Once Upon a Country

by Sari Nusseibeh

  In an article he published in an Israeli paper at the time, he writes, “I think Israel should be the first to recognize the P.L.O., because you are the strong ones and have all the cards in your hands. If you will sit together with the P.L.O. for negotiations, this will automatically create mutuality, which will mean that the P.L.O. recognizes Israel’s right to exist … Once and for all you must eliminate this complex of fear of the Palestinian state … I really believe that you could live peacefully with them in mutual cooperation, side by side.”1

  A far bigger fear lurking in the background during the after-dinner family salons was the promise of Palestinian autonomy in the West Bank and Gaza under the terms of Camp David. “In order to provide full autonomy to the inhabitants,” ran the text, “under these arrangements the Israeli military government and its civilian administration will be withdrawn as soon as a self-governing authority has been freely elected by the inhabitants of these areas to replace the existing military government.”

  Most Arab commentators assailed Sadat for selling us down the river and then mocking us with empty promises of “autonomy” and local elections in place of sovereignty. Sounds being made by the Israelis only strengthened this impression. When a journalist asked Begin if he was prepared to negotiate on the future of the Occupied Territories, he snapped, “What occupied territories? If you mean Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip, they are liberated territories. They are part, an integral part, of the Land of Israel.”2

  The consensus at the Nusseibeh family salon was that talk of autonomy and nondeployment was woefully short on detail. Nowhere did the agreement mention a full Israeli withdrawal or possible sanctions if they refused. Sadat’s deal had ensured withdrawal from Sinai, but autonomy only under Israel’s rule for the Palestinians. The rest was left up to chance. The “redeployment” was to be to “specified security locations.” Where were these locations? Was this up to the whim of the Israelis? Only after a five-year transitional period would the question of borders and a final status be raised. Who would guarantee that the Israelis wouldn’t use that time to create irreversible realities on the ground? Most important, what was to happen to East Jerusalem?

  Father dismissed the plan as patronizing and vague. In the same interview, he criticized it because “it includes no real element that will solve the basic problem: the right to self-determination for the Palestinians … It tends to freeze the process of giving self-determination to the Palestinians for many years to come … Are we children? Are we politically cripples? Why does Israel think that we are unable to manage our life on our own on all levels and that we need a guardian?” In a front-page article in the mass-circulation daily Al-Quds, Father writes in the spirit of Woodrow Wilson that it is basic justice for a people to be free to exercise their sovereignty, an aspect of which is the full control over their land. Autonomy as offered by Israel ran roughshod over these rights. (Moshe Dayan admitted as much when he stated, “If the Egyptians understood Israel’s real intentions on this matter they would not sign the peace treaty.”3)

  Mother contemptuously ignored Israeli plans and promises. She had by now known too many politicians in her life, Jewish and Arab, and had come to the understandable conclusion that people with a sense of decency avoided most of them like the plague. As always a person more of actions than of words, around this time she started a school for girls whose families couldn’t afford their education, called the Young Women’s Muslim Society. The school started with seventy pupils, and over the years has grown to more than a thousand.

  Lucy, Jamal, and I soon moved to an apartment owned by an uncle of mine, around the corner from my parents’ house. It was while we lived there that Lucy gave birth to our second son, Absal. An omen for the kind of strong-headed boy we had on our hands occurred just after his birth. Smiling happily at the successful delivery, our doctor, a kindly man and old friend of the family, held Absal up by his feet. Absal responded to the doctor’s good work by peeing directly in his face. Absal was destined to be a defiant child.

  Soon afterward we moved into the snarled lanes of the Old City. We would have rented a place close to where Mohammed hitched his legendary al-Buraq, if it hadn’t been turned into a parade ground. The next best choice placed us in the center of two mystical traditions. Our new home, which had once upon a time belonged to a wise Sufi sage, was on the Via Dolorosa, less than a hundred meters from the Antonia fortress where Jesus was brought to trial before Pontius Pilate. We were now straddled between the fortress and the Ecce Homo Arch, the second Station of the Cross, where Pilate, pointing to Jesus as he came out from the fortress, exclaimed, “Behold the man” to the roaring crowds. (Ecce Homo also happens to be the title of my favorite book by Nietzsche.)

