Once Upon a Country

by Sari Nusseibeh

  Arafat was the mysterious figure behind the vague rumors back home of guerrilla strikes against Israelis. I still knew little more about him or his Fatah movement than what I read in Free Palestine. Given the debacle of the war, what he had said about the Arab states sounded prophetic. In March came reports over the radio of a major battle between his fighters and the Israeli army. What riveted my attention was the site of the battle: it was in Karameh, where as a boy I drove a tractor at the family farm.

  The Battle of Karameh was a bloodbath in which dozens of Palestinian insurgents died. But afterward, when Israeli units retreated over the Jordan River, Fatah proclaimed victory. The Israelis had given it their best, and many of our fighters had died, but the movement lived on. The Battle of Karameh went down in our mythology as the “Stalingrad of the Palestinians.” Arabs weren’t the only ones impressed by the heroism. Lady Fisher, wife of the Archbishop of Canterbury, was quoted as saying that the Arabs were “surely only doing what brave men always do, whose country lies under the heel of a conqueror.”1

  We were finally beginning to win some respectable allies. Another thing that attracted me to Arafat, even more than his scruffy bohemian appearance, was his vision of a unified democratic state of Palestine. I should add that he was a master of ambiguity and mixed signals—he dodged the issue of what would happen to the Jews once Zionism was swept away. I filled in the blanks. For me, a united Palestine was to include both Arabs and Jews. With no border, people would be able to mingle normally, and eventually a single state would emerge, without a shot fired. Half the Israelis looked as if they could be my cousins anyway. Many spoke Arabic because they came from Iraq or North Africa. We liked the same food and music and smoked the same tobacco in the same kind of water pipes. Why shouldn’t we share the same state?

  Thinking that this conformed with the vision behind Arafat’s movement, I began to hand out Fatah flyers to audiences or students attending lectures on the Middle East by such eminent figures as Roger Owen, an old-school author of such tomes as The Middle East in the World Economy, 1800–1914.

  At Oxford, Palestinian politics soon faded into the background for me, just as my social world began to expand. I mingled with students from different backgrounds and with different interests. One was an American graduate student named Jay, who liked driving around to pubs in his convertible Mercedes. We sometimes went to parties together, and when the weather permitted, we raced around the countryside with the top down. Politics and guerrilla wars seemed far away indeed.

  It may sound strange, but I kept up my interest in politics only after meeting some Israeli students doing graduate work at Oxford. Though formal enemies, we had a lot in common, starting with a strong predilection for debating politics over hummus, our shared Palestinian-Israeli national dish.

  My favorite sparring partner was Avishai Margalit, a philosophy student studying with the great Isaiah Berlin at Queen’s College. We would often meet in the mornings at a teahouse run by a church on St. Aldates, across the street from Sir Christopher Wren’s imposing Tom Tower. It was easy to discuss politics with Avishai because we both had sufficient distance from events back home to scoff at the bugle-blowing victors (his side) and the caviling complainers (mine).

  Tooling around in a Mercedes and conducting my own political salon in a teahouse was giving me some much-needed self-confidence. At times I even suspected I was finally getting a bit of Father’s backbone, and hence his unflappable strength of character. I was also beginning to put my political convictions on a better footing than they had been at the heated bull sessions at Café Troubadour. Unfortunately, serious inroads into philosophy proved exasperatingly elusive.

  Troubles began with my first tutorials. As if by destiny, the first book I was given to read was none other than Bertrand Russell’s Problems of Philosophy. A week later my tutor, to whom I still owe the deepest gratitude, pulled the rug out from underneath me, causing my seemingly incontrovertible world of ideas and facts to come crashing down. I was settled in the leather chair in his office and venturing forth into my commonsense epistemology when he let me have it. And when I tried to offer counterarguments, he finished them off, too. He did so with such remarkable ease that it seemed effortless. Making a cup of tea would have worked up more of a sweat.

  The following week the same thing happened. After one more round of crawling out of his office utterly defeated, I had to admit that whatever certainty I had found over the previous year or two had gone. I was back to my familiar condition of floundering.

