Once Upon a Country

by Sari Nusseibeh

  Abu Dhabi was not Oxford or Jerusalem, but Lucy and I made the most of it. She worked as a columnist for a local English newspaper and started a radio program on classical music. It was amusing to hear Bach’s Christmas cantatas carried over the waves of the sheikhdom’s radio station. With our jobs we were able to buy a brand-new car, maintain a respectable apartment, and rub shoulders with the gin-drinking expatriates and foreign diplomats there. None of this meant—at least this is what we told ourselves—that we had succumbed to bourgeois comfort. We still found time to rough it on a foray into the oases at Al-Ain. To celebrate New Year’s 1974, we camped on an island studded with ancient ruins off the Abu Dhabi mainland.

  However interesting my job was at the time, I was obviously not cut out to be a businessman. My plans to make a quick million foundered on the iron laws of economics and logic. No one with my low level of material aspirations and total dearth of financial acumen could, or should, become a millionaire overnight. To my credit, at least it didn’t take me long to conclude that I had no interest in business, and as such had to find a career alternative fast.

  On one particularly sand-bitten and lonely day—it was my twenty-fifth birthday—I decided to treat myself to a gift. This was an important juncture: I was a quarter of a century old, married, and, on paper, a respectable employee at an oil company. But I was scared that in the world of business I was beginning to lose my inner self. What better way to regain my bearings, I told myself, than to take a couple of days off work, lock myself away, unplug the telephone, and spend long hours in quiet reflection, just like al-Ghazali in his room near the fabled Dome of the Rock.

  In one go, with short breaks for meals and naps, I read all seven volumes of C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia. What intrigued me about the books, and the reason I kept all in my apartment unread for months awaiting the right occasion, were things I had heard about Lewis at Oxford. C. S. Lewis came up with his fairy tales after an unexpected vision—and there’s no better way of describing it—of what he called “mental images.” One was of “a faun carrying an umbrella,” another of a “queen in a sledge,” and a third of a “magnificent lion.”

  Once again, legend served me well, for it was somewhere in the middle of reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe that I came up with a plan to do my Ph.D. at Harvard with the Egyptian professor.

  Lucy, who knew I was hankering to do more research on what I had started in London, promptly backed me up. With a higher degree, we also thought, I could probably get a teaching job back in Palestine, at some university—altogether a more suitable profession and location for us than the business world of the Gulf. I contacted Professor Sabra, applied, and was offered a place as well as a scholarship. Beginning in the fall of 1974 I’d be at Harvard. I quit the oil job and we spent the summer back in Jerusalem.

  Shortly after our arrival back home, I paid a visit to my cousin Salim in prison. Ironically, days afterward came the exciting news from the Voice of the Lightning Bolt, a Palestinian radio program in Damascus, that there had been a guerrilla attack against what it described as a “strategic Zionist stronghold.”

  It seemed that a bomb had gone off at the studios of Israel Radio, the source of my rock-and-roll education before the war. The broadcast made it sound as if the attack had been a major blow to the enemy, and a first step toward taking over the Knesset. The Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PDFLP) claimed responsibility for the “heroic and daring strike,” which involved clandestine infiltration, strategic brilliance, and an audacity straight out of James Bond. The guerrillas had hit the enemy’s communications nerve center at the Russian compound. It was from there, the former Russian monastery, that the Israelis broadcast their propaganda to the world. Now the PDFLP’s heroes had silenced them.

  The studios were housed across the street from the central prison where political prisoners were detained (over the years I would get to know this building well), and a short jaunt from my parents’ house. A cynical friend from my Café Troubadour days rang me up and invited me to amble over to check out the ground zero of the attack.

  We covered the distance in fifteen minutes. As we approached the explosion’s epicenter, my friend let out a derisive guffaw. He pointed to a small huddle of soldiers standing around looking bored. Next to them was a chalk mark on the asphalt. I had to look twice until I finally spotted a small tear in the pavement at least a hundred feet away from the communications hub, which was not an imposing Brave New World monolith but an attractive turn-of-the-century stone building in the Arab style.

  That night I told guests at my parents’ after-dinner salon about the “attack.” My father only shook his head. A wan grin spread over his face. Mother’s expression hardened, as if we shouldn’t be mocking an attempt, futile or not, at getting back our rights. Mother was already far more involved in street politics than my father. She had established a Committee for the Defense of Prisoners, was organizing demonstrations and getting herself arrested time after time, and on more than one occasion had ended up with bruises at the hands of baton-wielding riot police in street confrontations. With her thick black head of hair and effervescent dark eyes, she maintained that Israel would only yield by dint of force.

  The conversation shifted over to the PLO. At Oxford, I had lost touch with Arafat’s Fatah movement. I knew, of course, that the Palestinian Stalingrad, the Battle of Karameh, had helped Arafat gain control over the PLO in 1969. From that point on, Arafat was the chairman of the PLO’s Executive Committee, which was made up of the heads of various Palestinian factions, all of which more or less recognized Arafat’s leadership.

