Once Upon a Country

by Sari Nusseibeh

  My brother, being older and in a hurry to get on with his life after graduating from Cambridge, chose the adventurous option of clandestine return. He first flew to Jordan, and from there he made his way to the Jordan River. The borders at the time were still not hermetically sealed, and Palestinians stranded in Jordan were making their way back to the West Bank with the help of smugglers. It was risky business: once the river was crossed, Israeli soldiers might open fire; then safe encampments on the other side had to be found. Undeterred, my brother made the crossing successfully, together with a small group. He hitchhiked a ride up to Jerusalem.

  A week back in the city was enough to convince him that there was no future for him in Israeli-occupied Jerusalem. He left for the Gulf to find work, never to return to his birthplace. “I prefer living with my childhood memory of Jerusalem rather than with what it’s become,” he later explained. He went on to become an Abu Dhabi citizen and a top adviser and friend of Sheikh Zayed, first ruler of the United Arab Emirates.

  I dallied in London a few more weeks. When I finally began to seriously ponder a return, I chose a different route. Why not fly directly to Tel Aviv? I asked myself. Why not openly challenge the Israelis to see if they would allow it? With this in mind, I asked Teddy Hodgkins, the brother of my father’s Marxist friend from the British Mandate days who wrote for the Times of London, to help me publish an open letter to the Israeli government, demanding that Israel not rob me of my patrimony and allow me to return home.

  As soon as the letter appeared, I got an official invitation from the Israeli embassy in London to discuss the matter in person. Many of my Troubadour friends were certain I would tear the invitation to shreds, as no self-respecting Arab would ever step foot in an Israeli embassy, let alone ask a favor from Zionists. I went straight away. Within a few days, an embassy official stamped a visa into my laissez-passer, a travel document that, as a Jerusalemite, I continue to use to this day.

  I boarded the El-Al flight to Tel Aviv in August. It’s hard to convey properly the uncanny sensation I had upon stepping onto an airplane, with its mammoth Hebrew letters painted on the outside, that was the enemy’s central symbol of statehood and power. Inside, I took my seat among a tightly packed group of Israelis going home, and well-wishing Jews and Gentiles traveling to a state that was suddenly enjoying nearmythic status. The experience of sitting among Israelis inside an enemy machine and being served by frankly gorgeous Israeli airline hostesses would leave a permanent mark on my approach to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

  Things got stranger as we flew over the Palestinian Mediterranean coast. From my window seat, I looked down on the orange groves below, spread out in large geometric patterns. Were these the famous oranges I’d heard about from Mother?

  At the taxi stand outside the airport in Lod, the Israeli name for Lydda, amid the pushing and jostling, I spotted only a handful of the black-bearded wizards I had been spying on since childhood. The other Israelis, too, weren’t nearly as mighty or as Wagnerian as I had been led to expect. I was shocked most by their simple clothes and boorish gesticulations, like peddlers in the Old City bazaar. How could such a badly dressed, ill-mannered people, who couldn’t even stand in line for a cab, defeat all the Arab armies in the same number of days it took God to create the cosmos? Their working-class appearance actually boosted my spirits. Just as I had suspected since listening to the Beatles over enemy radio waves, they were normal people just like us.

  I soon found an Arabic-speaking Israeli cabdriver offering service to Jerusalem. I got into the car, and for the first leg of the trip I barely opened my mouth, so astonishing was the journey. It was like being driven through a dream. It was uncanny enough just to drive east on the badly potholed and winding Tel Aviv–Jerusalem road. Naturally, I didn’t recognize the landscape unfolding out the window; but what got my heart thumping were some of the road signs. At one point we drove through mythic Ramle. From the backseat I looked out eagerly, and of course entirely in vain, for Grandfather’s grave.

  Along the road to Jerusalem there were few traces of Arab civilization. It could have been Southern California: no Arab villages, no donkeys, no camels, and no Arabs. Wiped clean. Among the first evidence of our 1,300 years in the country was a ruined stone house adorned with Ottoman ornaments near the steep climb into the Judean hills. Closer to Jerusalem I saw a sign in English to al-Castal, site of the famous battle.

