Once Upon a Country

by Sari Nusseibeh

  Here it should be added that by “foreign” the government meant anyone who had been physically absent from his home in the West Bank at the time Israel took over, even if he had been born and bred there and had been on vacation in June 1967.

  It was a calculated move to undermine our academic freedom and prevent a full-fledged civil society from taking root by threatening hundreds of professors teaching at West Bank universities with deportation if they engaged actively in politics. We in the union decided to mobilize the entire country in what retrospectively came to be known as the “mini-intifada,” a dress rehearsal for the explosion of dissent in 1988.

  The Israelis threatened to shut down all the universities if we refused to abide by the new order. The administration at Birzeit, not wanting to take the risk, agreed to go along. Many members of the faculty, and in particular the internationals and expatriates most threatened with expulsion if there were any trouble, sat with bated breath, not knowing what to do. Entire careers were on the line. This only increased the pressure on those of us in the union, as it was our decision whether to compromise with the occupation and submit, or put up a fight everyone believed we would lose.

  We in the union and the various student councils debated it, put it up to a vote, and decided to thumb our noses at the Israelis and mobilize supporters throughout the West Bank and Gaza. It was not just academic freedom at stake, but our civil society and our political future as a nation. Collectively, we gave the occupiers the finger.

  The Israelis repeated their threat to shut down the university, and we continued to refuse to sign the loyalty oath. The administration now weighed in, demanding that we submit to the order. We told the administration what we told Israel: forget it! We incited no violence and threw no stones. We simply ignored the order, and to everyone’s amazement, mine included, the Israelis did nothing. And shy of actually shutting down entire universities, there was little they could do.

  Like magic, a disciplined organization with a single will managed to run circles around a powerful state with a ruthlessly determined security apparatus. In mobilizing public support for our position, we published studies of the implications of the order in newspapers, distributed leaflets, and organized lectures at town hall meetings and on campuses. We came up with contingency plans to continue teaching if the Israelis carried through on their threats and padlocked the universities.

  To drum up support in the countryside, union leaders spread out north to south, carrying our message to the villagers and their elders, explaining to them the significance of the military order and the reasons we needed to combat it. The foreign and Israeli press began to take notice once we began to hold press conferences. A number of Israeli academics showed up on campus to express solidarity. Menahem Yaari, today the president of the Israeli Academy of Science and my partner in the Israeli-Palestinian Science Organization (IPSO), headed up a commission of Israeli academics to investigate the legality and morality of Military Order 854. Yaari came to my home in the Old City for a chat, and his subsequent report backed our decision to resist his government.

  It was for me an intriguing glimpse into Israeli psychology that only after the first hint of violence did they act. One day an Israeli officer dressed in civilian clothes walked onto campus, went directly to the administration building, and demanded that the university hand over lists of student activists. Word leaked out that he was there, and students began to crowd around the administration building. Nearly the entire student body showed up, shouting at him and demanding that he leave. As he walked out and down a narrow staircase, one of the students pushed him, and he fell to the floor. We all rushed to ensure he could leave the campus without getting ripped to shreds. He left in one piece but the damage had been done.

  The following day the army ordered the campus shut for three months. Seventy professors from various West Bank universities were promptly picked up and deported.

  By this point, our grassroots network was strong enough that by closing us down, the Israelis only spread the confrontation to the towns and villages throughout the West Bank. There were confrontations with soldiers in every village where the students returned home. In The Washington Post the front-page headlines read: “Israeli Troops Wound Nine in Protests on West Bank.” Gabi Baramki’s fourteen-year-old daughter was one of the wounded.

  As soon as the university opened up again, the battle over Military Order 854 resumed. We still refused to sign, and once again the Israelis did nothing.

  For me it was an extraordinary moment. For thirty-five years every shot we took at the occupiers had ricocheted back at us tenfold: more land was seized, more people expelled, more of our future trampled upon. It was a losing battle, because they had a strategy, whereas we had only emotions. Now, for the first time, we were discovering our strength. The Israelis had nothing in their repertoire to defeat a dedicated nonviolent campaign of civil disobedience.

  It was at this moment of euphoria that a baffling message arrived from PLO headquarters in Amman, insisting that we submit to the Israeli diktats. The seventy deported professors had arrived in Amman, and many of them were demanding that the PLO force us to comply. The various university administrations, with Birzeit’s leading the chorus, said much the same thing: the PLO should show some mettle by reining us in.

  We held an emergency meeting at Birzeit. Union and student council representatives from all over the West Bank and Gaza attended. The choices we debated during this tumultuous gathering were paradoxical but clear: either we submit to the PLO, against the PLO’s best interests, or we continue our defiance. We opted to stick to our guns. At the meeting, I was charged with the disagreeable task of presenting to PLO leaders in Amman the national consensus on the issue—indeed, our vote was the closest thing to a democratic consensus Palestinians in the Occupied Territories had ever had.

