Once Upon a Country

by Sari Nusseibeh

  To be sure, in philosophy I tried to keep their minds firmly nestled in problems of logic, and in their cultural studies, my students read the prescribed syllabus of Great Books, from Gilgamesh to Albert Camus. But instead of lecturing to them about the meaning of the texts, I tried my hand at my don’s method by steering clear of straight answers and easy facts. They must have thought I was just as lost and confused as they, if not more so. “Why do you believe what I just told you is true?” I said once, chewing out a student I had caught taking notes during one of my lectures. “How do you know it’s worth writing down?”

  Students were to think for themselves, without kowtowing to the opinions of their fathers or Muslim clerics or priests or professors like me. I wanted them to deconstruct their inherited mental horizons, to disassemble the myths they’d accepted wholesale, and reconstruct their thoughts so that they could discover their own identities and their own ways of thinking. My job as teacher wasn’t to dish out precooked, easily digestible truths; it was to break the students’ logic, the way a physician breaks a bone in order to reset it.

  From the first day in the classroom I encountered a lot of bewildered students, and those who simply wished to collect data in order to pass their exams made a wide berth around my classes. But even with those who stayed, I was battling the effects of a badly constituted Palestinian educational system, which typically expected students to recite information, as if naked facts alone, in a sort of spontaneous generation, sufficed to prove a point. At most, students thus “educated” might be able to analyze past events; constructing scenarios for possible futures, however, was unheard of, and questioning established beliefs, even if only to understand them critically, carried with it a hint of heresy. Whether in religion or in politics, students were prepared only to imbibe received doctrines, memorize them, live by them, and defend them. Minds coming out of our high schools were either frozen or boiling hot. Almost never were they cool and balanced. And as I would later witness countless times during political demonstrations, they had a tendency to overheat and explode.

  For the first few months I couldn’t have been happier. At the Lemon Tree Café, Lucy and I organized concerts, discussions, and even self-published a couple of art books for some friends. The café was the only spot in the city, if not in the country, where young Palestinian and Israeli intellectuals could meet so freely. It attracted writers, musicians, European backpackers, and, alas, the occasional drug peddler. On occasion, some foreign visitors dropped by for a drink. One was the legendary Oxford philosopher of law H.L.A. Hart, an old friend of Lucy’s father. (Later with the philosophers Isaiah Berlin and Peter Strawson, he published an open letter in the London Times protesting my imprisonment by the Israelis.) Hart came for a visit after climbing up the Mount of Temptation, outside Jericho.

  One of the highlights from this period was a trip Lucy and I took to the Israeli town of Arad, in the desert hills overlooking the Dead Sea. We went there to visit the novelist Amos Oz for the first time. Along the lines of “know thy enemy” (and future countryman), since 1967 I had been soaking up Israeli fiction and poetry. With Amos, I read everything of his I could get my hands on, partly because of his genius and partly because my Israeli friends had always spoken very highly of him as a man of integrity and the conscience of the Israeli people. So I phoned him, and without hesitating he invited us to his modest, unassuming desert home.

  Teaching at Birzeit had its challenges. Whenever I felt I was at the point of despondency at students fidgeting in the chairs while discussing al-Farabi or coming up with some outlandish comment on Kant, I always had the Hebrew University. Compared to Birzeit’s two thousand students and Spartan conditions, the Hebrew University was in every arena—the libraries, the facilities, and the level of academic distinction—a first-rate research university.

  Once a week I made my way to the main campus. The library there was large and the students less agitated—older after their two-year army service—and more demanding academically. Besides Guy and Sarah Stroumsa, Avishai Margalit was on the faculty. More important for me academically, the university had excellent scholars in the field of Islamic philosophy and thought. Guy introduced me to perhaps the world’s best: the eminent scholar and linguist Shlomo Pines. With Guy and Lucy and a handful of others, I attended his biweekly seminar, in which we explored various translations and readings of Plato’s Laws.