  Finally, around dusk, we approached the Arab village of Abu Ghosh. The driver suggested we stop for a coffee or a snack. To sip Turkish coffee after my absence in England was a real delight. The pit stop opened my eyes to the fact that not all Palestinians had been driven out of their homes in 1948; many had stayed. I also discovered that the owner of the restaurant, a member of the Abu Ghosh clan, was in fact a distant relative.

  As we got back into the cab and drove on, I was once again lost in thought. The one thing I hadn’t anticipated when I planned the trip was to feel at home among Arabs in the Jewish state.

  Crossing over what had been No Man’s Land was the highlight of the trip. It was miraculous to see how the barbed wire and shoot-to-kill zones, things I had lived with since childhood, were gone. It was only then that it dawned on me how the war had ended the division of my country. Defeat had given me back my homeland.

  Growing up, I had never doubted for a moment that my homeland started in Jerusalem and extended west to Jaffa. Amman and all the deserts to the east were always foreign to me. I never felt a part of the Jordanian system, and the fact that No Man’s Land had now moved to the eastern bank of the Jordan River didn’t bother me in the least.

  I don’t have to mention here just how misplaced my optimism was. As there was no crystal ball in the cab, I couldn’t forsee the coming years of occupation, the thousands of corpses, or the twenty-foot-high concrete wall or the electrified fences now carving up my country. But in one respect my naïveté wasn’t far off the mark. I believed then, as I do now, that the Palestinian Arabs and the Jews are natural allies, not adversaries. In 1967, I saw no reason why I couldn’t live in the same democratic, secular state with the people who had cut in line for a taxi. In fact, I felt my fate was far more entwined with theirs than with the public school types at Rugby.

  My parents and my two younger brothers Hatem and Saker were at home when the cab pulled up to the house. (All my elder siblings were abroad.) It was a festive reunion, like finding each other alive and well after an earthquake. Almost immediately, Mother announced her dislike for the new military regime. The way the soldiers had plundered the house had only confirmed her grimmest prejudices against “this uncivilized gang of thugs,” to use her words. Father was more stoical. The war had only confirmed what he had long suspected about Arab leaders, who time and time again had made their countries pay a steep price for their blundering demagoguery. Father’s words were few, but intuitively I knew that his political mind was spinning as furiously as a top.

  I quickly got a full report on what had happened since the war. Father hadn’t held an official post since leaving London, yet he was still at the center of things. Over the centuries, during other political upheavals, the family had always fallen back on its old role as protector of holy sites, Christian and Muslim. My father was following in this old tradition when he, together with religious and political leaders from throughout the West Bank, formed the Higher Islamic Council. His main partner in this was the new mufti of Jerusalem, Sheikh Sa’d el-din El-Alami, who also became the head of the Higher Islamic Council. The mufti respected my father’s political advice on whatever issue was at hand and whenever he needed it, he would don his flowing robe and sweep through the streets from the haram, or holy sanctuary, to our neighborhood. My father was always ready to give the holy man levelheaded advice.

  Father envisioned the council as a representative institution that could give voice to the people under the new occupation. A major concern on his mind was the preservation of the religious sites in the Old City.

&
nbsp; In the meantime, Israel had moved quickly to impose its rule on the entire city. The new rulers shut down the Arab municipality, and sent the mayor of Jerusalem, Rauhi el-Khatib, packing, across the Jordan. Full control of public services therefore passed into the hands of the Israeli municipality in West Jerusalem. A couple of weeks after the war, the Knesset voted to annex our section of Jerusalem. We were not just getting a new ruler to tax and control us. We faced a state with a military and civil bureaucracy with claims to our land.

  “None of this will ever hold up in an international court of law,” my father commented with an open hand lightly rubbing his metal leg, after concluding his survey of developments. His confidence in the lofty and impartial hand of Justice, impervious to the machinations of mere men—or alternatively in the common humanity embodied in an international court of law or the United Nations, where the wrongs in the world could always be put right again—was as unshakable as ever. My father’s faith in the supremacy and permanence of law never wavered, even as he lived to witness the daily mockery of legal standards by brute force.

