Once Upon a Country

by Sari Nusseibeh

  The blisteringly hot summer sun took its toll, and many people died along the way. My family managed to survive the foot journey east. Mother made her way to join my older siblings, Munira, Saedah, and Zaki, now in Damascus. At first my grandmother joined her, then eventually moved to Cairo with her children. Ironically, Cairo was where her dead husband had been exiled, and now she began her life as a refugee there. The one thing she didn’t dare do was head back to Ramle. Israeli shoot-to-kill orders prevented people—the Israelis called them “infiltrators”—from returning to their ancestral lands.

  After his recovery in a Beirut hospital, Father returned to the divided land, where he was asked to join a new Palestinian “government,” to be established in Gaza under the leadership of the grand mufti. Soon after its establishment, this “government” moved to Cairo, as did my father. In a pathetic sop to Palestinian national sentiment, the League of Arab States, formed in 1945, offered this “government” a few shabby offices with broken furniture in its own headquarters. This was where Father spent the following two miserable years, almost penniless and increasingly annoyed at the fictitious Palestinian “government” he was a part of, and at the mendacious Arab leaders who had set it up. With little else to do in his empty office, he composed his memoirs.

  But he refused to be defeated by circumstances. (He loved the hoary English motto to “pull yourself up by your bootstraps,” which he often inserted seamlessly into long monologues in Arabic.) Many years later he recounted to me a story that for more than half a century had remained untold. With Israel now firmly established, the Palestinian “government” languishing ineffectively in Cairo, and concern growing over the remaining Palestinian territories now under Jordanian control, the earlier ideological rejection of the UN partition plan started to seem rather misguided, to put it mildly. There had always been those among the Palestinian elite who believed that the partition plan should have been accepted, but the grand mufti, the towering figure in the leadership, had always been against it. Mother tells me that her own father, though a member of the leadership at the time, had been in favor of partition.

  From the vantage point of his Cairo office, where the prospects for the future looked bleak, Father concluded that the time was ripe to raise the issue of partition again with the mufti. For the mufti, the alternative was to allow his rival, King Hussein of Transjordan, to absorb the West Bank and Jerusalem into his kingdom. True to character, Father phoned the mufti and persuaded him to send him to London as a secret envoy, with a written statement signed by the mufti declaring his acceptance of the plan.

  Carrying this top-secret document in his pocket, Father flew to London. It was a highly sensitive mission fraught with potential dangers, for the slightest indiscretion could totally unhinge the plan—and could cost him more of his remaining limbs. He had promised the mufti that he would initiate contact with officials from the British government only if there was utmost secrecy.

  Upon his arrival in London, the “cat,” to use another of Father’s English idioms, was “out of the bag.” A newspaper report hinted at a furtive Arab rapprochement with Israel. Father felt personally threatened by the report, and with the specter of vitriolic Arab attacks against him should his mission be discovered, he headed back to Cairo with the document still in his pocket. Father came to think that Israel had leaked the story, as the freshly created Jewish state was in no rush to return to the borders prescribed by the United Nations in exchange for peace with the defeated Arab side. The secret deal they had made with King Hussein had given them far more.

  “What happened to the statement?” I asked Father when he recounted the story shortly before he died. “Do you still have it with you?”

  Gazing into the distance, Father smiled. “As soon as I returned, the mufti immediately demanded it back, and as soon as I handed it over, he tore it to shreds.”

  Back in Cairo, Father was finally convinced that the All-Palestine Government was a sham product of internecine Arab squabbles. In fact, the pseudo-government was an attempt at undermining King Abdullah, the only Arab leader who had benefited from the war.

  The secret agreements the king had made with Ben-Gurion had secured him a sizable piece of new territory. Ben-Gurion proved a reliable partner by preventing a number of young Israeli generals from having their way and conquering the West Bank, which they could easily have done. Abdullah and his British-trained Bedouin army controlled the West Bank and Jerusalem. The fortified No Man’s Land running through the middle of Jerusalem was, for Abdullah, a source of comfort. With a strong and reliable Israeli state at his back, he could more easily incorporate his war booty into his desert kingdom, and at the same time fend off the poisonous darts coming at him from his Arab brethren. Now owning both banks of the Jordan, Abdullah changed the name of his kingdom from Transjordan to Jordan.

