Once Upon a Country

by Sari Nusseibeh

  In Hebron, sixty-four Jews were slaughtered, all of them from an ancient religious community that had always lived in peace with its neighbors, and had nothing to do with the secular nationalism of the Russian Zionists. But the mob, inflamed by an insanely simplistic nationalism, no longer made any distinction between Jews and Zionists. It was a black-and-white proposition: them against us. An awful precedent.

  The English responded to the “al-Buraq Revolt,” so called because it started at the Western Wall, by flooding the country with soldiers. They also did something that would be repeated innumerable times in the future: they sent in clueless “experts” to find a solution.

  The anti-British sentiment created by the Balfour Declaration and by the heavy-handed response to the rioting didn’t prevent my grandfather from, out of defiance and pride, sending Father off to Cambridge to study law.

  It wasn’t long after he returned to Palestine with his degree in 1936 that he met my mother, at her father’s estate in Wadi Hnein (now the Israeli town of Nes Ziona). Her father was a wealthy landowner and political activist who regularly opened his home to political leaders and literary figures. The estate in Wadi Hnein stood amid vast tracts of orange groves that stretched all the way to Gaza. His palatial home had a swimming pool and enough guest rooms and servants to accommodate visiting effendis or even the occasional prince, king, or prime minister. King Abdullah was a frequent guest. My father showed up ostensibly to acquaint himself with the illustrious political milieu there, but in fact he wanted to set eyes on the beautiful young woman his cousin had told him about.

  I’ve been told that for my parents it was love at first sight, which was hardly a traditional Muslim way of doing things. But given the social and even blood ties between the families (my maternal grandmother was also a Nusseibeh) it might as well have been an arranged marriage. These two children of wealth and position seemed fated for a life of ease and happiness. The world stretched out before them like an open garden.

  After my parents met, my father returned to Jerusalem to start a legal practice. He must have picked up some Victorian attitudes in England, because he wasn’t about to start a family without having established himself professionally first. His ancestry, education, and his powdered wig and the black cloak of a barrister guaranteed his rapid ascension up the professional ladder. He had no doubts that he and my mother could soon marry.

  But catastrophe stood in the way. Father would soon find himself using the English legal code he adored to defend people who were doing everything in their power to evict the British from the Holy Land. In the months leading up to the rebellion, when Father was not in the courtroom defending people hauled in under the draconian security laws passed by the English in their effort to suppress a new uprising, he taught courses at the Arab College. His fellow professor, Khalil al-Sakakini, a Christian, represented what was best about the Arab Awakening. Cultured and deeply proud of his Arab heritage, he lived in the posh neighborhood of Talbieh, where he had turned his home into a literary salon for poets and intellectuals, and a meeting place for a circle of literati who called themselves the Party of the Vagabonds (hizb al-saʾaleek). Al-Sakakini’s Pan-Arabism was reflected beautifully in his verse. (Father adored his poetry, and often quoted it to me when I was a boy, in particular the poem lauding the individual’s resolute defiance against the world.)

  In his free time Father played tennis, and over the years collected enough trophies to fill several shelves. He also took long rides on horseback with Thomas Hodgkins, an English officer stationed in Jerusalem and a closet Marxist who sympathized with the Arabs. They sometimes traveled for days through the desert.

  Before it became too dangerous, that is. In 1935 political tension, building up for years, exploded into the open. The catalyst was the mass immigration of Jews fleeing for their lives from fascist Europe. Unlike in 1929, it wasn’t the mufti who stirred up trouble but instead a village cleric named Sheikh Izzeddin Qassam, who found his followers among farmers who had lost their livelihoods when absentee landowners sold their land to a Zionist organization.

  Sheikh Qassam (Hamas’s crude handmade “Qassam” rockets recall his memory) started a guerrilla campaign in the tradition of the mountain fedayeen from the Ismaili sect, who came from the Syrian mountains to terrorize the Franks centuries earlier. Qassam and his band hid out in caves, only venturing out at night to attack the British and the Jews. But Qassam’s strategic vision, like that of many subsequent Palestinian leaders, fell sadly short of his nationalistic ardor. In one of his famed exploits, he wanted to lay siege to the British navy at Haifa, with two-score of his followers armed with antiquated World War I–era rifles. He was killed in battle and his followers were duly hanged. “Martyrdom,” which always feeds base instincts, became a staple ingredient in the conflict over Palestine.