  This condition was, in truth, considerably worse than the foglike state of my childhood. Now there was no safe harbor to which I could retreat. My Arabism was in shambles, and now my realism, too, was flat on its face. My hair became more disheveled by the day.

  I nevertheless kept going back to my tutor, and as the semester wore on, it began to dawn on me that his ruthless attacks were not nearly as merciless as I had first suspected. His was a Socratic method of challenging set beliefs and assumptions, if necessary by tearing away safe moorings and hallowed orthodoxies and legends. He wanted to inculcate in his students enough critical reflection and steeled intellectual discipline to allow them to live and think consciously, to open up doors of the mind previously sealed shut. He went beyond challenging my conscious views; far more disconcertingly, he forced me to question hitherto unquestioned assumptions, and to jettison them if they didn’t measure up. During one sitting, he quoted Francis Bacon’s belief that the mind has idols in need of being shattered. I was immediately reminded of the story of Mohammed’s triumphant return to Mecca from Medina, when he entered the Kaʾba armed with only his camel stick, and without further ado dispatched the pagan gods.

  Although my readings concentrated largely on masters from the European Enlightenment, it wasn’t long before my attention shifted over to the philosophy of language as conceived by Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Austin, the former a Cambridge man and the latter from Oxford. What was thrilling was the sense that this new school of thought was being reshaped even as I was studying it, precisely because of its local provenance.

  Although he had died years earlier, John Austin’s legendary intellect and sharpness of mind still reverberated in the corridors and cloisters of Oxford. (His book How to Do Things with Words had won over a generation of philosophers to “ordinary language.”) Wittgenstein had also recently passed on, and like Austin’s, his spirit was still fresh and alive. An Austrian aristocrat with ancient Jewish-Catholic roots, he threw security to the wind by giving away his fortune, and launching himself out into the world, trusting only in the powers of his mind. At one stage, Wittgenstein ended up as a schoolteacher in a peasant village high in the Alps. He was constantly on the outside looking in—at language, society, and himself. Somehow he found within himself an existential perch from which to observe life. Far more than Descartes in his barrel or Kant on his daily rounds in Königsberg, Wittgenstein struck me as an explorer I could follow, if only from a distance.

  In the summer of 1968, I returned home. Given the painful new intellectual horizons opened up to me in my tutor’s office, it was odd to return to a family, and a nation, in a deep rut. My family, with all its titles and honors, reminded me of aristocrats in exile from Soviet Russia. Father had even had his country estate confiscated—a two-hundred-acre tract of land in the Jordan Valley, seized by the Israeli authorities. The clan from Medina, with a name redolent of past glories, had turned into a small family of ex–civil servants, the children all gone or about to leave.

  The Palestinian side of Jerusalem seemed moribund and uncertain of itself, just like me. It was neither under the boot of the Israeli military, like the West Bank, nor free, like the rest of Israel. A bizarre process had begun, of professionals boycotting their professions: Arab lawyers, for instance, had stopped working as lawyers because they refused to work within the Israeli justice system. The Arab municipality was gone, just as the social and economic fabric was in flux. Confusion had begun to set
in as Israeli currency, license plates, transport systems, legal procedures, consumer products, and habits were all rapidly becoming ingrained into daily life.

  Upon my return, I found Father actively seeking ways to undo the catastrophe of the latest defeat. UN Security Council Resolution 242, which called for an Israeli withdrawal from the territories it had conquered, had been denounced by demagogic Palestinian leaders the minute it was announced, and for the simple reason that with 242, Israel had won tacit legitimacy for the pre-1967 borders and hence for all the territories it had conquered in 1948. Article III calls for the “respect for and acknowledgment of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every state in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force.”

  The official Israeli attitude toward 242 can be summed up by Ben-Gurion’s disparaging quip about the UM (the Hebrew acronym for the UN): “UM-shmum.”