  Meanwhile, my pregnant mother was in a cramped apartment in Damascus with her three children, her mother, and all her siblings. As fate would have it, I came into the world during a record cold snap, when Damascus was covered with a thick blanket of snow. It seems that I didn’t stop crying from the moment I was born. I still didn’t have a name, but jokesters in the family found a provisional solution. The Russian scenery outside, combined with the fact that Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and Notes from the Underground were being passed from one family member to the next, inspired the family to give me the temporary name of “Dostoevsky.” And so it was: for a few precious days, until word got to my father, I was named after the darkly metaphysical Russian novelist.

  The wire from Cairo eventually arrived. “Mabrouk” [Congratulations], began the telegram, “on the birth of Sari.” Father chose the name both for its linguistic association with Mohammed’s Night Journey and because it had been the name of the dead son of Khalil al-Sakakini, the celebrated literary figure and teacher at the now-defunct Arab College. I would like to believe that al-Sakakini’s poem on the individual’s rebellion was on Father’s mind when he came up with my name.

  Father soon decided to put an end to the Cairo charade. Weighing the options of working for a powerless government in exile and living as an ordinary citizen back home in Jerusalem, he opted for the latter. He was hardly alone in his disgust at Arab politics. Young Egyptian army officers led by Gamal Abdul-Nasser, incensed at the Egyptian king Farouk’s apparent apathy for the Arab cause, were already cooking up a plot to overthrow the monarchy. In Palestinian circles, young activists and students inspired by the young Yasir Arafat were also planning to get rid of the mufti and the old regime of notables.

  By the time my parents returned to Jordanian-controlled Jerusalem in 1951, it no longer was made up of the rich fabric of a cosmopolitan British-governed city. Gone were the English and Arab aristocrats, the free-wheeling parvenus, middle-class tradesmen, and the demimonde catering to soldiers; gone were the bohemians, servants, and British clerks; gone too were the rich blend of cultures—the bishops, Muslim clerics, and black-bearded rabbis crowding the same streets.

  What was left was a tired provincial city with barbed wire snaking through its center, and much of its political life drained off to the desert capital of Amman.

  Without the British court system providing a semblance of good legal practice, Father decided to set up his own law offices. He soon found work as a lawyer for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), defending the rights of refugees.

  On the political front, Father only had two options: either to accept Jordanian domination, or to leave politics altogether. That year, King Abdullah organized the “Jericho Conference,” in which Palestinian notables and leaders declared their loyalty to the king and their acquiescence to a union between lands straddling the two banks of the Jordan River. Wishing to further solidify his rule over the West Bank, the king approached Father, a bona fide war hero, with an offer he couldn’t refuse: he promised to make him minister of defense. Father hadn’t attended the Jericho Conference, and he agreed to the king’s proposition only b
ecause he assumed the union was a transitory measure, pending the restitution of Palestinian rights. Soon after accepting the post, Father was elected as Jerusalem representative to the Jordanian parliament. This launched him into a fifteen-year career of frenetic political activity.

  This is important to point out because it meant that I barely got to know him as I was growing up. Fitted with a metal leg, he spent his days rushing to meetings in Jerusalem, Ramallah, Amman, or farther afield. The evenings when he was home, he was huddled with his brothers, friends, and colleagues in heated political debate.

  Success as a parliamentarian soon led to an offer to lead the kingdom’s Baath (or “Renaissance”) Party, a pan-Arabist movement created by Christian nationalists in Syria and Iraq. But the Baath Party’s mixture of Arab nationalism and socialism, so redolent of European fascism, made Father suspicious, and he demurred. He did something far more ambitious instead: he started the Constitutional Party. His aim was to create a liberal, open system that could help bring the splintered Arab states together, much as Jean Monnet was trying to bring together postwar Europe. (Monnet, a French diplomat from a family of cognac merchants, pushed the idea of European union as a way to prevent future wars.) And for him, the linchpin to Arab unity was the constitutional rule of law.