  It was already evening. After dinner, my parents launched into their customary salon discussions with friends and family. The scenario was a replay of 1948, when refugees believed they would return in a matter of days. After the current disaster, everybody in the living room assumed that Israel would soon be forced to withdraw, despite all evidence to the contrary, such as the widespread land confiscations, house demolitions, and new construction signifying long-range plans. How could the “thieves of 1948” now be allowed to gobble up the West Bank? Just as unthinkable was that the world would stay silent against Israel’s “brazenly illegal actions.” The wanton destruction of the Mughrabi, or Moroccan Quarter, the confiscation of property, the expulsion or house arrests of leaders, were all cited as examples of Israel’s criminal intentions. I listened without comment.

  The next morning I undertook the most astounding trek of my life. I leapt over the garden wall of my parents’ house and ventured into No Man’s Land.

  It began with a few halting steps onto the rocky, thistly, perilous territory, with my eyes trained on the grapevine straddling a crumbling ruin. The vine had always been for me the undisputed king of No Man’s Land. Each spring it rejuvenated itself under my watch, and then withered, untouched.

  My heart palpitating with excitement, I picked a branch clean of the vine’s fruit. Blowing off the dust, I popped a shriveled, raisinlike grape into my mouth. The taste wasn’t the sumptuous burst of flavor I had long imagined. It was bitter, and I spat it out.

  I forged ahead, toward the previously forbidden streets of Mea Shearim. With each slow step, I was trying to adjust myself to the new reality. At one point I looked behind me at the back of the garden, where I had stood, year in and year out, gazing westward.

  A few minutes later, I reached the narrow street populated by pious Jews in their ink-black trench coats. This had been the limit of my vision into Israel as a child, but also a section of the city my parents had known well before 1948. A group of startled children dashed around a corner. Turning and taking a long and steady look back toward my home, I tried to imagine the thoughts of the people in Mea Shearim over the years. What had they thought when they saw an Arab boy looking out at them from the garden of a red-tiled house? Had I been the evil goblin in their pepper tree?

  My behavior that summer caused just as much of a fuss among my parents’ friends and associates as it did among the startled children of Mea Shearim. Here I was, an Oxford-bound Nusseibeh, and the exgovernor’s son to boot—who in their eyes should have been sporting a blazer with a Rugby coat of arms stitched on the breast—with long hair and wearing sandals, just like the European hippies then roaming around the Middle East.

  Over the rest of the summer, I took frequent walks to explore the ways the city had changed. My forays led me to Talbieh, Baqʾa, and Qatamon, all former Arab neighborhoods in West Jerusalem now repopulated by Jews. Life was thriving there. The prosperous inhabitants, so different from the people I had first seen at the airport, blithely went about their business, unconcerned and probably unaware that they were living in other people’s homes. “Should I blame them?” I asked myself. I didn’t have an answer. I still don’t.

  I didn’t have any such muddle when I walked to the former Moroccan Quarter, whose destruction left me speechless and outraged. Its tangled and mazelike Oriental streets had been my favorite haunts as a child. Now it was all gone. Within days of the war, the sappers, wrecking squads, and bulldozers had arrived. The quarter’s wretched inhabitants were given two hours to clear out, and the entire quarter was razed, including two twelfth-century mosques, to make room for a plaza in front of the Western Wall. It seemed monstrous to me to uproot a community and destroy its past for what resembled a featureless Soviet-style parade ground.

  In my parents’ nightly salons, the same issues popped up with predictable regularity, as they did anytime Palestinians discussed politics. Seeking consolation, people fantasized that the old status quo would magically reassert itself. The slightest incident spawned speculation that the Jordanian army was marching back across the river. Tales circulated of armed Fatah cells operating surreptitiously in various parts of the Occupied Territories. “Who are these people?” my uncle asked Father, who didn’t have an answer. I knew, but I didn’t say a word. Knowing more than the stalwarts of the salon was a milestone for me.

