Once Upon a Country

by Sari Nusseibeh

  Those persuaded by the Athenian argument—or Fanon’s—vigorously objected, insisting that God was irrelevant and monotheism was no more than a fairy tale. Marxists of all stripes belonged to this camp. God for them was either an illusion or, if he existed at all, the source of all our troubles, certainly not the solution.

  I normally tried to stay neutral in the theological spats, and the only time I made an exception I got duly and roundly attacked. One day, at a poetry contest for students at a small Catholic university in Bethlehem, a student read out a poem attacking God. The accused blasphemer was like Dostoyevsky’s Ivan Karamazov. He came from a camp and used his poem to vent all his rage and frustration. The university, fearful of being regarded as harboring anti-Muslim agitators, expelled him.

  One of my friends from the Café Troubadour days, who was also teaching in Birzeit, told me about the student and his expulsion, rightly assuming I’d be indignant at this infringement on the liberty of speech. When he suggested that he and I write an article for the Al-Quds newspaper, I agreed. It was titled “Freedom of Opinion,” and appeared on the front page the following day.

  No sooner was it published than a tirade of angry responses arrived, one of these written in fire and blood by a sheikh who later became the mufti of Jerusalem. After six consecutive articles denouncing us, we responded with another article. (I would later use these articles in a course I gave on freedom.)

  This is an example of how I began to adjust my teaching to the conditions of occupation. It was during one of the aforementioned discussions with my students that it suddenly hit me that I couldn’t—to turn Plato on his head—stay outside the “cave” and expect the “cave-dwellers” to ignore politics, because their “cave” resounded with it. If I wanted to reach them, I had to enter into their “cave” by understanding their experiences. Only then would the Great Books or Great Ideas come alive to them.

  In Western society, a liberal education can often be little more than a rite of passage or a sign of a proper upbringing, like eating your salad with the right fork. For us, it’s a matter of life and death. Education is a tool to prevent people from passively stewing in their own resentment, and either giving up by submitting or lashing out by tossing bombs.

  Hence my long conversations with students over Omar cigarettes and hummus. Students taught me what the occupation was doing to my people, and thanks to them I began to consider the kinds of intellectual skills they needed to outsmart a highly intelligent enemy. Rather than a Fanon-style gun-slinging romanticism of violence, we needed to think strategically.

  The students I had less success with were the religious zealots, who were still a minority. In my courses on Islamic philosophy I never came out against Islam, and given the type of religion Mother raised us with, I had no reason to. I only explained to students that al-Farabi and other Muslim philosophers weren’t traditional theologians. When al-Farabi wrote about human government (and he did so only esoterically), he didn’t go along with the traditional line that describes the ideal government as one run by God or his prophet. Al-Farabi’s ideal government was run by a wise and learned ruler; whether he was religious or not was secondary. A good ruler, of course, had to be able to read and write, but he also had to be educated in all the existing sciences, and above all to know his Plato and Aristotle. Sure, he also had to be moral. But for this he didn’t need God. He could find his moral principles by reading Aristotle’s Ethics.

  The pious students clustered in the back row, their lips pursed in tight circles, didn’t like the sound of this. Few of them knew the slightest thing about Islamic civilization, beyond what they had picked up from their village imam. But they knew enough to think that I was attacking Islam.

  My preferred method of teaching—that is, rattling them a bit to make them think critically—only made matters worse, because I played devil’s advocate by defending what for them were outrageous opinions. They saw the likes of al-Farabi and me as a danger to Islamic tradition.

  “What do you say about the Prophet?” one righteous student called out, his beard quivering. “Isn’t it true that he was the receptacle of true and complete knowledge, and he had no need for Greek or for Aristotle.”

  “Well”—I began pacing the front of the classroom—”you should recall that Mohammed couldn’t read or write, and was but a messenger. Ditto the Angel Gabriel, who only transmitted the truth to Mohammed. Al-Farabi teaches us that when a person uses reason to figure out the truth, he possesses it in a far deeper manner than one who’s merely a vessel.” The Holy Rollers gasped. “It is the man who uses reason,” I continued, “that al-Farabi, like his teacher Plato, singles out as the wisest ruler.”

  “Wiser than the Prophet?” four students asked at once.

  “You got it!” said one of my Marxist students.

  “Exactly,” I continued, still pacing, playing with an unlit Omar in one hand. “Take any example in life. Someone who knows English is better at reading Milton than someone who doesn’t. Someone who knows about banking is better at running a bank than someone who can’t even decipher numbers. Isn’t someone who drives a car better at getting from Ramallah to Bethlehem than a mule-driver?”

  I had gone too far, and the religious students were fuming. In their tendency to personalize the exchange of ideas, they had heard me say that I—who was literate, had a checking account, and drove to work every day—was claiming to be better than the Prophet.

