Once Upon a Country

by Sari Nusseibeh

  My decision to stop teaching at the Hebrew University was also an admission that my previous assumptions had been dead wrong. Allowing evolution to take its course was bringing the opposite of justice and equality. Far from bringing the sides closer together, occupation was turning Palestinians into a permanent underclass of workers whose land, resources, and basic rights were being systematically violated and stripped away by a litany of regulations.

  What I noticed was a strange process. On the one hand, the country was becoming unified, just as I had expected. Following the conquest of the West Bank, the Israeli plan was to integrate the new territories into the Israeli economy; and sure enough, after just a few years of occupation, Israelis were employing half of all Palestinians. Palestinians were relatively free to travel across the old Green Line, and on weekends, hordes of Israelis descended on Arab villages for hummus and fresh vegetables. The peoples seemed to be merging.

  At the same time, an invisible no-man’s-land was being created, this one by ideology and psychology rather than by concrete and barbed wire. The Israelis expected the Palestinians, paycheck in pocket, to forget about the nonsense of national identity. As a rule, Israelis didn’t deny that there had been Arabs in their Land of Israel when they got off the boat from Kiev; we just were not a people with the same national rights to territory and independence that the Jews claimed for themselves. In Golda Meir’s unforgettable words, “It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.”1

  This may help explain much of what the Israelis were doing to us, and why, for example, they began to build settlements in East Jerusalem without bothering to consult us. The Vienna-born mayor of Jerusalem, Teddy Kollek, was not a bad man; from what I gathered during his chats with Father, he was a decent cigar-smoking fellow with a good sense of humor and without any of the overweening arrogance displayed by so many Israeli generals and traffic police. Yet, decent though he was, his actions trampled upon our history in ways the Turks had never dreamt of. When he lobbied his government to build the neighborhoods Ramat Eshkol, Neve Yaʾakov, and Gilo, he didn’t set out to harm our national rights. He simply didn’t factor them into his plans. Building Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem was in his eyes a matter of supreme national importance and a real estate deal that had brought construction jobs to an otherwise disorderly aggregation of Arab individuals who happened by historical accident to find themselves in the City of David. Giving these Arabs work and an income was doing them a favor, Kollek thought. Why, it was the chance of a lifetime for them to live in a fast-growing modern metropolis. He couldn’t understand why we would make a fuss about it.

  What the mayor couldn’t appreciate was how the laborers, merchants, and peasants he thought were benefiting from his plans shared a collective identity no less human and no less deserving of recognition—and no less riled when it was spat upon—than Kollek’s own Jewish Israeli identity.

  In the classroom and Old City cafés, I became cognizant of what might be called a bad case of national schizophrenia. While at one level economic and administrative integration between Israel and Palestine was proceeding apace, throwing off the impression that all was well, at a more fundamental level a separatist Palestinian nationalist identity was growing stronger. Arabs were becoming self-consciously “Palestinian.” The more the Arab “body” became immersed in the Israeli system, the more the Palestinian “soul” struggled to transcend it.

  I was pondering all these shifts and dialectical conundrums in my mind one day when it hit me like a bolt from heaven: the solution to our conflict with Israel was not more economic integration or a better elementary curriculum, or nicer military governors, or a more humane form of torture. Nor was it to make bad Israelis better. The occupation simply had to end—lock, stock, and barrel.

  In 1980 two years had passed since my return to Jerusalem. At Birzeit I still passed my time between classes either strolling dreamily through the nearby countryside or joining students in the heated discussions in the university cafeteria, or at one of the cafés in the village. Otherwise, I sat in my office correcting papers, working on my book on logic, or trying to write articles on Avicenna.

  Meanwhile, the stream of politicians and journalists going in and out of my parents’ house continued uninterrupted. Autonomy talks went nowhere, and probably were never intended to do so. (Begin told the Knesset, “We do not even dream of turning the territories over to the PLO, … history’s meanest murder organization except for the armed Nazi organization.”2) Far from giving up control in East Jerusalem, the Israelis did their best to expand it, and into every area.