  The house was always full of people asking Father for advice. An influential cleric, Sheikh Abdel Hamid Al-Sayeh, issued a fatwa forbidding Muslims from abiding by Israeli law. There was talk of a general boycott, a throwback to the glory days of 1936. “Should we cooperate?” people asked Father.

  My father walked a fine line that maybe only he, equipped with an aluminum leg, could. Writing about the past is tricky business. With what we know now, it is easy to see how, already in 1967, the Israelis were devising wide-ranging plans to strip Arab Jerusalem of its character, its history, and its role in the cultural and political life of our people. There were signs of such an attitude, but there were just as many signs of a spirit of respect and cooperation.

  With no crystal ball to consult, Father’s first instinct was to extend his hand to the Israelis—not as an obsequious subject to new overlords, but as a proud pan-Arab nationalist who realized that we could overcome our weakness only by approaching the enemy with an unbending neck. To the Israelis with whom he had dealings—and there were many—he was amiable and polite, entirely free of the taint of hatred or ill will. At the same time, he wholeheartedly supported the boycott of Israeli courts and jurisdiction in East Jerusalem. His rejection of dubious legal practices was as immovable as solid rock.

  I sat in on some of Father’s meetings with Israeli officers, and I was astounded by his poise, as if it were he who had won the war, not they. A proud Arab believing in the immeasurable superiority of his heritage, in his defiant civility he infuriated—and, I think, impressed—his guests.

  His political imagination was also working, fed, as it were, by an inbred ancestral duty to serve the City of Peace. Almost thirty years later, Yasser Amer, a member of the PLO executive committee and minister of education in the newly formed Palestinian Authority, told me about an exchange he had with Father in his law office shortly after the Six-Day War.

  “Tell them,” Father told Amer, referring to the leaders of the PLO, “to go straight for negotiations with Israel for a two-state solution.” Father assumed, perhaps correctly, that in the wake of Israel’s victory over the Arab states, a peace offer from the PLO might just bear some fruit. “And do it now. If you wait, the Israeli position will harden.”

  The PLO ignored the advice. “Your father,” Yasser Amer explained, “had a far longer range vision than we did. Given the nationalistic mood back then, there was no way we could have listened to him.”

  Chapter Seven

  Smashing Idols

  IN THE FALL, I HEADED TO OXFORD. I was eager to study philosophy, bu
t when I ran this past my father, he only grunted. The compromise that he suggested, and I agreed to, was the preferred track for a “gentleman” seeking a career in public life. The course combined philosophy, politics, and economics. My college, Christ Church, has a roster of alumni that includes kings, prime ministers, archbishops, and such luminous characters as John Locke and Lewis Carroll.

  I must have been an unlikely sight when I first crossed the threshold of the college. What set me apart was less my long hair and thick beard or the antiestablishment pose I had picked up at Café Troubadour—in those days Oxford still had its fair share of Marxists and communists—than my dark Arab complexion. There was only one other Palestinian undergraduate student at Oxford at the time, Ahmad Khalidi, a member of Jerusalem’s most illustrious family of scholars, grandson of the head of the Arab College, and son of Walid Khalidi, the eminent professor at the American University of Beirut. (Both my father and my uncle Hazem knew Walid Khalidi well.)

  Ahmad and I spent a lot of time together. Having been raised by a nationalist intellectual, he gave me a crash course in Palestinian politics. Among other things, I learned what stood behind the dizzying array of revolutionary acronyms, such as the ALF (Arab Liberation Front), the PLF (Palestine Liberation Front), the PFLP (Palestinian Front for the Liberation of Palestine), and the PDFLP (Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine). Ahmad’s favorite was a splinter group of the PFLP, led by the legendary Ahmad Jibril. Monty Python obviously had us in mind when, in Life of Brian, they depicted the “Judean Popular People’s Front,” the “People’s Front of Judea,” and the “Judean People’s Front” competing for converts.

  It was an exciting time to be a student. The year 1968 was the height of the student rebellion and the hippie age, and young activists worldwide looked to revolutionary leaders such as Fidel Castro and Mao Tse Tung. In Paris, “Red Danny” Cohn-Bendit was shaking up the stilted French establishment. In Yasir Arafat, we, too, had a firebrand to follow.