  Our new home was part of the Muslim quarter, where for centuries pilgrims from Avicenna’s hometown of Bukhara stayed when they came to Jerusalem to pray at the haram where the Dome of the Rock sits. The Sufi’s empty bedroom, an extension of our apartment, sits on the top of a Roman-built arch.

  From its place buried in a box of my old papers, the unfinished fairy tale had somehow worked its magic, because Lucy and Jerusalem were a perfect match. (The magical donkey in the story transported her to the very spot, to the inch, where we now lived.)

  Installed as a resident for the first time, Lucy was enchanted by a place that retained much of its Oriental charm. Camels still grazed in empty lots, peasants dressed as they had done for centuries, and the old stone buildings were redolent of distant epochs. Our main sitting room, which had once served as an Islamic court, had a high, wooden ornamental ceiling. Next to the courtyard at the back of our house was a medieval minaret, and next to that was one of the gates to the Noble Sanctuary. Sitting in our courtyard, we would look over a maze of domed houses to the Hill of Gethsemane to the east and the Hill of Evil Counsel to the west. This was where tradition says caliph Omar caught his first glimpse of the Holy City. In the evenings, Lucy and I liked to climb to the roof to catch a view that was just as grand: into the Noble Sanctuary compound, at the majestic Dome of the Rock.

  It was while we were living in this house that our third son was born. Not surprisingly, given where we lived, he got the name Buraq, after Mohammed’s legendary steed.

  Jerusalem equally worked its charms. At times something as banal as walking down the street can transport you into a different realm. As Avicenna said, with a shift in perspective the concrete world, so immutably familiar, can become animated by the will, as if the inner and outer worlds, instead of being opposed to each other, join into one. That was how I felt strolling through the Old City with my family. Places I had passed a thousand times as a boy took on a fresh tone and hue.

  I adored the smells of cardamom, sage, and thyme in the souk, and the sight of old men in their Crusader-era cafés sucking up fumes from the burning coals set into their bubbling water pipes. It was here that rumors were hatched or spread. Occasionally Lucy and I caught a vaguely tantalizing taste of the old Jerusalem of oud players and poets.

  We especially loved our house, whose meter-thick walls, at least in our imagination, were alive with intimations of whirling dervishes. One day, we even managed to bring the dervishes to life. In Muslim tradition, upon his return home from his Haj, his pilgrimage to Mecca, a pilgrim deserves some sort of festive reception. After my parents came back from theirs, Lucy and I decided to throw a party at our house. I managed to track down some Sufi sheikhs and dervishes, some of whom knew and loved Father.

  On the appointed day, our home was full of Koran-reciting sheikhs, whirling dervishes, and the resounding echo of beating drums. Family members and guests packed into the courtyard, and the melodious sound of religious songs traveled along the Via Dolorosa and the surrounding alleys. No one enjoyed it more than Jamal. He ran around in the midst of dance and song as if in religious ecstasy, and then leapt into the lap of his grandfather, who for the first time in his life learned how to hold a child.

  Almost immediately after moving in we decid
ed to open up a café and art gallery in an abandoned building next door belonging to my uncle. We called it the Lemon Tree Café, after the lemon tree growing in its inner courtyard.

  We had a European model in mind. It was to be a café and hostel where backpackers could mingle with the young Palestinian intelligentsia. The hope was that some of the free-spirited free-thinking of the Europeans would rub off on our youth, and that the Israelis and Europeans would also get to know one another.