  Father became fully immersed in Jordanian politics. It was he who greeted the young King Hussein in 1954 when the latter returned from the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. Three years earlier, his grandfather King Abdullah had been assassinated, after Friday prayers on the steps outside the Dome of the Rock. That day the young prince, wearing a medal Abdullah had given him, stood proudly next to his grandfather. The assassin had intended to kill them both; what saved the prince, now king and forty-second direct descendant of the Prophet Mohammed, was the medal pinned to his uniform. Since King Hussein was only fifteen at the time, a regency ran the country until he finished his studies at Sandhurst. (His father had become king but abdicated within a year due to mental illness.) His English teachers there addressed him as “Mr. King Hussein sir.”

  Even if he disagreed with many of his policies, Father always retained a paternal fondness for the new king, who was twenty years his junior. (King Hussein was born in 1935.) But Father’s primary loyalty was neither to the king nor even to himself: it was to his principles, a sure guarantee for a checkered political career.

  I was raised in a house on Nablus Road in Jerusalem, not far from where my uncle’s “Castle” once stood. The home had an old-world feeling to it, with Persian carpets, gold-embossed academic degrees on the wall, crystal decanters for after-dinner drinks, and dozens of finely buffed tennis trophies. Across the street was the American Colony Hotel, once the home of a Turkish pasha and his three wives. Next to that was a small private cemetery, housing the graves of the Husseini family.

  My first memories of my father are of a distant man who would occasionally take my brothers and me up to the Noble Sanctuary for Muslim festivals, or to funerals or other occasions. As a Nusseibeh, he had to practice a tolerant ecumenicalism. He made sure we all fasted during Ramadan, and like clockwork every Friday, he was in the Al-Aqsa mosque for his prayers. On Christian holidays he visited church dignitaries, as they visited us on our holidays. Once a year, members of our extended clan joined the high clergy dressed in robes and carrying golden crosses to circle the Church of the Holy Sepulcher seven times. Of all the religious ceremonies, my brothers and I liked this one the most because the Christian girls were by a long shot the prettiest in town.

  Religious ceremonies may have played a prominent role in Father’s public life, but in private he always believed that creeds had to serve man, and not the other way around. To quote from his manuscript, “religion, being essentially universal and one, should be made to serve the end of uniting the world rather than separating it.”

  Mother ran the household and raised the children. (Her fifth and sixth, Hatem and Saker, came along in 1955 and 1961.) She was the perfect complement to a man who hadn’t the faintest idea how to relate to children. Holding a child was for my father like carrying a weapon: he preferred leaving it to the professionals. For Mother it came naturally, and the home she created was always so full of love that she diffused sibling rivalries and jealousies before they could arise. She also instilled in us loyalty to our extended families. Each year she sent us to Cairo to spend our school holidays with her exiled family, and when the widowed aunt who had raised my father fell ill, Mother took her into our home, where she stayed until her death. I still can picture this melancholy octogenarian lying on her bed, reciting endlessly with a haunting voice the elegiac poetry of her deceased husband.

  I’ve often suspected that Mother’s intuitive grasp of the art of nurturing children might have stemmed from her father’s Sufism. Whatever the source, the Islam she inculcated in us was a religion with minimal miracles—Mohammed’s nocturnal ride on his magical steed is one of the few I can think of—and a cornucopia of rock-solid humanistic values. For her, Islam taught dignity, honesty, self-worth, simplicity, kindness, and of course love. Endless love. It was also flexible enough to change with the times. With the conclusion of the Ramadan holiday, on the first day of the Eid, she allowed my father and uncles to break out the beer and whiskey. In her Islam, there was also no competition among faiths. My mother, a pious Muslim, had no problem telling us that the Via Dolorosa was the path of Christ’s Passion, or celebrating Christmas with a Santa Claus and a brightly ornamented tree.