  I was already in hot water with the religious community because I had defended the Bethlehem student poet. And to many, the way I acted seemed so utterly untraditional that they assumed I was antireligious. Didn’t I consort with Marxists and PLO secularists? Didn’t I have liberal views? And what about the sandals, the English wife, the long hair, and the conspicuously missing moustache? They added it all up and concluded that I was their sworn enemy.

  A group of them went to Father to complain about me. “Get out of my house!” he barked at them after they called me a blasphemer. The new mufti of Jerusalem, at their next address, agreed with them, however. The mufti lashed out at me during his next Friday sermon at Al-Aqsa mosque. My young inquisitors were so irate that they put out a leaflet in broad black letters: THERE’S A NEW PROPHET AT BIRZEIT. It accused me of heresy by thinking I was better than Mohammed. The leaflet, meant to be a threat, actually was amusing. I rather liked the designation “prophet,” because for me a prophet is less a magician than someone who thinks clearly and logically enough to detect future trends and patterns. I framed the leaflet and hung it on the wall in my office next to a photo of the Dome of the Rock.

  Chapter Twelve

  Military Order 854

  There always comes a time when one must choose between

  contemplation and action. This is called becoming a man.

  —ALBERT CAMUS, “THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS”

  HOW I ISSUED FROM FATHER’S LOINS I’ll never know. Since I was a boy, I’ve preferred analyzing a situation to rolling up my sleeves and getting my hands dirty. The thought of being burrowed for days in library stacks or chain-smoking Omars over a pile of notes in a café has always been far more alluring to me than jockeying for position and power. This is the reason I’ve always admired Hannah Arendt’s definition of political action as “leaving one’s private hiding place and showing who one is by disclosing and exposing oneself.”1 Who enjoys “exposing” himself? In my book you should do it only when your conscience forces you into a corner, leaving you no choice.

  My entrée into politics came about through a paradoxical realization. By instinct an antinationalist with an aversion to flags and histrionics, I was becoming convinced that Palestinians had to pass through a stage of nationalism. Only a successful national movement could free us from the dangerous embrace of nationalism.

  I still felt I could do my part in this as an educator rather than as an activist. Anyway, activism went against my nature, and it would have sapped what little time and energy I had left over after teaching. I had my ow
n philosophical puzzles I wanted to solve, puzzles that had nothing to do with liberation.

  It was while poring over one such puzzle during a break between classes (inclement weather had forced me to forgo my daily walk through the fields) that I got a visit from my childhood friend Bashir, who cracked open my office door and peered in with a mischievous grin. He was followed by several of my colleagues, one of them was Hanan Ashrawi, who was also smiling. My friends were up to something.

  My broom closet–size office didn’t have enough chairs for them all, so in contravention of the traditional Palestinian warm-up of coffee and a smoke, they immediately got down to business. Bashir, acting as spokesman for the others, said I couldn’t “just sit there” as if everything were okay. “We need you to become involved.”

  He was referring to a brewing conflict between the administration and faculty members. At the time, our miserly salaries weren’t even coming on time. But there were many other irksome problems besides money. Lucy had to set up a nursery for the children of faculty because none existed. We didn’t have university health insurance, and we had no say in the university’s governance. Faculty members wanted a union to represent their interests, and the people crowded into my office thought I was the one to create one.

  A friend of mine had tried to set up a teachers’ union at Birzeit back in 1977, and was immediately given the boot. The administration, to forestall any future agitation, craftily introduced into its bylaws rules for a faculty association that gave us a representative structure, while maintaining ultimate control. Now, five years later, the delegation in my office explained how the main political factions on campus—PFLP, the communists, and Fatah—had agreed to nominate one independent person to take over the faculty association and, from the inside, try winning concessions from the administration. Since I was one of the few faculty members not belonging to a faction, process of elimination had landed them at my door.

  “Why not?” I told them without giving it much thought. No sooner had those words passed my lips than I felt bewildered, and for good reason. Without knowing it, this flippant why not? was about to catapult me in the midst of the national political fray.

  Within the matter of a week, I saw myself with the title of president of the faculty association. My first impulse was to dismantle it. How could it represent the will and interests of its members if the ultimate power over its decisions and actions lay with the authority before which those interests were to be brought in the first place? The association was a sham. Another trick the university administration used was to separate the faculty and nonfaculty employee associations. An action by either one of the two would be far less effective than a combined action.

  What was needed was a change in the rules. The first order of business thus was to merge the two associations, which was easy to do because the head of our nonfaculty counterpart was the defiant feminist novelist from Nablus, Sahar Khalifeh. The two of us began what we called our “White Revolution.” (We would later recycle the expression during the intifada.) We then jointly declared the formal death of the two associations and the birth of a union that henceforth would represent the interests of faculty and nonfaculty members alike. Pending new elections, the elected executive council members from the two associations became members of the provisional executive of the new union.

  The administration, led by Gabi Baramki after Nasir’s expulsion, was stunned. In a single act as decisive as a karate chop, we had exploded all previous efforts to prevent the unionization of the university.