  Bir zeit in Arabic means “container or well of olive oil,” which makes sense because the Greek Orthodox village of Birzeit (a few miles from Jerusalem in the West Bank) has lived off its olives for millennia. The Nasir family, a local Christian clan, founded a school for local girls during the British Mandate. Under the Jordanians the school evolved into a junior college whose graduates typically continued on to the American University of Beirut. After the Six-Day War, Palestinians could no longer easily sally back and forth to Lebanon, which led the directors of the junior college to think about turning it into a full-fledged four-year liberal arts school.

  The university first got going in 1972. Musa Nasir, the founder, had a résumé similar to my father’s: he had been a governor during the British period, and under the Jordanians served the king as his foreign minister. When Nasir died, his son Hanna, a physicist by training who had been educated at Purdue University, returned from the United States to become the school’s president. As university president, Hanna Nasir fostered a devoted faculty with a strong commitment to teaching and to the development and future of the Palestinian people. His vision, shared by many members of the faculty, was to create the Palestinian version of the American University of Beirut.

  President Nasir was engaged and liberal, giving weekly lectures to faculty and students on democracy, dialogue, and the significance of protecting people’s rights to their opinions, however unpalatable. But his notion of a renaissance of a free Palestinian people put him on a collision course with the military governor—which was no surprise given the attitude of one of Israel’s chief consultants for Arab education, who is quoted as saying, “It is good for us if the Arabs are hewers of wood and carriers of water.” The first closure at Birzeit took place in 1973, a year after it opened. The following year the Israelis expelled Dr. Nasir from the country. Thinking the exile would be only temporary (it would last twenty years), no one was named as his replacement, and the university was led by its vice president, Gabi Baramki.

  Most mornings, Lucy and I drove to Birzeit together. Between lessons we often wandered through the mesmerizing countryside. We took in the scents of the flowering plants, the feel of the earth in isolated wadis, and the sight of old men plowing fields with mules. Like a siren song, the ringing of the old church bell in the village told us it was time to head back to class.

  My other walking partner was Bashir, the boyhood friend with whom I once wandered Jerusalem and discussed Russell and who was now a professor of chemistry. He and I took up our old habit of peripatetic musings about the unanswerable enigmas of metaphysics. The intervening years hadn’t changed our questions, only our vocabulary. We joined hands now in writing a paper on subatomic particles and matter’s indeterminacy.

  There were a number of faculty members at the university who would over time assume important national positions. The best known is perhaps Hanan Ashrawi, a Christian who got her Ph.D. in medieval literature from Thomas Jefferson’s University of Virginia and later became official spokesperson for the Madrid Negotiating Team. A number of other Birzeit colleagues would later work with me in politics. During the intifada in the late eighties, Israeli interrogators would torture two of them, Sameer Shehadeh and Izzat Ghazzawi, in an effort to get them to cough up information on my clandestine activities.

  One of the most eccentric characters (our fates would later be fatally linked) was an American Protestant missionary, Dr. Albert Glock, an archaeologist. Dr. Glock grew up in a strict German American midwestern home and within a fundamentalist sect that maintained that the Christian Bible was the inerrant word of God, down to the last punctuation mark. At Birzeit he swapped a religious crusade for Palestinian nationalism.

  Dr. Glock realized long before we Palestinians did how ancient history was being used by the Israelis to cement their moral hold on the territories, and he made it his mission to preserve the Arab archaeological record before roots-seeking Israeli generals effaced it. He had in mind Moshe Dayan, who with the obsession of Captain Ahab had dug up the countryside searching for traces of ancient Jewish settlements. The military governor, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, had done the same. A big swaggering man with thick arms, he had ignored the international ban on conducting digs in the Occupied Territories.

  When asked by an Israeli newspaper reporter in 1979 about my experiences at the Hebrew University, I confessed that as an intellectual, I obviously preferred its first-world standards to those of Birzeit.