  The sheikh’s uprising may have been something straight out of the Three Stooges, but for various reasons neither the British nor even the grand mufti understood the forces the simple village cleric had released. English officers, born and bred to rule, naturally dismissed Qassam as a crackpot. For his part, the mufti was embarrassed by Qassam’s call to arms, because at the time the mufti was trying to get the British to crown him Palestinian leader.

  In truth, the grand mufti’s real fear was competition. The crudely woven kefiyyeh of the Palestinian peasant farmer in the countryside was threatening to replace the tarbush, the red felt hat (similar to the fez) with silk tassels, worn by the urban leadership. This was a classic case of a conflict between the simple man’s fanatical commitment to a cause, and the diplomatic ambiguity of sophisticated and self-serving politicians. Both methods, as it would turn out, would be equally futile.

  The following year, nobles tried their hand at an uprising. The 1936 uprising, called the Great Rebellion, began as a harmless fistfight in Jaffa before quickly escalating into brigandage. Arabs held up cars, robbing some Europeans and killing two Jews. There were reprisals and counter-reprisals, and the violence threatened to spin out of control.

  The reason it didn’t, at least initially, was because the Arab elite of the country took charge, and conducted their protest campaign with the civility of European-educated gentlemen. The Arab Higher Committee, with six members led by the grand mufti of Jerusalem, comprised political and civic leaders throughout the country. Nationalist clubs and groups put out newspapers and erected public banners calling for a stop to Jewish immigration, and in support of a freely elected representative assembly. Such an assembly would be based on majority rule, along the lines of Iraq and Transjordan, and aligned with the British but no longer governed by a policy aimed intentionally at undermining pan-Arab ambitions. Zionists, who claimed to represent Western values, logically rejected free elections in which they would have been badly outvoted. They fought ferociously, and effectively, against all efforts to weaken the Balfour Declaration, an antidemocratic document if there ever was one.

  Politically, one royal delegation after the next trooped through the country, all with the solemn expressions of well-meaning professionals trying their best not to think about the impossibility of reconciling Arab national demands with the Balfour Declaration, which the British were not prepared to abandon. Divided by the cold facts of demographics, Jews and Arabs were at loggerheads.

  To show the British that they meant business, Arab leaders organized strikes and demonstrations. (In a prime example of their ill-conceived strategies, they shut down Jaffa Port, which only encouraged the Jews to build a port of their own.)

  In 1937, the English responded with a tri-council plan, which was actually more of a power-sharing scheme that envisioned the country ruled equally by Jews, Muslims, and Christians. Arabs unthinkingly rejected the plan. A stalemate set in, and the English came up with more committees and more papers and more plans. The one thing they weren’t prepared to do was abandon Balfour.

  This largely peaceful movement quickly degenerated into a three-year guerrilla war. It began in the north
of the country when some local Arabs attacked and killed L. Y. Andrews, the acting district commissioner for Galilee, after church one Sunday. The English overreacted by pinning the moral blame for the murder on the Arab Higher Committee, which they now banned. The main members of the committee had their properties confiscated and were expelled from the country. The mufti escaped from Jerusalem dressed as a woman.

  Mother’s father was one of these expelled nobles. One day British soldiers showed up at the front door of the villa and arrested him. Operating under the new security laws, the British Mandate administration stripped him of his lands and home and sent him off to the Seychelles without a trial. My grandmother and all of her children, including my mother, moved into a small house in Ramle, which was in fact the site of the tomb of one of the family’s patriarchs, a Sufi Muslim mystic who had lived there in the fifteenth century. (Sufism is a mystical form of Islam with an ecstatic belief in unity with God through love.) As a child my mother had watched with rapture during an annual religious festival as various members of Sufi orders congregated at the house before marching off into the city streets. Now it was her home.