  Father never thought it was possible to undo 1948, and as such focused on the resolution’s discussion of the more recently conquered territories. He liked 242’s clarity on the “inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war and the need to work for a just and lasting peace in which every state in the area can live in security.” In Father’s mind, the UN was unambiguous: Israel had to move back beyond No Man’s Land.

  Father’s indefatigable diplomatic activity drew a steady stream of foreign dignitaries, prime ministers, and journalists to the house. At one point he tried unsuccessfully to convince King Hussein of Jordan to negotiate a deal with Israel. The king, threatened on all sides by a rising nationalist Palestinian power within his kingdom and not wanting to end up gunned down like his grandfather, didn’t dare. Father toiled on nonetheless. Eventually King Hussein had some secret meetings with Moshe Dayan and Golda Meir, but they foundered on the issue of Jerusalem. The king was willing to let the victors keep the entire area around the Western Wall in exchange for handing back the rest of the Old City and the West Bank. The Israelis weren’t interested.

  This didn’t prevent Israeli dignitaries such as Moshe Dayan and Mayor Teddy Kollek from visiting the house. Kollek dropped by on Islamic holidays, and I can recall the sight of him and my father sitting across from each other, smoking the Havana cigars that my eldest sister, Munira, supplied the family from Abu Dhabi.

  “Anwar, we’re just about to introduce some innovations in the Arab school system,” Kollek said to my father, lazily blowing out a warm stream of smoke. “Why don’t you find some way to get the local Arab educational leadership engaged in this effort? It’s in your own interest, after all.”

  “Fabulous idea,” Father responded in a serious tone, flicking some ashes into the tray. “But tell me, when are these innovations to come into operation?”

  Kollek, not used to having an Arab respond positively to his initiatives, leaned forward, and excitement entered into his voice. “Why, as soon as the academic year starts.”

  Father, innocently pretending to calculate the months, shook his head and put on a befuddled look. “But that’s in another five months. Surely you’ll be gone by then.”

  Father also took up invitations to speak to Israeli audiences or to engage in debates with Israeli leaders. On one occasion I went with him to Petah Tikva, where he was invited to address a large audience of Arabic-speaking Yemenite Jews. Father drove, and I was supposed to read the map. Predictably, we got lost, and after driving in circles, an Egged bus driver, noticing our East Jerusalem license plate, waved us down to help. Father recounted the incident to his audience, adding that if only politicians were like bus drivers we would have peace. The audience roared with pleasure.

  Soon after I got home from Oxford, I was surprised to see Israeli journalists lining up to see my father, either at the house or at his law office not far from Damascus Gate. I had been back a week when Danny Rubinstein, a reporter from the Hebrew daily Haʾaretz, came for an interview. Danny wasn’t much older than I, and in contrast with my nonexistent Hebrew, he spoke fluent Arabic. After the interview, we chatted. I told him about Oxford and that I had befriended a couple of Israeli students. This must have impressed him, because he asked me if I’d like to see the Knesset. I told him I’d seen it from the outside plenty of times. “I mean from the inside,” he explained. “Are you joking?” I said.

  He wasn’t.

  Before the visit, I had had various mental images of the Knesset. I had heard, for instance, that on a massive flag hanging from the ceiling were images of the Euphrates and the Nile, a symbol of Zionism’s voracious appetite to extend its territory from the suburbs of Cairo all the way to Baghdad.

  Within a few days, Danny had made all the arrangements, and from the top gallery I got a close-up view of the Israeli government. I didn’t see the flag, though I did make out Moshe Dayan’s eye patch. Down on the government benches, I saw Golda Meir, David Ben-Gurion, and Prime Minister Levi Eshkol in what looked like a conspiratorial huddle.

  By this point I was developing a strong desire to understand what made Israel tick, what gave it its dynamic energy. I was soon to get my first chance.

  One day, representatives of the Higher Islamic Council showed up at the door to inform Father that the Israelis were beginning archaeological excavations in the vicinity of the Al-Aqsa mosque. They feared that the new masters would burrow under the haram in search of Solomon’s lost temple. The gentlemen of the Higher Islamic Council wanted to enlist Father’s support in protecting the Dome of the Rock from desecration.