  The East Jerusalem District Electricity Company, the largest employer of Palestinians in the area, was facing a crisis. The company had a long-term concession from British Mandate times to provide electricity to the entire Jerusalem district stretching south to Hebron, north to Nablus, and east to Jericho and the Jordan River. All the municipalities served by the company had representatives on the board of directors, and the mayor of Bethlehem, Elias Freij, was the chairman.

  The crisis broke out between the company’s workers and Mayor Freij. Ostensibly, the cause was financial, as the company, unable to provide its own power generation, had to rely more and more on Israel’s government-run power company. This increased the company’s debts, and hence threatened the long-term job security of its employees. More important, it gave Israel greater say in the affairs of the company—especially as the company’s concession was coming to an end. It was uncertain whether Israel would renew it, or if, as an occupying power, it had the right under international law to make the relevant decision in the first place.

  To make matters worse, Israel refused to allow the company to provide power to the areas in which Israel was now busy building settlements. Given the electric company’s growing debts, it made no financial sense—went the Israeli argument—for the company to provide the settlements with electricity. Israel’s concern, needless to say, wasn’t the financial well-being of the company but the security of the settlements. If Arabs controlled the electricity, they could, of course, shut it off at will.

  In our part of the world anything can be political. A misplaced stop sign can spawn a hundred rumors. In this case, a power company became the impetus for the first full-blown nationalist protest movement. The company’s Arab workers didn’t want anything to do with Mayor Freij, whom they suspected was too close to the Israelis.

  This was the first time the PLO, through Arafat’s second in command, Abu Jihad, the nom de guerre for Khalil al-Wazir, officially sought my father’s help. Would he accept becoming chairman of the board and CEO of the company? Father agreed, and the workers threw their support behind him. Before he could take up the post, however, there was a technicality to surmount. To be a board member he had to own shares in the company. A veteran friend from the Herod’s Gate Committee stepped in and transferred the necessary shares to Father’s name.

  Father’s superhuman defense of the company—there’s no better word for it—was to be his final battle, for it was at that time he was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. Exhibiting a stoic equanimity in the face of this slow-working disease, he threw himself into a dozen legal, financial, administrative, and political battles to save the company from a concerted Israeli attempt to undermine it.

  One day Father got a call from someone in the company who nervously reported that a large contingent of Israeli police had raided the main offices and kicked out the employees and were now rummaging through the file cabinets. Father drove to the headquarters at once. As if he were the Israeli prime minister, he barked out orders to the police that they should evacuate the building without delay. Mysteriously, the police followed his orders, and without a murmur of dissent. The company employees stood around with dropped jaws.

  Such was the mysterious inner strength my father was able to tap, and the res
pect he commanded, that when Israel’s minister of energy, Moshe Shahal, his nemesis in the legal tussle over the company, visited him as he lay dying, I detected a striking deference. Shahal, representing youth and power, spoke to his one-legged, bed-ridden opponent with a demure air. It was for me as if the roles had been reversed, and it was Shahal, not my father, who had found himself in the weaker position.

  In the summer of 1980 a main topic at the family evening salon, besides the situation at the electric company, was assassination attempts against some of the West Bank mayors. Perhaps irrationally, Father felt partly responsible. Already in 1967 he was urging Israeli leaders to allow for municipal elections, and Moshe Dayan finally permitted elections in 1976, for the first time since the occupation began.

  It is hard to say what the Israelis were expecting, but what they got were nationalist mayors in all the major West Bank towns and cities. All but two were associated, directly or indirectly, with one or another of the PLO factions. Some of the mayors, together with other figures associated with the PLO, formed what was called the National Guidance Committee.

  This was ironic, because Fatah still regarded itself foremost as a clandestine military organization, and as such was slow to take advantage of the political opportunity afforded by the elections. It was the Communist Party, historically not an armed military movement, that came to control the NGC.