  In 1970, King Hussein had expelled most of the PLO from Jordan, and Arafat began his exile years in Damascus and Beirut. Just as this was happening, the PLO started to reinvent itself. As of 1970, Fatah’s official vision of liberated Palestine was that of a democratic state guaranteeing equal rights to all its citizens—Muslims, Christians, and Jews. The PLO also started reining in its earlier crank remarks, such as seeing a grain of truth in the anti-Semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Much of the world didn’t buy the new moderate line, however, because the PLO was blamed for the kidnapping and murder of the Israeli Olympic athletes in 1972. There was justified worldwide outrage after the 1972 tragedy and Arafat denied all responsibility.

  My father wanted to know what I thought about the PLO and its claim—which Arafat repeated every chance he got—to represent the interests of the Palestinian people. Surprisingly for Father, the Arab states were ready to echo Arafat. In a meeting in Algiers in November 1973, just a month after the 1973 war, the Arab heads of state crowned the PLO the “sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.”

  I welcomed the declaration, and told my father why. Who else was going to represent our interests? In the Occupied Territories we had no leadership, no bar association, no legal strategy, no civil rights movement. Nothing. Do the Arab states know what we need? Does Jordan? Who gives a damn about us?

  Father only shook his head in disapproval. He was still a pan-Arab nationalist, and as such did not believe in separate Palestinian politics. The Palestinian Arabs had not created the problem with the Jews, and it wasn’t up to them to solve it. Anyway, he had no truck with the PLO tactics, and no faith in the ability of scruffy “revolutionaries” to sit down with the Israelis and negotiate a solution to our conflict. How could a shadowy organization constantly on the run from one redoubt to the next represent all Palestinians? Besides, how could the PLO represent us if it refused to allow contact between Arabs and Israelis? Even the word Israel had no place in their vocabulary.

  Father was partly right. It would take years before PLO leaders figured out how to make use of international legal instruments, such as Resolution 242. And by then, vast swaths of our best lands had been lost.

  Chapter Nine

  Monticello

  LANDING ON THE AMERICAN CONTINENT for the first time in my life, at Logan Airport in Septem
ber 1974, was exhilarating. With the exception of Jay, the playboy at Oxford, I had never had any American friends, and psychologically I was hobbled by the reigning anti-American prejudices common in European and Arab left-wing circles. Even so, America’s time-honored spirit of adventure, of making a new start, and of seizing opportunities had always held for me a secret appeal. Even before Lucy and I were out of the airport, I felt at home.

  We quickly settled into a working routine whose intensity only increased with time. We got an apartment, bought some used furniture and an old VW Beetle—parts of the steel floor were rusted through, but this didn’t keep us from far-flung camping trips, some in the dead of winter—and made our first friends. I was soon to learn, however, that I no longer had the carefree liberties of the undergraduate.

  America, this vibrant and ramshackle democracy, was fun to watch. Nixon had just resigned. The Vietnam War was over but the images of returning POWs gave Americans a wrenching reminder of the lost war. To top it off came inflation, crime, and OPEC ministers jacking up the price of oil. I must have heard the wisecrack “you Arabs have us over a barrel” a thousand times.

  In Boston, the school busing issue exposed how much raw racial tension existed in the city. The gunning down of Martin Luther King, Jr., a few years earlier seemed to have proven to black militants that if you wanted change you had to be armed—just in case.

  Lucy and I immediately discovered Café Algiers, a local place just off Harvard Square, where students smoked through the night, giving the place the subversive feel of a Left Bank café. At Algiers and other cafés, and sometimes in a literature or philosophy class, students talked about the “downfall” and “crisis” of American democracy, as if the sixties hadn’t ended. It was amusing for me to observe the future leaders of this massive imperial power talk about the downfall of an ascendant system of which they were a part, and which it would be their destiny to serve and eventually lead. Oxford represented the leisured life of literature and conversation in a dying colonial power. By contrast, the academic ambition at Harvard was palpable, with the muscular American empire needing the expertise of her best and brightest.

  When Lucy and I needed a break from the intensity of Cambridge, our Beetle offered an easy escape from the excitement and turmoil of modern America. With a short ride to Concord, one could take a quick afternoon pilgrimage to Walden Pond, Thoreau’s Walden and Civil Disobedience in hand.

  I felt at home in America. As a child I had never felt like a citizen of the Hashemite kingdom of Jordan. In some vague sense I knew I was a part of the Arab nation, but that was only an ideal. In terms of an actual country, with a real flag, England had been the only place that exemplified the civic values I was raised with. Yet living in England had taught me that no matter how well I spoke the language, or how pure my wife’s Anglo-Saxon bloodline, I could never become a part of English society. England was cramped and small, and its social system closed to outsiders.

  It didn’t take long for me to recognize how different the atmosphere in America was. I missed the eccentricities of Europe—at Harvard there was no stuffed Jeremy Bentham presiding over university functions. But neither did I sense invisible barriers to trip me up and keep me in my place. America was a place with lots of elbow room and as much opportunity as you could take. I immediately fell in love with the beauty of the country and the friendliness of the people, and the thought of settling there often crossed my mind.

