My great-grandfather, for instance, was perfectly willing to give up his part of the key for the sake of the amorous appeal of a younger woman. One day, he announced to his wife that he wanted to take on a second wife, still common practice among the wealthy at the time. She wasn’t thrilled with the idea, and putting her disapproval in a language her husband could appreciate, she demanded compensation. She wanted the key. It was an erotic variation on the story of Jacob offering the porridge to Esau. In our case, the “birthright” now belonged to her children and not to the children of my great-grandfather’s new wife, who was my great-grandmother. Thus Great-grandfather’s amorous desires led him to establish a new branch of the family, leaving the key behind.

  My grandfather, an offspring of his father’s second nuptial bond, never missed the key. He had more important things on his mind, such as investing his inheritance in new business ventures, or spreading it freely as acts of charity, or social climbing, which, judging by his nuptial preferences, was a skill he certainly mastered. His first wife belonged to the Shihabi family, famous for scholarship. She died, and Grandfather’s second wife, my grandmother, came from the Darwish family; part of the powerful Husseini clan. When she died soon after giving birth to my father, his next and final wife was a Nashashibi, a family that rivaled the Husseinis in wealth and influence. In a matter of a few years Grandfather had managed to stitch together four ancient Jerusalem families, two of which were bitter rivals.

  Chapter Three

  Promises, Promises

  WORLD WAR I brought the 1,300-year-old political system of caliphate rule to an end, ushering in a time of great hope for Arab nationalists. In this respect my father, who came into the world in 1913, was born at an auspicious moment. One childhood photograph shows him dressed and posed like a young noble. He was still too young to realize that the Arab movement he was to embrace his entire life was about to be strangled at birth.

  With the coming of war in 1914, the relatively tolerant prewar years became a thing of the past. The Turks made the mistake of supporting the Axis powers, and the Turkish governor, Jamal Pasha, whose not-so-subtle nickname was “the Butcher,” ruled over Palestine as if it were his personal fiefdom. He brooked no dissent, and as the war dragged on and Arab sentiment turned against the masters in Constantinople, the vengeful Turk handed out death sentences with the flippant ease with which a later generation of police would write up parking violations. Water was scarce, as was food. Then came the locusts. By 1916 most Arabs secretly longed for an Allied victory. Pan-Arab intellectuals pinned their hopes on the English and French.

  Well aware of the mood, the British stoked these hopes whenever they could. T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), a British liaison officer, joined in common cause with Faisal bin Hussein, the Arabian sheikh and member of the powerful Hashemite dynasty, to destroy the Turkish army. Lawrence, speaking in good faith on behalf of his government, assured Faisal the support of the British Empire. Once the war was over and the Ottoman defeated, the Allies would help Faisal unify the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire into a single kingdom, with Faisal as king.

  The first promise of a free Arab Palestine came from the sky, when British airplanes dropped leaflets bearing the message, COME JOIN US FOR THE LIBERATION OF ALL ARABS FROM TURKISH RULE SO THAT THE ARAB KINGDOM MAY AGAIN BECOME WHAT IT WAS DURING THE TIME OF YOUR FATHERS.1

  While the English made their promises to the Arabs, they and the French were making contradictory plans, in the Sykes-Picot Pact, to divide the booty of the war between them. Meanwhile, Lord Balfour, the British secretary of state for foreign affairs, wrote, at the instigation of Chaim Weizmann, the Zionist leader, to Lord Rothschild, whose family were supporters of a Jewish state, pledging support for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” and informing him of his goverment’s support, with the proviso that the establishment of such a state “not prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities.” It was a strange promise for many reasons, not least because the proud citizens of the future “Arab kingdom” described in the flyer dropped from British airplanes were now reduced to a “non-Jewish community.” It was also an unusual promise to make when the Turks were still in charge of Palestine. Moreover, this generous pledge was made by a man who, in 1905, had pushed for immigration limits to prevent Eastern European Jews from entering England.

  In 1917, with General Edmund Allenby and his Egyptian Expeditionary Force closing in from the east, Jamal Pasha surrendered to the British. Like a scene from a Brecht play, the Turks slipped out through the gates in the middle of the night and gave the letter of surrender to the mayor, who ripped a sheet in two, attached half to a broomstick,
and wandered down Jaffa Road until he found his first British soldier.