  Not long after the NGC got off the ground, the Israelis tried to crush it. In 1979 the authorities detained Bassam Shakaʾa, the popular pro-Syrian mayor of Nablus, for “supporting terrorism.” In May 1980 the mayors of Hebron and Halhoul, moderates as well, were picked up and deposited over the border. A few months later, Military Order 830 put a final end to Palestinian local democracy by doing away with the elections of municipal councils. Seven members of the NGC, including two mayors, were rounded up and tossed into jail.

  They were lucky to be behind bars, because members of a Jewish messianic underground group with ties to the settler movement Gush Emunim, the “Block of the Faithful,” tried to finish off those NGC leaders who weren’t. Shakaʾa, who had just been released, lost both legs in a bomb attack; the mayor of Ramallah lost his left foot.

  The forcible sidelining of the National Guidance Committee set into motion deep changes in Palestinian political life, even if the Israelis didn’t yet realize it. The old class of nobles and dignitaries, along with traditional tribal and clan leaders, were on their way out, replaced by military and civic networks organized by young activists throughout the West Bank and Gaza.

  Another subject of endless salon discussion was the settler movement, and the threat this represented to any hope for a future Israeli withdrawal. Israel’s Labor Party had built the first settlements after the Yom Kippur War to counter another sneak attack. If Kollek spearheaded the East Jerusalem settlements, it was now Shimon Peres who was serving as patron for the West Bank settlement of Beit El, built on the expropriated land of the Palestinian village of Beitin. The wheel was set in motion.

  But it was the Likud Party, in the shadow of Camp David, that launched the construction of the largest settlement blocks. Prime Minister Begin believed that the captured territories were integral parts of Israel because they were the God-given Holy Land, the birthplace of the Jewish people. He was willing to grant limited autonomy for Arabs living there, just not national rights. National rights implied control over a territory, and this was what he was determined to deny us.

  Settlements started sprouting up everywhere. Shilo, Neveh Tzuf, Mitzpeh Yericho, Shavei Shomron, Dotan, Tekoa, and a number of other settlements all share the same basic storyline: one morning you’d spy a caravan perched on a hill, the next there would be two or three. Before you knew it, like dividing cells in a Petri dish, caravans covered the entire hillside.

  When I was a boy, Jerusalem was the nerve center of Palestinian political and cultural life, and the debates and meetings raging in my father’s salon gave one a feeling of what was happening in the entire country. As the occupation put down deeper and deeper roots, the Jerusalem elite’s traditional leadership role became emptier and emptier, until it was little more than hollow pretension. The political battles shifted over to the West Bank and Gaza villages and cities that now had to deal with decisions made by occupation authorities. Whatever the occupation touched produced a steady stream of new grievances, new stories, new heroes, new leaders, new experiences, a new reality.

  It was from these far-flung battlefields that students were beginning to arrive at Birzeit. The university now had thousands instead of hundreds of students, and the cozy, intimate village setting couldn’t facilitate the booming growth. In 1980 the university started moving locations to modern buildings in a new nearby campus. The new campus, largely financed by wealthy Palestinians living in the Gulf, was on a hillside. Growth meant more students, lower academic standards, and a growing demand to shift over to Arabic rather than English as the main language of instruction.

  I was still learning more than I was teaching. On most afternoons my office—or, better, my “salon”—was a hummus restaurant in the village, where my students and I sat, talked, and chain-smoked. (I took to smoking Omars, the cheapest brand on the market, and the only cigarettes available to our political prisoners in Israeli jails.) As strange as it may sound, once I began to get to know my students I experienced a far greater intellectual intensity than I had known at Oxford or Harvard. Occupation made ideas as palpable as hunger or thirst or pain.

  These salon and classroom conversations grew out of the quotidian reality of my students living in squalid camps and villages, and were then fertilized by the Great Books. At universities in the West, good students are meant to plow through a stack of material before they acquire the confidence to hazard their own take on a given subject. My students didn’t feel they needed any authority other than their own experiences. They didn’t need to read about what death was, or what rights were, or about freedom and identity and the difficulty of making choices. In every village, in every camp, in every town, almost every Palestinian was going through experiences just as profound as those to be found in the canon.