  Within a year, my optimism for the natural evolution of “Palest-El” started to crumble. It was becoming unmistakably clear to me that the nature of the Israeli occupation would systematically and intentionally undermine any kind of natural, peaceful, evolutionary development.

  This was a major change for me, and it started with a dose of humility. Probably the biggest lesson I learned my first year back was to respect deeply the feelings and traditions of my people, a people I barely knew after so many years abroad. Finally, in a sadly delayed reaction, my parents’ immense admiration for the “man on the street” finally started to take hold in me.

  In some respects I knew less about Palestine than my colleague Dr. Glock. To be sure, I could have written a tome thicker than my dissertation on the inner lives of Jerusalem patricians. Where Dr. Glock had an advantage over me was in his knowledge of traditional village life.

  I quickly developed close ties and friendships with some of my students, who were for me a window onto the life beyond the narrow confines of urban Jerusalem. Whether in discussions with them in the cafés or at their village homes, where Lucy and I were often invited for a meal, I got a glimpse of pristine, unspoiled village kindness, tradition, and wisdom. Hospitable, dignified, and with unlimited capacity to offer respect and affection, they contrasted sharply with the city’s überbourgeoisie, politicians, businessmen, and evolving sector of professionals and academics. It was from among the ranks of villagers and the denizens of camps that young men and women would later step forward to defy tanks and Uzis, and end up wounded, killed, imprisoned, and tortured. Such people I had—and have—as much to learn from as to teach.

  One of the most important tutorials for me in the village life of Palestinians took place by way of shame. I was driving to Birzeit one morning, running late as always, hair disheveled, when an older woman, clad in her local peasant clothes, suddenly jumped in front of the car to catch a bus that had just stopped on the other side of the street. I wasn’t driving very fast, but in spite of throwing on the brakes, I hit her. She fell to the street with a thud.

  Getting out of the car to see what had happened to her, I saw that she had luckily sprung back on her feet again. I tried to ask her how badly she was hurt, and whether she needed to be taken to a hospital. “I’m fine,” she kept saying, pulling herself away from me. She still wanted to catch the bus, and began a quick dash across the street. I managed to give her my card before she disappeared.

  I didn’t hear from her and soon forgot all about it.

  Three months later, Father returned from a trip abroad. He rang me up and asked to see me. Loosely translated, the first words he came out with were “What the devil have you been up to?”

  I stuttered out something, because I didn’t know what he was talking about. “What happened with this old woman?” he wanted to know. Someone from her family had contacted him.

  It finally dawned on me what he was referring to. I explained that the accident wasn’t my fault, that the woman hadn’t been hurt, and that I had given her all my contact information. Father listened, nodded as if he understood, and finally said—again loosely translated—”This time you’ve really blown it.”

  I stood there speechless. Disappointing Father had always been my greatest dread.

  “You failed to do the main thing,” he went on. “By not apologizing, you impugned the honor of their family and ours.”

  He told me a story to illustrate the point. During World War II, Fakhri al Nashashibi, a prominent Jerusalem patrician, was murdered in Baghdad. An Arab news source accused Ahmad Nusseibeh, my father�
��s distant cousin, of the murder. Nusseibeh was a “henchman of the mufti,” said the report, and a member of a clan “long addicted to crime.” Without a shred of evidence against him, the police in Baghdad arrested the cousin forthwith and threw him into a dungeon.

  No one believed the newspaper report, and, anyway, the Nusseibeh family was related to the Nashashibis by marriage and the two families were on the best of terms. Nevertheless, Father went with Uncle Hassan and their cousin Ali to visit the Nashashibis on the evening following Fakhri’s burial. Whether their distant relative Ahmad was guilty or not was irrelevant: the family had to honor the family of the victim.