  In 1917, the city of Jerusalem witnessed the entry of armies from the European West for the first time since Saladin tossed out the Franks. When standing victoriously inside Jaffa Gate, General Allenby did not fail to remind his troops of this historic fact. Even as he did so, the Arab crowds cheered him on. For the pan-Arabists, this was the moment they had been waiting for. With the Turks expelled, it was time to realize their dreams.

  None of the Arabs gathered at Jaffa Gate knew that Allenby’s entry was but the first step leading to Jerusalem’s being wrested from Arab hands. Once the Sykes-Picot Pact and the Balfour Declaration became public, Lawrence, having tasted British perfidy up close, returned all his medals to the British government. The Arabs of Palestine were the most directly affected by these secret agreements. With admirable candor, Lord Balfour confided to fellow politicians back in London what the Arabs could expect from the agreement:

  In Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country … Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.2

  He didn’t say this to the Arabs. The official line, duly echoed by the Zionists, was that the rights of the Arabs would be safeguarded. At every opportunity, the Zionist leader, Chaim Weizmann, declared with hand on heart that the Zionists would vouchsafe the rights and property of Arabs.

  At first Arab fears in fact seemed overblown. After the war, Faisal bin Hussein became king of Iraq, and his brother Abdullah the king of Transjordan. Palestine wasn’t in Arab hands, but neither had it turned into a Jewish state. The British made a number of improvements in Jerusalem. They finally completed a water system for the city begun by King Herod 1,900 years earlier, and they solved the locust problem, using stockpiles of poison gas brought over from Flanders. The main thing the English imported was an efficient administration, along with the very thing the inhabitants of the region had never known: law, order, and a sense of justice.

  Administration was a more accurate term than an enemy occupation, because no one wanted the Turks back. Gone was the despised system of forced conscription, which had been little better than slavery; gone were the absurd taxes that kept the population poor; gone was the never-ending and necessary baksheesh (bribery).

  The new British Mandate economy was a boon to professionals, merchants, and government civil servants. The Arab middle classes built their homes in Qatamon, Talbieh, and Baqʾa, while Jaffa Road grew into a busy commercial strip, lined with banks and shops, mostly belonging to Arab Christians.

  The general mood was upbeat enough in 1921 that Musaa Kazim al-Husseini, the president of the Arab Higher Committee, asked the Palestinian people to “put their hope in the government of Great Britain, which is famous for its justice, its concern for the well-being of the inhabitants, its safe-guarding of their rights, and consent to their lawful demands.”3

  Father’s education can serve as a good gauge of the mood among the children of Jerusalem patricians. With the exception of general hostility toward the Balfour Declaration, the Jerusalem elite fit into the social order imported by the English as if tailor-made for it. The men belonged to the same gentleman’s society, and in private, English officers tended to prefer them to the Russian Jewish upstarts streaming into the country.

  As a child, Father lived in a wonderful jumble of worlds. On top of the social pyramid sat the British governor, perched high on his white horse. He ruled from an administrative building on top of the “Hill of Evil Counsel,” where in New Testament times the Jewish High Priest had his home. (In Arabic we call the hill al-Mukabber, because when Omar first set his eyes on Jerusalem from its crest, he was so moved to tears that he asked the muezzin to call for prayer.) Then came the ornamentally dressed representatives of the various religious orders, led by the Haj Amin Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem and the most important Muslim leader in the city, and the various Christian archbishops and bishops. Next were families like ours, still living off real or imagined past glories, whose children wore pressed suits with creased trousers and typically carried a volume of modern Arabic verse or Robinson Crusoe under their arms. Their version of cowboys and Indians were Islamic warriors and Frankish Crusaders. Below the notables was the emerging class of urban professionals, mainly administrators, teachers, and merchants. Finally, down on the bottom, were the hardworking peasants, or fellahin, of the villages and countryside, proudly clad in the bright colors of their traditional dress. Rounding out the scene were Bedouin in long flowing desert djellabas, leading their camels through the streets, which now had a few private cars. (Cousin Zaki tells me that my grandfather imported Palestine’s first Buick.)