  I didn’t leave it at that. I unpacked my theory that living, thinking, and even struggling with the Israelis was actually a good thing for Palestinians. This went along with my hopeful prognosis of a future “Palest-El.” Life was no bed of roses under the military regime, I pointed out with a chuckle, but neither was it as bad as it appeared from a distance. “In the U.S. or England, every new wave of arrests or every stone thrown makes it seem that the West Bank stands on the verge of an explosion. No doubt, there are problems, and some very serious ones. On the whole, however, one senses optimism everywhere.”

  Next came my point about why I had chosen to pursue my academic career in the West Bank rather than at an American or European university, where it would have made more sense. If the West Bank were returned to Jordan, I told the interviewer, “I wouldn’t stick around even for a day. Nor will I stay a minute if the Palestinians get their state. But I will remain as long as we are under occupation.”

  “In this,” the journalist summed up, I was “acting as the true son of his father.” The title of the article was, appropriately, “The Son of Anwar Nusseibeh.”

  It was also in the spirit of my father that at Birzeit I did my best to keep education and politics separate. In politics, an untrained mind—Father liked to say in English—”is like a bull in a china shop.” Trying to convince students that they first needed a solid education before pursuing their revolution was no easy matter. The students were on the whole more politically active than the faculty, though professors also tended to join one faction or the other. Of the politically active professors, most were associated with one or another of the leftist groups, such as the PFLP or one of the Marxist factions. Arafat’s Fatah movement was small and ineffective, and was generally dismissed as overly conservative.

  Among students, the situation was precisely the reverse. The strongest faction was Fatah, for it attracted poor students from refugee camps and the countryside. The second largest group was the emerging Islamists, and in a distant third place came the leftists and communists, attracting students from relatively well-to-do families. The more privileged the family, the farther left the politics.

  It was standard practice for the factions, like fraternities in America, to woo new members, but when they came knocking on my door, I politely demurred by telling them that I needed time to think about it. I hoped they would get the hint and drop the issue. Socially, I got along with the leftists the best, whereas politically I still inclined in the direction of Fatah, as I had since my London days. My gut instinct was to maintain my independence for as long as I could.

  This caution came in part from natural inclination, in part from witnessing the bare-knuckle workings of politics at the university. Soon after I arrived I was dragooned into a heresy trial. A professor, the American-educated political scientist Nafez Nazzal, had transgressed the national ethos that considered Sadat a traitor and the autonomy deal he had agreed to at Camp David a sellout by meeting with American officials at the American consulate to discuss the Camp David Accords. A faculty meeting was convened to take him to task
for it. As I entered the hall, I saw Nafez standing on the stage, microphone in hand, absorbing rhetorical blows from all sides. He couldn’t get a word in, so loud was the inquisitional clamor. “If I ever try to get my ideas across,” I said to myself, “I’ll have to figure out a different way of doing it.” Professor Nafez, isolated and harried, served as a warning.

  My focus was on teaching. Besides the cultural studies course, I worked with some other faculty and with Lucy to expand the course offerings in philosophy, until we succeeded in developing it into a minor concentration. One of my earliest contributions in this area was to introduce a badly needed introductory logic course.

  Birzeit wasn’t Oxford, and most of my students hadn’t had the privilege of playing hooky at St. George’s or dropping out of Rugby. Besides a smattering of students raised in well-off Jerusalem or Bethlehem families, most came from working-class families, the farmhand milieu, or refugee camps. In the classroom, I was determined to get my students to go to the ultimate root and cause of things rather than to skim the surface, which in my experience was what most political conversations tended to do. Besides, they didn’t need me for their revolutionary politics; they were getting enough of it from their clubs and factions.

  At first the students didn’t know what to do with me. I stood in front of the class like all their other teachers, just without the customary tie, and with my uncombed hair. My socks often didn’t match, which they could see because of the sandals on my feet, which also clashed with the image of the respectable schoolmaster. This put me in the category of the communists, the only other professors so slovenly dressed. Even more puzzling for them was the climate of intellectual confusion I intentionally or unintentionally fostered.