  More was to come. At An-Najah National University in Nablus, a pro-Fatah mathematician named Adnan Idris was spearheading a drive to create a labor union. We soon began talking about ways to cooperate. Wouldn’t the muscle of our respective unions be greatly strengthened by forming a single nationwide structure? We could all benefit from union actions at any of the campuses. And why stop at universities? Why not involve teachers from vocational training centers?

  Driving between Nablus and Ramallah for consultations and negotiations, we came up with a basic charter for the union we called the Federation of the Union of Employees in Palestinian Universities and Institutes of Higher Learning. According to our bylaws, each chapter would have independent elections and the autonomy to call individual actions depending on local needs. At the same time, the umbrella organization would have an overall strategy and unity of purpose.

  Circumstances and events have their own logic, and one thing now led to another. What about student unions? The various universities and colleges already had student councils, and each council tended to mirror the political factions of the country. Some were pro-Fatah, others pro-Communist, pro-PFLP, pro-PDFLP, and so on. Couldn’t we forge an alliance between our union and the councils?

  In the meantime, we needed office space for our union at Birzeit. The direct approach of asking the administration for space on campus led to a predicable no. Now the student union, led by some of my pupils, adopted an even more direct method. We took over an empty room, hung a sign on the door, and moved in. We were already well ensconced by the time the administration found out, and the fact that all the political factions backed me—not to mention the young, burly Fatah activists posted outside the door—prevented our being evicted.

  The following is a list of some of our successes: we developed a health policy for the employees through direct agreements with doctors, dentists, and hospitals; we negotiated salary disputes; and most important, together with the student councils, we fashioned a democratically legitimate political force of astonishing power. Soon enough, this power would come into conflict with both the PLO and the mighty Israeli military.

  Our union can be seen as a good example of civil society at work. Though most members belonged to various PLO factions, or were sympathetic to them, the union was independent and democratic, and as such had none of the mystery-mongering and secretive cell structure of a guerrilla movement. As an open movement with nothing to hide, we put out a booklet describing our bylaws, budget, goals, and achievements.

  The often raucous meetings in which elected representatives of student and union bodies sat to discuss policies and strategies—or sometimes stood on chairs and shouted—were a breath of fresh air in a society long run by aristocrats. As president, I spent hours in wearying union deliberations trying to persuade colleagues to accept my point of view; when I lost, as I often did, I had to play the spokesman for a view I had until then vigorously opposed.

  At first we never thought to coordinate our policies and strategies with the PLO leadership. The legitimacy we needed came from our own experiences. If it hadn’t been for the Israelis and the hubris of the military establishment, we probably never would have established links with the PLO, and the union would never have become a potent nationwide force against the military occupation.

  The military had various repressive instruments to keep people in line. Its repertoire included closures, administrative arrests, house arrests, torture, and if these failed, there was always expulsion. The Soviet Union had Siberia; the Israelis had Jordan and Lebanon.

  The single largest center of resistance to occupation was the university campus. Israel called Birzeit “the hotbed of Palestinian nationalism,” and in the early 1980s it was. Other centers sprang up. In the 1970s a number of colleges were established in various parts of the West Bank and Gaza through private local initiatives, all propelled by the same needs that the founders of Birzeit had felt, namely to provide higher education to students who could no longer travel abroad. More campuses attracted more attention abroad, more international faculty, and among the students and faculty, more meddlesome nationalist activism. All of these were worrying developments for a military and occupation administration long used to unfettered control.

  The military came up with what it must have considered an elegant solution. Soon after the occupation began, Israel placed the West Bank and Gaza under the control of the Israeli defense minister, who in turn appointed a military g
overnor, investing him with all the prerogatives needed for ruling over a population. Mayors could be dismissed, trees could be uprooted, houses could be demolished, entire areas could be confiscated or redefined as military zones. In theory, paying lip service to international conventions, the governor ruled in accordance with preexisting law, which in the case of the West Bank had been Jordanian law. In truth, to carry out Israel’s expansionist policies, he relied on the issuance of military orders that had to be ratified by his superiors in the Ministry of Defense.

  The military governor now figured out a way to control the universities and colleges. There were no Jordanian laws governing universities in the West Bank, simply because there hadn’t been any universities before 1967. In 1980 the governor promulgated Military Order 854, which placed universities under the same rules that the Jordanians had used to run government kindergartens and elementary schools. Such a creative application of the old law granted near absolute power to the Israeli authorities over faculty appointments, student admission, and curriculum. It gave the army the right to vet students before they gained admission or faculty before they were appointed, and every course or book taught required the stamp of the military governor.

  As an adjunct to Military Order 854, the military governor demanded that all foreign professors, whether Palestinian expatriates or internationals, apply again for work permits, and that they sign a loyalty pledge, specifically stating they would not engage in opposition to the military government or have any dealings with a “hostile” organization as defined by the Israelis, namely the PLO.