  My father clearly stood on the side of the rebellion, even if he considered the grand mufti of Jerusalem—who at the time was an avid admirer of Hitler—to be a disastrous leader. Father’s nuanced view of Zionism never conflated it with the Jewish people or with Judaism, both of which he held in great esteem, even after his leg was shot off in 1948 by Fighters for the Freedom of Israel, an underground Jewish faction. His conception of Pan-Arabism was of a pluralistic and vibrant society composed not only of Muslims and Christians, but also of Jews. The Pan-Arabism he believed in was not yet the chauvinist or exclusivist ideology it later became.

  Father ended up supporting the rebellion because he had come to the conclusion that the Eastern European Zionists arriving by the boatload had no interest in fitting themselves into Arab culture and society. In the Russians he saw ideologues with no understanding of the country, and without the slightest intention of respecting the culture or rights of the Arabs living there. Most of all he saw very determined men and women with scientific, industrial, and political ambitions to create a Jewish state. The attitude that frightened him the most can be summed up in Chaim Weizmann’s words: “Palestine shall be as Jewish as England is English, or America is American.”5 These were public words. In private, Zionist leaders spelled out their plans. In 1936, in a letter to his son, David Ben-Gurion wrote nakedly, “We will expel the Arabs and take their place.”6 It would be hard to think of something more antithetical to Pan-Arabism.

  The British committed an enormous blunder when they arrested my grandfather and his colleagues. The latter were political leaders, not terrorists, and most of them had probably never fired a gun in their lives. So now, instead of a secular leadership as represented by my grandfather and his colleagues, the British made way for the creation of a guerrilla war fueled by militant followers of Sheikh Qassam.

  Only after the British sent in twenty thousand troops did the Arab leaders finally agree to call off the boycott of Jaffa Port. But the country would never be the same. After 1936 only the blind refused to see that what people were now calling the “Arab problem,” it being national and not economic in nature, was not about to go away. A memorandum delivered to the British Mandate and signed by hundreds of high Arab officials and judges spoke of the “repellent” government policies and threatened the British with the “rage of the Almighty God.”7

  With the onset of World War II, the British brooked no more dissent. They were the ones who had encouraged Arabs to conduct guerrilla attacks against their Turkish overlords during the previous war, but they were not about to allow the same thing to happen to them. The British army outdid itself in its brutally repressive tactics. Its main target was the Palestinian countryside and the compliant fellahin. Stories of British brutality are still recounted in Palestinian villages to this day.

  With the country full of British, Australian, Irish, Scottish, Greek, African, and Indian soldiers, there was no point in putting up a fight, and the uprising ground to an end. Ironically, when the British first set up a law college my father got a part-time teaching job. Many of his best students were German Jewish refugees, whose presence in the country had triggered the uprising in the first place. One of his star pupils is now my lawyer. Now retired, his only remaining case is fighting attempts by the Israeli government to shut down Al-Quds University, which I now head.

  Chapter Four

  The Herod’s Gate Committee

  MY PARENTS FINALLY GOT MARRIED in 1943, and because of my father’s position as itinerant court judge—the active life of a lawyer, judge, and later politician suited him more than teaching—they shifted residences from Jerusalem to Jaffa to Tiberias to Ramallah. Within five years, my father had a permanent position back in Jerusalem, and my parents and their two girls and one boy lived in a house across the street from the American Colony Hotel. (Munira and Saedah, my sisters, were born in 1944 and 1945, and my brother Zaki in 1946.) Life seemed to be returning to normal, when new disasters occurred. I, their fourth child, was born shortly after the tragedy called by Palestinians the Nakba, or the “Catastrophe.”

  The year of my conception, 1948, witnessed the collapse of the Palestinian dream. It was a year that left Father fighting for his life in a Beirut hospital from bullet wounds in his legs; my mother huddled in a cramped Damascus apartment, where she eventually gave birth to me; and her family along with seven hundred thousand Palestinians driven from their homes. An ancient way of life had come to an end.