  So began a series of trips to PLO headquarters. At the time, contact with the PLO was treated as a criminal offense, carrying with it steep prison sentences. As a precaution, written materials had to be smuggled across the bridge into Jordan. Prisoners in Israeli jails had developed the best method, which only an X-ray would reveal. It was the “capsule.” Messages were written in minuscule script on both sides of very thin paper. The message was carefully folded into a small tight roll, often no bigger than half an inch in width and two inches in length. This was then wrapped in a layer of protective paper taken from the inside lining of a cigarette packet. Finally, it was rolled up into a piece of plastic cut from a shopping bag. Once the message was properly wrapped, the skillful smuggler lit a match, blew it out, and used the glint from the dying flame to melt the plastic together at both ends. Now the capsule was ready to be swallowed. The message could be safely moved across the bridge in the intestines of the messenger.

  On my trips I took along Ali Hassouneh, a student affairs officer at Birzeit. Like me, he had a Jerusalem ID and could more easily obtain permits to cross the bridge into Jordan. In total we made five trips together, each time with capsules swimming around in our entrails.

  The first meeting ended disastrously. I arrived in Amman with a strong résumé as the head of a coordinating body of all unions and students of all universities in the Occupied Territories, and cofounder of the Federation of the Union of Employees for the entire West Bank. I was also carrying in my stomach signatures of hundreds of union and student leaders backing our position.

  In Amman we were met by Hamadeh el-Faraʾneh, an amiable fellow working for the PLO’s educational department. Hamadeh belonged to a Marxist faction of the PLO, the PDFLP. Both Ali and I felt immediately that Hamadeh was on our side, and this created the mistaken impression that the sailing was going to be smooth.

  Hamadeh started out by taking us to a number of meetings that had been arranged, some with the expelled professors. It was awkward to address them, for we naturally sympathized with their unenviable fates. They had lost their jobs and were separated from their families. At the same time, in our eyes we were
fighting to preserve the very institutions they had been ordered to leave.

  Soon after arriving at Hamadeh’s home, we discovered the real reason we had been summoned to Amman. We were sitting around smoking and drinking coffee when we heard a car pull up outside. A man dressed in an expensive-looking suit—Ali swore it was an Armani—stepped out of a waxed and buffed Mercedes limo. He was the special representative in Amman of the Executive Committee of the PLO. What’s more, the man was the head of one of the PLO armies, a brutish-looking character accustomed to inspiring fear and respect.

  He had scarcely walked into Hamadeh’s living room when he began talking down at us with an officious tone. Father had not raised me to suffer such arrogance easily.

  “I have been asked on behalf of the Executive Committee of the PLO to order you to sign the anti-PLO pledge and the military order concerning universities.” After delivering his message, he looked down at the untied laces of the tennis shoes I was wearing. I saw him roll his eyes.

  The self-importance of his voice triggered an automatic response in me. Putting on my own officious act, I countered: “And I was asked on behalf of the entire network of unions and student councils in the Occupied Territories to deliver to you and to the Executive Committee the message that, no, we will not sign.”

  To hear a professor who couldn’t even tie his shoes properly tell him no came as a jolt to this man. He had expected compliance, not a debate, and merely repeated his orders. I did the same.

  “It is impermissible for you not to obey us,” he said.

  I was about to correct his grammar when Ali spoke up. “But what we are doing is precisely in the PLO’s best interest. What you’re asking us to do is to drive a nail in the PLO’s coffin.”

  “I have a letter from Arafat ordering you to sign,” snapped the professional revolutionary in his tailor-made suit.

  “Let’s see the letter,” I requested.

  “What, you don’t trust me?”

  “Yes, of course,” I assured him. “It’s just that I want to see what the chairman’s signature looks like. I’ve never seen it before.”

  He pulled out a letter from his satchel and passed it to me. Scanning it, I saw that it only stated that Arafat considered higher education in Palestine a matter of great importance, and that he feared that foreign professors could be expelled from occupied Palestine.

  “This letter says nothing about signing the order,” I said, handing the letter back to him. “We, too, are concerned about the professors from abroad. Who isn’t?”

  The officer began nervously shifting his weight from one foot to the other, and with a red hue of anger in his face he told me that no one had ever spoken to him in that way. He was now gaping at me, as if stares alone could get me to comply with his demand. After a few seconds of awkward silence, he swiveled on his heel and left the room.

  The next day the head of the Jordanian intelligence service rang me at my hotel and asked me to come to his office. When I arrived I saw an oversize, dark, and unsmiling figure sitting in a chair—like a photocopy of the officer from the previous day, only with a cheaper suit. With his thick jowls, he muttered out a greeting. Sitting next to him was an American, obviously a CIA agent. The Jordanian security man echoed what the PLO man had said the previous day: that it was best for us to sign the oath. I repeated the union’s position.

  My first brush with the shadowy world of security was not a very edifying one. Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined that Israel, the United States, Jordan, and the PLO would have a common interest in Palestinian professors denouncing the PLO.

  The same pattern repeated itself over the course of several cross-border trips, each time with me carrying new capsules. The PLO made demands, and we refused to comply. We got our way only after I met Abu Jihad for the first time.

  Abu Jihad was Arafat’s second in command. His intelligence and grasp of strategy made him a hated and feared figure for the Israelis. Just talking about the weather with him could have landed us in the Israeli prison camp.