  My father at the time was like me: young and “modern,” and he had to bite his lip to keep from laughing when he saw the reactions of the young Nashashibis who ushered them into the house. Here were young people like him, all living in the middle of the twentieth century, yet they were being controlled by observances that logically should have been extinct long ago. He managed to contain his laughter, though, and by paying his respects to their family, prevented an act of revenge against his.

  Father told me this tale just to make sure I understood the seriousness of Sulha, our tribal system of justice. In Palestinian tradition, the individual isn’t really an individual. If you steal something, or are even accused of doing so, you and your entire tribe become culpable. They are responsible for you. The wronged family or tribe has the right of revenge against any member of your tribe or family. What prevents revenge and bloodshed is a form of conflict resolution. The two sides set up a Sulha. Within a three-day period, intermediaries will go to the family of the injured party to set up a meeting.

  If someone gets run over and killed, the person who drove the car (or someone on his behalf), guilty or not, must go with his family to the family of the victim to apologize and to offer compensation. The father of the victim may say, “We want fifty million dollars, even though there is no price for my son’s life.” Once the driver’s family accepts the terms, the victim’s father starts dropping the price. “For the sake of Allah, I’m prepared to give up on ten million”; “for the sake of Mohammed another ten,” and so on until a reasonable price, or no price at all, is reached. Sulha is less about money than about honor.

  In my case, we took a big convoy of one hundred family members to the old woman’s village. The entire village showed up for the ceremony. In great solemnity, we gave our apologies and offered compensation. Just as Father had predicted, the other family accepted our show of respect, and waved off the compensation. We had done our duty, and they showed us respect by refusing to take anything.

  Many years later, addressing an Israeli audience, I repeated this story. It doesn’t matter whether you set out premeditatedly to cause the Palestinian refugee tragedy, I told them, the tragedy did occur, even as an indirect consequence of your actions. In our tradition, you have to own up to this. You have to come and offer an apology. Only this way will Palestinians feel that their dignity has been recognized, and be able to forgive. But by denying all responsibility, besides being historically absurd to the point of craziness, you will guarantee eternal antagonism—a never-ending search for revenge.

  This lesson of respecting the feelings of my own people also led me to a better understanding of what was happening right at my back door, in the Old City of Jerusalem. Once I began to observe and listen to the so-called “commoners,” I realized that under the surface people were growing desperate. The occupation was strangling them.

  My moving into the Old City was never a popular idea with my family. Had I been a bachelor, they would have dismissed it as a whimsical attachment to the landscape of my childhood. But to drag my blond English wife and my sons into those dodgy streets was sheer madness.

  The Jewish Quarter, of course, was booming. Over the years it had been greatly expanded in size, overflowing well beyond its historic borders. More than six thousand Arabs had been driven out of their homes, and Israeli law had made sure they wouldn’t go back. An enduring stain on a generally admirable institution, a 1974 Israeli Supreme Court ruling upheld a rule forbidding Arabs from living in the quarter.

  By contrast, the decay of the Arab city’s social fabric was astounding. The drug dealers around the corner from the Lemon Tree were signs that social rot had entered the life of the city, sapping it of its old strength. Drug culture and the crime that comes with it had been unknown in the city I lived in as a boy. As had been the rats now scurrying in and out of tipped-over municipal garbage cans, which were almost never emptied.

  Intentional neglect wasn’t limited to the Old City. There were plenty of signs of decline outside the walls. My uncles’ half-built hotel in the heart of East Jerusalem was still a concrete eyesore, mainly because the Israeli municipal authorities had thrown up bureaucratic obstacles to prevent its completion.

  Arabs complained to Mayor Teddy Kollek, who just pointed his finger back at them, blaming them for much of the downfall of the city. And he had a point. I was quick to note that Palestinian leaders barely did a thing to defend their rights in the Old City or to promote its development. By boycotting municipal elections, they willfully relinquished the most potent democratic weapon available to them for pushing economic and social development.