  Father’s upbringing was something out of a Victorian novel. For starters, he was the only child of a mother who had died giving birth to him, and after Grandfather remarried, he promptly put Father in the custody of a widowed aunt. This aunt was obsessed with the memory of her late husband, who was a fine Arab poet and had left behind a body of work his widowed wife memorized and recited back to my father every chance she got. It was thanks to her that Arabic poetry became for him a source of inspiration and pride, even as he was busy imbibing Latin and English literature at his thoroughly English school.

  It was a measure of the traditional religious tolerance in Jerusalem that the members of the Muslim haute bourgeoisie all attended Christian schools. The Arab College, where my father went and later taught, was one of the best schools in the Arab world at the time. Its head under the Mandate was Ahmad Sameh al-Khalidi. Khalil al-Sakakini, a poet whom my father held in high regard, was one of the school’s luminary professors. There he mastered the canon of European learning, and when he wasn’t beating English officers at their own game—he learned to play an excellent game of tennis—he was practicing the piano. Another sign of tolerance was Father’s favorite holiday: the yearly pilgrimage south of Jericho to the shrine of Nebi Musa, or Moses the Prophet and Lawgiver to whom God spoke, a custom that dates back to Saladin and takes place during Easter. The shrine, as Father liked to joke, contained nothing more edifying than the worm-eaten remnants of a wandering Bedouin tribesman. As a boy, my father loved the pilgrimage because the ceremony was accompanied by singing, dancing, lots of clowning around for the children, and, for the adults, horseracing.

  My father and his fellow students at the Arab College also picked up Arab nationalism, and in far greater doses than their parents.

  With the downfall of the Ottoman Islamic regime, Pan-Arabism was fast becoming second nature to the young generation. They had never identified with the Turks in the first place, and they harbored high hopes for the “Arab spirit,” now set free from the Ottoman yoke, to rejuvenate the glory of Arab civilization. Anyway, for a student body of Christians and Muslims tied together by class, education, and language, religion was becoming a vaguely private affair. Language, not religion, was the creative domain for young poets and intellectuals. It was for this reason that my father and his friends preferred fraternizing with the like-minded in Beirut and Alexandria to adhering to the dusty system of inherited privileges, rank, family name, and symbols in Jerusalem.

  The reigning spirit of the age was without question one of hopeful change, and yet when my father was still an adolescent, an event occurred that presaged the catastrophes that would accompany him all the way to his death. As a sixteen-year-old, he witnessed how the three-thousand-year-long Jewish spiritual attachment to the Western Wall (we call it al-Buraq, after the Prophet’s steed) turned into a nationalistic slogan, which in turn produced a nasty backlash among the Muslims. Overnight, Islam, a religion my father was raised to consider inherently humane, turned into a lethal stick with which to club opponents. Even worse, by unleashing a murderous mob on defenseless men, women, and children, the village cler
ics equally attacked Father’s luminous pan-Arab vision of a free, tolerant, and open society.

  It’s remarkable how sacred sites that can arouse in us a sense of the ineffable mystery of life can also spawn a bare-knuckle brawl. This is a mystery only a metaphysician or psychotherapist can make any sense of. I won’t try.

  In 1929, anti-Jewish rioting started after a few hundred young supporters of Zev Jabotinsky (some Jews nicknamed him their “Duce”) marched to al-Buraq hollering, “The Wall is ours!” Amid waving flags, Jabotinsky’s followers sang the “Hatikva,” the Zionist national anthem.

  Our hope is not yet lost

  The hope of two thousand years.

  To be a free people in our land

  The land of Zion and Jerusalem.

  An English journalist living in the city at the time described the scene this way: “The young heroes who passed a while ago were guarded heavily by the police; mounted officers in front of them and behind them, with policemen on foot marching alongside. The material for an awful three-cornered fight. What an exhibition of imbecility the whole thing is!”4

  Among Muslims, rumors spread that the Jews were trying to take over the Noble Sanctuary, the traditional spot of Solomon’s Temple, and a mob stirred up by the mufti went berserk. The next day, screaming “Islamiya,” Muslims raided the Wall and tore up Jewish prayer books. Then a Jewish boy was stabbed to death after a quarrel in a soccer field.