  One “mental image”—to borrow from C. S. Lewis—that illustrates what was so liberating about the country took place at the Blue Parrot Restaurant, where I worked part-time washing dishes. (I resolutely refused to accept money from my family.) One day, the Polish-born cook in the kitchen took me aside. He must have seen me sneak a cold French fry into my mouth and assumed I was broke. “Don’t worry,” he told me with his arm around my shoulder. “Okay, you’re just a dishwasher now. But look at me! I started out as a dishwasher, now I’m a chef. One day I’ll open my own restaurant. You can make it, too.”

  A different image comes from a trip along the Shenandoah Trail. Shortly after we arrived, Lucy and I decided to go camping, making a side trip to Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. I’d rubbed Monticello often enough on the backside of the nickel to know what it felt like under my thumb, but to see it for myself was a shattering experience. The first glimpse I had of it reminded me of an English country gentleman’s estate. The architectural style Jefferson employed had been the rage among eighteenth-century aristocrats. I’d seen a dozen buildings like it in England. But the man behind this estate was the same contradictory figure behind the revolution against England and its aristocratic system of privileges.

  I wandered through room after room thinking about this slaveholding, tobacco-growing member of the American gentry devising his rebellion. In my mind’s eye, I pictured him in his library, a volume of Thomas Paine on his lap, conspiring to overturn a system of rules and laws made according to imperial interests rather than to the interests of the people living in the governed territory. Grandfather had turned against the British in the 1930s for the same reason, though he and his friends on the Arab Higher Committee never drew up a constitution, and they never founded a university.

  From Monticello, Lucy and I made our way down to the original brick buildings of the University of Virginia, and there I pondered the additional fact that the author of the Declaration of Independence had also established a university. He called it an “academical village.” What was so astounding for me about Jefferson, in contrast to Robespierre, say, or any of the Arab revolutionary leaders, was the systematic manner in which he went about putting flesh and bones on the conception of liberty by building free institutions. Just as impressive for me was Jefferson’s philosophy of public education: “It is safer to have the whole people respectably enlightened than a few in a high state of science and the many in ignorance.” Tears welled up when I read this.

  The next stop was the obelisk marking his grave. Inscribed into the stone was more than his personal legacy, it was a clue to the internal strength of American democracy:

  HERE WAS BURIED

  THOMAS JEFFERSON

  AUTHOR OF THE

  DECLARATION

  OF

  AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE

  OF THE

  STATUTE OF VIRGINIA

  FOR

  RELIGIOUS FREEDOM

  AND FATHER OF THE

  UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA

  Lucy and I stayed in America for four years. During our last year, we had our first son, Jamal. With our new baby, we moved to a graduate student apartment complex off Mt. Auburn Street. We now saw more of Walid Khalidi, whose kind wife provided us with clothes for our newborn son, as did his friend Stanley Hoffmann, the eminent German-born political scientist. Jamal spoke his first words in that apartment of ours. One was the Arabic word for ant, the other for light.

  Raising a son, plugging away at my dissertation in my office at Quincy House, doing dishes at the Blue Parrot, and stalking the campus in my new part-time job as a security guard didn’t leave me much time for socializing. Nonetheless, I did get to know some fellow Arabs, and sometimes we got together in the smoke-filled Café Algiers to discuss politics over Turkish coffee and cheesecake. Conversations ranged from the “Third World” liberation movements to Jean Genet’s account of homoerotic forays into the gritty refugee camps in Jordan and Lebanon.

  Unsurprisingly, I also ran across some Israelis. One was none other than Avishai Margalit in the philosophy department; another was Gedaliahu, or “Guy,” Stroumsa, a French-born Israeli and a child of Holocaust survivors. We first met when we were invited to talk to some American students about Middle Eastern politics, and we ended up agreeing with each other more than we agreed with the views espoused by the students in the audience.

  Over the four years we spent in America, Lucy and I returned to Jerusalem only once, after Jamal was born. In those days, it was too expensive. Even a ten-minute phone conversation could cost
me a couple of hours of washing dishes at the Blue Parrot.

  I did my best to keep abreast of events back home by attending the occasional lecture. When my father’s friend Walid Khalidi—his son was with me when I first met Lucy—came to campus, I naturally showed up for his talk. An immensely witty and charming man with a piercing intellect, Professor Khalidi had just published a controversial and unprecedented article, “Thinking the Unthinkable,” in which he squarely argued for two states: one Jewish, the other Palestinian. In his lecture, he laid out his position. A two-state solution was still an unthinkable proposition for me, and in the Q-and-A at the end, I unfurled the standard PLO vision of a single secular, democratic Jewish-Arab state. Wasn’t that what progressives were demanding in South Africa? Why should Israel be held to a lower standard?

  The other way I kept in touch with the Middle East was through the American media. Palestine was in the news a lot at the time, albeit cast in a less-than-flattering light. In the 1970s, Palestinian international terrorism went into high gear. By nature I’ve always recoiled from violence of any sort, even Cousin Zaki’s barbaric bird hunts. At the same time, no one could deny that the world took notice of our plight only once passengers in first-class seats on airplanes began fearing they could end up in Beirut instead of Tokyo. Terrorism put the Palestinian issue on the map, and suddenly politicians in Washington and Moscow were discussing the issue.