  We would be discussing Hamlet in class when a student would come out with a puzzling comment. He would either have been recently released from an Israeli prison or have just come from a camp or a village where he had had a grueling encounter with the Israeli military. His comment, with this in the background, would cast a different light on the Danish prince’s behavior.

  One text we read in class was the Athenian historian Thucydides’ account of an exchange between the Athenians and the Melians during the Peloponnesian War. We debated the relative merits of an aggressively expanding maritime power and a group of islanders wishing only to be left in peace. The islanders, as the weaker party, defended their position using moral arguments, divine right and the like. The Athenians retorted that the peaceful islanders had to wake up to the fact that the only laws of history were those of might, of power, of the stronger lording it over the weaker.

  In a classroom at Harvard, Thucydides’ account would have been part of a clever academic exercise, with no real relevance outside the classroom. To my students, Israel was Athens, Melos their village or camp. In their imaginations, the Israeli army officers who came to their village to speak with their elders were the cynical Athenian overlords issuing diktats from a position of power.

  At this point our discussions gained more traction. If might makes right, as the Athenians/Israelis obviously assume, isn’t it only natural to resort to armed rebellion, instead of coming out with useless moral arguments that will only be scorned by the masters? If international law is a sop, and the real world is created on the battlefield, as the masters believe, shouldn’t we fight them using their own instruments of power and force?

  Another classroom favorite was The Wretched of the Earth, an essay on the Algerian war by psychologist Frantz Fanon. Once again, the students saw themselves in the role of the Algerians fighting off the French a
rmy and the settler population it had been sent to protect. Moral arguments didn’t prevent the Athenians from slaughtering the islanders. The people of Algeria, by contrast, heroically fought off the settlers, and gained their independence. The message for my students was obvious.

  To give my students a different perspective more in line with my own position, I once invited to class the Palestinian Christian Mubarak Awad, a crusader for nonviolence and a proponent of Gandhi’s civil disobedience. I had known him from my school days at St. George’s; he was in Zaki’s class. Awad had a hard time selling my students on Gandhi’s nonviolence. How could white flags and tax boycotts chase Israeli tanks back across the Green Line? How could peaceful protest get the Israelis out of their hair? How could nonviolence prevent arrests without charges, land confiscations, house demolitions, searches without warrants? Only one person at the talk openly defended Awad’s ideas: Lucy. (She later worked for three years at the Palestinian Center for the Study of Non-Violence, in Jerusalem, which he set up.)

  Mubarak Awad was unfazed by his cool reception; he was used to it. He went on preaching and practicing his ideas until the Israelis expelled the pacifist gadfly from the country in the mid-eighties. They accused him quite absurdly of using nonviolence as a cover for the “armed struggle for liberation.” In truth, as I would experience firsthand, the Israeli authorities often feared men of peace far more than they feared the terrorists.

  Another book we read in class that generated continuing debate and interest was Gilgamesh, an old Akkadian legend dealing with immortality and the gods. Some of its stories, like the Flood, later showed up in the Bible. One raging debate set off by Gilgamesh was whether the received religious texts were really from God, whose very existence was now less than certain for some of my students. This theological question, which if debated at all at Harvard would have had less urgency than the outcome of a Celtics game, had a burning relevance in my classroom. Many of those who believed that justice would willy-nilly win out over occupation, right over might, fell back on God to prop up their hopes. This quietist tack was taken by the Islamic contingent. As strange as it sounds, this group, which eventually morphed into Hamas, was initially opposed to violent confrontations with Israel. Salvation, in their pious thinking, would come about only after we all went back to the unsullied Islamic way of life. People who would later praise suicide bombings as a sure ticket to Paradise were still strict pacifists in the early 1980s.