  Throughout my youth I heard innumerable accounts of my father’s role as “Defender of Jerusalem” in the war of 1947 and 1948. But it was only after Father died in 1986 that I stumbled across the unpublished firsthand report he wrote in 1949 detailing precisely the part he had played. In Cairo recovering from his wounds, and running the offices of the so-called All-Palestine Government, he composed a sixty-thousand-word personal account of the battle for Jerusalem and for Palestine. As I read it, I imagined him typing away, doing his best not to think about the leg that had been blown off by the Stern Gang, the British name for the Fighters for the Freedom of Israel, and the fact that soon he would have yet another hungry mouth to feed. What I found more difficult to imagine was the role this paragon of bourgeois respectability—a judge, governor, and ambassador—had had in the battle for Jerusalem, when he donned a powdered wig and gown for his day job, then moonlighted as a gunrunner by night.

  During the war the British finally permitted my grandfather to return from exile in the Seychelles—just not to Palestine. They moved him to Egypt. It was only late in the war, after eight years in exile, that he was finally allowed to join his family in their cramped quarters in Ramle. There was no returning to the estate in Wadi Hnein; the British had burnt it to the ground. With his wealth and properties confiscated, by day he ran a small shop, and by night he read, prayed, and chanted mystical Sufi songs.

  In 1946 the British legalized the Arab Higher Committee. Almost immediately the local inhabitants of Ramle honored Grandfather by installing him as their mayor. But his health was broken, and the next year he died of a heart attack at the age of forty-eight. He was buried in Ramle in the tomb of a Sufi master and sage.

  At the time of Grandfather’s death, the country was descending into civil war. To stop the now-daily terrorist attacks, the British went back into the business of meting out draconian sentences. Mere possession of a weapon or ammunition was a capital offense. As in 1936, my father again had his hands full defending Arab nationalists in court.

  In Jerusalem political tensions lay close to the surface. My father used to visit his friend Raouf in his office behind the King David Hotel, where the two of them sat and drank coffee and where my father often overheard the bloodcurdling threats that Raouf and a Jewish colleague traded under their breaths. As professionals, the two men respected each other, but because of the nationalist conflict, they greete
d each other with a combination of friendly hellos and threats. “What kind of madness was this?” my father asks in his memoirs. The two men were hardly to blame as individuals. After all, what could Raouf and his Jewish colleague have done to stem what must have seemed to them the inevitable tide of history pulling their respective peoples apart? They continued to work as colleagues, and after clocking out they returned to their respective tribes, each preparing for a war everyone felt was inevitable.

  My father’s memoirs turn on one date: November 29, 1947, the day the United Nations General Assembly voted in favor of the partition of Palestine. The same British who had endured the Nazi Blitzkrieg had had enough: terrorism and the cost of pacifying the country were driving them away.

  The preceding year saw a massive upsurge in organized, systematic terrorism. Initially, most of it came from the Jewish underground for simple, logical reasons. The Arabs had never recovered from the 1936–39 uprising: their political leadership was fragmented, and most of the old guerrilla leaders were either dead or still in prison. Moreover, the Arabs had no compelling reason to attack the British. Time seemed to be on their side, as the British were clamping down on Jewish immigration from Europe—and without a massive influx of immigrants, everyone knew there would never be a Jewish state.

  By contrast, immigration was the main factor triggering Jewish terrorism. Fueled by a potent mixture of desperation, ideology, and political calculation, Zionist forces were resorting to terrorism to pressure the government to allow survivors from Nazi death camps into the country.

  Father describes many of the acts that finally led to British capitulation, many of them perpetrated by the Stern Gang, the most active Jewish terrorist organization and the group who later took Father’s leg. The group’s founder, Abraham Stern, is described in my father’s manuscript as an ex-student of the Hebrew University: “He was a very nice, quiet, studious type of fellow,” my father wrote. Members of his group kidnapped two British soldiers, executed them, and hung their booby-trapped bodies from a tree in a eucalyptus grove. “When the rescue party came to lower them to the ground, a bomb wired to the corpses exploded.” Then there was the machine-gunning and killing of British soldiers asleep in their camp in Tel Aviv.