  But this didn’t make Kollek’s accusation any less of a self-serving excuse. It didn’t take a Machiavellian genius to figure out the political dimension of the unraveling of the city’s elaborate tapestry. From Omar all the way to the Herod’s Gate Committee, the Old City has been a natural political and cultural center for the Palestinians. You see this in our literature, our symbols, and our language, in the city’s architecture, its climate, its cyclical ups and downs, and in the dusty hills. All of these formed us as a people.

  My first clue that deliberate Israeli policies were at work behind the collapse came from the local chatter in the cafés I was now frequenting. In 1967 the Israeli soldiers patrolling the streets were met with benign or even welcoming indifference. Now the old men puffing away on their pipes despised the Jewish occupiers far more than they ever had the Jordanians. It was as if the common people, having given the Israelis the benefit of the doubt, were now drawing other conclusions: they were up to no good.

  This universal hostility had many sources, some as simple as the tipped-over garbage cans or the endless hassles with permits. A bigger source was the policy of building Jewish neighborhoods around the Old City and hence cutting it off from its hinterland. What was once a seamless web of city and villages was becoming chopped up and fragmented.

  After 1967, Israel used a British Mandate land ordinance to expropriate agricultural land around East Jerusalem. With new expanded borders, it used a range of planning and zoning laws to build Jewish neighborhoods, the aim being to bring as many Israelis into East Jerusalem as possible. The creation of Ramat Eshkol (1968), Ramot (1968), East Talpiot (1970), Neve Yaʾakov (1972), and Gilo (1973) led to a demographic shift in the city.

  This, combined with the fact that it was nearly impossible for Arabs to get building permits, led me to conclude that the long-term Israeli plan was to degrade Arab Jerusalem into a ghetto of a greater Jewish city. Lacing our part of town with so many Israeli institutions dedicated to repressing Palestinian nationalism, notably the ministries of interior and the police, was engineered to keep the population docile. Meanwhile, Palestinian institutions and thus the financial, social, and political elite running them, were driven out and kept out, partly through diktats such as the dismissal of the municipal council in 1967, and partly through intentional neglect. I felt as if I was watching a slow act of homicide, the killing of a city that constituted the soul of my family and of my people.

  Shuttling back and forth between the first world on the main Hebrew University campus and the third world at Birzeit was becoming a difficult balancing act. It had been easy when I believed that a natural process was going to lift the latter to the level of the former. The minute I concluded this wasn’t happening, it got much h
arder. Doubts soon led to my resignation from the Hebrew University.

  There had been a lot of grumbling at Birzeit regarding my job at the Israeli university. The administration said I had to choose between “them” and “us.” At first I ignored their objections as just more of the same boycott thinking that had long outlived its usefulness. I couldn’t honestly teach my students not to obey the village elders blindly if I buckled under such pressure.

  Still, in the end, I quit. I felt ineffective at the Hebrew University, as if my words had no real influence there. It came to me one day at a checkpoint, after an eighteen-year-old soldier pushed his gun through my car window demanding I produce my ID. This soldier could be one of my students, I thought. I imagined a highly intelligent student eagerly debating the intellectual power and elegance of Islamic philosophy one day, and the next day going off to do military service in the territories and treating my people—or me—like animals. It was a contradiction I found impossible to bear.

  Chapter Eleven

  The Salon

  HOWEVER ODD IT MAY SOUND, in 1980, at the age of thirty-one, it finally began to dawn on me that my fairy-tale childhood world had been reduced to ruins, that the city I had been raised to love was gone forever. Maybe the reason it took me so long was due to my natural disinclination toward politics, coupled with the social privilege that, like the young Buddha, had shielded me from the truth of the violent world I had returned to.

  There are moments in life when frustration or anger gets the better of you. I had always tried to look beyond the soldier’s khaki to see another human just like me. But having that gun pushed through my car window that day, all I could see was a churlish soldier standing on his side of the checkpoint facing me, an Arab under occupation.