  Father and his fellow council members took me with them to the archaeological site. We made our way through the Old City until we reached the place of the dig. Meʾr Ben-Dov, the leader of the archaeological team, saw us standing skeptically off in the distance. In perfect Arabic, he raised his voice and asked, “Do you want to see what we have found?” He waved us over to take a look at a pile of Islamic artifacts from the Umayyad period that his team had unearthed.

  The Islamic scholars among our group looked at one another awkwardly, not knowing how to respond. Father finally asked who was doing the digging.

  “Students from all over the world.”

  “Would you accept a Muslim volunteer to help in the dig?”

  “Of course,” went the reply.

  My father, head straight up, left the puzzled clerics behind and approached the archaeologist. “Come,” he waved me to him. I was to be his volunteer.

  I’d seen Father’s Kismet before, but never had I witnessed such a good example of his willingness to ignore peer opinions, step out of line, and snub his nose at prejudice, especially when knowledge was at stake. Naturally, in his mind, the destruction of the Moroccan Quarter had been a criminal abuse of power. But for this he blamed politicians, not archaeologists. Arabs, he knew, had nothing to fear from science, in particular the science of uncovering our ancient ossuaries and coins.

  The next day, I showed up with my customary sandals, tank top, and jeans, and went to work deciphering the Arabic script from old coins. I didn’t spend a lot of time at the site, but enough to ignite a minor controversy back in our part of town. People were not happy that the former governor’s son was working with the devilish Zionists burrowing under the Holy Sanctuary. This was the first time I heard my name uttered in a political context, and little of it was flattering. It was good practice in ignoring what others thought. Even Cousin Zaki was irked with me.

  With Father’s encouragement and money, in that summer of 1968, I also signed up for an ulpan, a language school, to begin to learn Hebrew. I made an even more important step when I volunteered to work on a kibbutz.

  At the time, the kibbutzniks were the darlings of the European left, and volunteers from Sweden to Switzerland flocked to kibbutzes to experience socialist ideals and, just as important, free love. To Arabs, the kibbutzniks were the shock troops of the Israeli system, merciless Spartan soldier-farmers on the front line of every fight. I wanted to see for myself where the swords of Zi
on were being fashioned.

  Father made all the arrangements. He contacted someone he knew from Kibbutz Hazorea, in the Galilee, which belonged to Ha-shomer Ha-tzaír, or the “Young Guard,” of the left-wing “Mapam” movement. This friend put the question of my visit to his fellow members, and they debated the issue over supper. They then put it to a vote, and decided to extend an invitation to me.

  Kibbutz Hazorea was founded by socialist youths who had fled Nazi Germany. Expelled from school by Hitler’s government, they emigrated to Palestine and built a communal farm. (Hazorea means “the sower.”) Within an hour of my arrival, the kibbutzniks made sure I knew that before they showed up with their crude plows and immense energy, their land had been a swamp owned by absentee landowners. They showed me the black-and-white photos of the pioneering days. The empty desolation in the photos was in striking contrast to the forests on the hills, the lush vegetation, and the flowers I could see just outside the window. The white tents they had initially lived in reminded me of an illustration in a book I read as a child on the Prairie Indians.

  Already on this, my first day in “enemy territory,” I was getting a good sense of the high caliber of the people there. Nestled among the simple white bungalows was the Wilfrid Israel Museum, named after a German Jewish art collector who fell into Gandhi’s inner circle during his travels to India in the 1920s, and who, in 1943, died while trying to rescue German Jews during World War II. In his will, Israel bequeathed his art collection to the kibbutz. I was amazed to see the ancient pottery and goddesses and Oriental art filling the museum.

  I stayed for about a month with a kindly old couple who, after dinner in the evenings, told me about their lives. They loved listening to Umm Kulthum on Arabic language radio, they said, along with other great Egyptian singers. I also heard about their fears, stirred by listening to Nasser’s ranting speeches on the radio. Unlike me and my colleagues in London, they had dreaded Nasser’s promise to annihilate Israel.