  Like Mother, Abu Jihad had been expelled from his native Ramle in 1948. He finished high school in Gaza and went off to Alexandria to study architectural engineering. It was in Kuwait where he met Arafat.

  Abu Jihad was the only top PLO official who believed in creating viable political structures in the territories. While others were shoring up diplomatic ties, planning hijackings, or creating weapons stockpiles in Lebanon, Abu Jihad was designing a national education policy for the Occupied Territories as a way for the Palestinians to assert themselves against the Israelis.

  We met during an encounter with the PLO in Amman that started out as yet another fruitless round-robin of demands and refusals. Finally, I pulled out one of our union leaflets and held it up to them. At the bottom was written, “The PLO is the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.”

  “What does representative signify here?” I asked them as if they were undergraduates. “Does it mean that the PLO does what it wants, or what the Palestinian people want?” From their expressions, I knew they weren’t following me, so I spelled it out for them. As leaders of the union, we represented the people who elected us. If we agreed to sign the military order, our voters would elect someone else who wouldn’t.

  I was there with Ali Hassouneh and another activist, Sami Khader. The three of us must have seemed a strange team to Abu Jihad. With confidence, and indeed with faith, we maintained that holding out against the Israelis would not, as some people feared, lead to the closure of institutions. The Israelis were bluffing, and we had the strength to call their bluff. By contrast, if we succumbed, we might as well shutter up the universities—because they would then cease to be true places of critical and humanistic thinking.

  I could see Abu Jihad’s mind at work, weighing the options the way a spice dealer apportions his products. No one said a word, and I was getting nervous because I knew we would have no option but to go along with his decision. Finally, he banged his fist on the table and told us to keep up the good work. I must have left a good impression on him, because from that point on, right up to his murder by Israeli commandos in 1988, we remained in close contact.

  Winning the backing of Abu Jihad didn’t mean I hadn’t collected enemies during my forays back and forth over the Jordan. On my last trip, feeling elated at having won over the PLO, I made my way back toward the border. At the bridge, a Jordanian officer looked at my passport and flung it back in my face, accusing me of belonging to the Marxist “Popular Front-General Command” faction of the PLO. He pointed in the direction of the West Bank and ordered me never to show my face in Jordan again.

  We won over the PLO by winning over Abu Jihad, who in turn persuaded Arafat to back us. This taught me something about the PLO. With some determined pressure, the main leaders came around to our position, and as such they demonstrated a willingness to adapt to popular pressure from their constituency within the Occupied Territories. Not that they had much choice. Sitting in Amman or Beirut, they didn’t have the physical means to apply thumbscrews. It was this practical reality—the PLO on the outside, us on the inside—that initiated a change in the relationship between the people and their leaders. You could say that Israeli border installations helped create a division of power that allowed a Jeffersonian spirit to begin taking hold.

  Which of course didn’t solve our problem with the Israelis. They continued issuing threats to shut down campuses, and we continued to ignore them. In time, our strength and support increased. Not only did we win a special resolution from the UN calling for Israel to back down from Military Order 854, we also managed to win the support of the International Commission of Jurists, which stated, “Implicit in the right to academic freedom is an atmosphere in which the attitude of government toward academic institutions, teachers, students and research activity is favorable if not benevolent. Unfortunately, however, no such atmosphere exists in the West Bank.”2 Finally, and with Israeli academics supporting our
cause, the Israelis backed down. They suspended implementation of the order for one year. They never formally retracted the law; they just chose not to enforce it.

  We couldn’t really savor the triumph, because just as the occupation authorities were backing away from Military Order 854, they began promulgating Military Order 752. The “Village League” called to life by 752 was the brainchild of the West Bank’s new master, Ariel Sharon.

  Sharon appeared on the scene after the Likud Party won the 1981 parliamentary elections by a tiny margin. As if he had heard a voice from heaven, Begin interpreted the election result as a mandate to pursue an even more aggressive policy in the West Bank and Gaza. To execute this, he handed the Ministry of Defense over to Sharon. Defense Minister Sharon now had a free hand to shove “autonomy” à la Menachem Begin down our throats.

  Among Palestinians, Sharon was best known for his role in a massacre in the West Bank village of Qibya in 1953. He was the commander of the infamous “Unit 101,” whose mission was to retaliate against Arab attacks. In Qibya, Sharon and his unit showed up in the middle of the night, and by morning had reduced the village to rubble. The houses had been blown up and sixty-nine Arabs, two thirds of them women and children, were dead. Major-General Vagn Bennike, a UN commander, reported that “bombs were thrown through the windows of huts in which the refugees were sleeping and, as they fled, they were attacked by small arms and automatic weapons.”3

  Never a man without a vision, Sharon set out to translate Begin’s mytho-political dream into facts on the ground. He began by replacing the previous military governor Binyamin Ben-Eliezer with Menachem Milson, an Orientalist who shared Begin’s messianic ideal of a Greater Israel. Sharon and Milson promptly went to work. One of their first acts was to outlaw the National Guidance Committee, and to remove all the remaining mayors still left from the 1976 election. To replace the deposed mayors with a new civilian administration more to their liking, they came up with the Village League.