  Some of the sweetest memories of my youth are of cold Ramadan nights when my aunts and great aunts would visit us from Damascus or Amman or Lebanon. After breaking the fast, we would sit by the fireside, roast chestnuts, and listen in near rapture as our aunts mesmerized us with fables and tales.

  Islam was thus no different for Jerusalem families like ours than Catholicism or Anglicanism was for our Christian friends, or as I would later learn Judaism was for Amos Oz a couple of hundred feet away, just beyond No Man’s Land. We had our rites and feasts; religion added a bit of spice to life, but it didn’t go much beyond that, and certainly never came between us and our education. The only place to meet the sort of wild-eyed fanatics who pose as Islam’s spokesmen today would have been in old musty stories of Sheikh Qassam, or in St. George’s library collection of Victorian-era horror novels.

  One thing I should mention about my mother was her almost religious respect for the wash ladies and drivers and cooks and peddlers who came in and out of our home. Here we were at the top of the pyramid in a class-conscious society, a society in which those with position and power liked to lord it over those with less, and yet I never saw my mother treat a beggar with less regard than someone of her own class, and sometimes with more.

  Looking back on my childhood, I can say that Mother’s tolerance had only one limit—and yet, as we shall see, even this was provisional. She made no bones about her dislike of the Jews. When Mother spoke about the “Jews,” she didn’t mean Jews in New York or Argentina, or even the tailors, greengrocers, or managers of the Edison Cinema in West Jerusalem she’d liked so much before 1947. She meant the Zionists who plotted to take over her country, who’d shot her husband’s leg off, and whom she held responsible for her father’s early death, the uprooting of her ancient roots on the coastal plain, the despoiling of her homeland, and the exile of her mother. Even her dear father’s grave was now in inaccessible enemy territory, and, as far as she knew, plowed under by land-hungry kibbutzniks.

  I call this provisional dislike because her compassion was able to surmount it. One day my older sister Saedah, thirteen at the time, fell into an uncontrollable fit of tears. She had brought home from school a copy of The Diary of Anne Frank. She cried and cried in anguished identification with this Jewish child hidden in an annex, terrified at being found out by the killers of her people. It was a paradoxical identification for the daughter of a mother who had suffered so much at the hands of the Zionists. But without a word, my mother gently wiped Saedah’s tears
away, and furtively wiped away her own.

  My first political recollections are of screams. It was in 1956, and a new war had broken out. It was my first war.

  Politics was the real gravitational center of family life. Even after nearly half a century, I recoil with dread when I think back on the interminable discussions between my father and his brothers about King Abdullah, or Ben-Gurion, or President Eisenhower, or the Soviet Politburo, or General Nasser. I was seven when the Sinai War broke out. The living room was filled with dense smoke during long evening debates. I picture a red face, impassioned shouting, and the spittle of indignation flying from the mouth of an uncle who was otherwise the model of soft-spoken civility. My brother Zaki, a precocious ten-year-old, watched the debates with large, round, curious eyes, absorbing every word as if his brain were a complex calculating machine.

  When Mother talked politics, she shifted Jekyll-and-Hyde–like from being a paragon of love to an unyielding victim. Her words were about the idyllic innocence of a magical dreamland. She told me about oranges I envisioned as the sweetest on earth growing on a plantation stretching all the way to the gently swelling waves of the Mediterranean, a sea I’d never seen because of No Man’s Land but that, like the oranges, I pictured as the noblest on earth. Then came the intrusion by the foreigners, the struggle with the British, the depredations of the Zionists, and the terrorized flight on foot.

  I never liked these long-winded political discussions, and when I could, I would retreat back to my room. Perhaps I wasn’t mentally astute enough to follow all the arguments and counterarguments, the dialectical loops and turns, the rousing monologues and heated spats. It must have been my own shallowness that caused me to prefer playing soldiers with matchsticks. My brother Zaki, by contrast, couldn’t get enough of politics.