Once Upon a Country

by Sari Nusseibeh

  The Village League is a good example of divide et impera. Sharon and Milson made the correct assessment that while two thirds of the Palestinians lived in the countryside and in camps, only one third lived in towns or cities, home to the secular Palestinian leadership. Even the mayors who made up the National Guidance Committee belonged to the educated urban Arab elite, and as such lacked deep roots in the countryside, where the fellahin lived out their days with neither the time nor the inclination to get mixed up in the secular nationalist thinking seeping out of the cities and universities. Sharon’s hope was to find, or if necessary buy or otherwise compel, local leaders, who would then win over the traditionally minded masses. Not having a national overview—went the reasoning—these more religious characters would be content to live in the fragmented chunks of the West Bank the Israelis left to them. “Autonomy” Likud-style envisioned a mass of Arabs happily bartering away national aspirations for the right to pray and mix cement for a contractor building the next Jewish settlement.

  Sharon used the full weight of the army and the Israeli security service, the Shin Bet (the Israeli FBI), to help the Village League get off the ground. Milson set to work propping up the local leaders who agreed to cooperate. Some of the leaders they came up with had shady criminal backgrounds.

  One of the docile local leaders Sharon and Milson decided to support was a quadriplegic cleric in the Gaza Strip by the name of Sheikh Ahmad Yassin. Already in 1978 the Israeli government had begun to prop up the sheikh as a way of undermining the PLO. The government allowed Yassin to start a newspaper and a charity he called the Islamic Association. Now, through the Village League scheme, Yassin’s Islamic Association began receiving funds for new mosques, schools, hospitals, and medical clinics. The Israelis also allowed the sheikh to raise tens of millions more from Arab regimes opposing Arafat.

  Meanwhile, Prime Minister Begin and Defense Minister Sharon picked up the pace of settlement construction. To increase the Jewish population, they appealed to Israelis with no ideological ties to Gush Emunim. The government offered low-interest mortgages and other economic perks to prospective settlers, and most of the people who took up the offer were secular.

  Beit El, which had been a bare mountaintop when I arrived in 1978, now buzzed with buses, schools, shops—all within eyeshot of the squalid refugee camp of Jalazun. Begin and Sharon broke ground on the East Jerusalem settlement of Pisgat Ze’ev, named after Zev Jabotinsky, Begin’s mentor and the man who had inspired the flag-carrying youths who sparked the 1929 riots at the Western Wall.

  To facilitate and protect more settlers required more roads, electricity, and water, and more soldiers. With more settlers needing protection, new diktats were required. In the end we got a mountain of them governing all the details of Palestinian life. (Military Order 1015, for example, prohibited the planting of any fruit tree or more than twenty tomato seedlings without the agreement and adherence to the conditions of the military governor.)

  Force of circumstance was pressing our union into the wider national struggle. Starting with the struggle for academic freedom and national rights, it was only natural that we would take up a leadership role in combating the Village League. We had a well-oiled organization, an effective means of communication, and a nonviolent strategy already in place. In the fight against Sharon and Military Order 752, the youth movement took a decisive role.

  Shabibah, the Fatah youth movement, grew out of the student movement and quickly emerged as the most potent force in the Occupied Territories. One of its founders was Samir Sbeihat. Samir had completed a five-year prison sentence before ending up in my logic class, where he couldn’t sit still, constantly interrupted me, refused to take things at face value, even when they came from W.V.O. Quine, and was in general the sort of student I loved having in class. Helped out by his self-confidence and prison credentials, he rose to the top of student council. But his ambitions—doubtlessly a by-product of sharing a cell for nine months with Marwan Barghouti, another charismatic figure, who in time would become the most powerful Palestinian leader of his generation—went far beyond Birzeit. He wanted to organize all the Fatah students in the West Bank and Gaza.

  Samir and I had long discussions at the hummus salon in the village, and soon the basic concept and rules of operation developed. More important, once called to life, Shabibah spearheaded opposition to the Village League.

  Samir and his fellow student activists employed the same strategies as before: a confrontation with soldiers at the university would erupt, followed by the school’s closure, followed by a planned spreading out of students throughout villages and towns to mobilize for a more general strike. By fanning out to their hometowns, villages, and refugee camps, the student activists succeeded precisely where the Village League failed, and by doing so they exploded the Sharon-Milson theory that the countryside, being less nationalistic than the cities, was more amenable to Israeli expansionist plans. As it turned out, the countryside was more incorruptible and nationalistic than the educated urban cliques that Israel had sought to bypass. Just as threatening to the Israelis was the fear that this evolving grassroots movement was making use of our “assertive nonviolence” to throw a spanner into Israeli plans.

  The Israelis quickly traced the source of the trouble back to Birzeit and did their utmost to stop us. There were closures, roadblocks, and the occasional violent flare-up. Inevitably, every time the army patrols came onto campus, rocks began to fly. The first student was shot dead when soldiers resorted to live ammunition instead of tear gas. After that, the university was shut down for six months.

  Nothing worked, and Military Order 752 eventually went the way of its predecessor, 854. The Village League failed to gain any popular support.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Masquerade

  Over the water, a destination; under the sky, a culmination.

  —KIT WILLIAMS, MASQUERADE

  THE LONG HOURS SPENT puffing away on Omars and debating with students over fine points of a particular strategy gave me a reputation on campus. They must have thought that I spent my free time at home reading the medieval philosopher al-Farabi before spinning out my next political stratagem. I assured them that the Israeli-Palestinian puzzle wasn’t the only riddle on my mind. After putting the kids to bed at night, I liked to exercise my imagination by grappling with other puzzles and paradoxes.

  For Christmas in 1981, Lucy and I, needing a break from the tensions at Birzeit, visited her sister in Glasgow, bearing gifts from Bethlehem. Her sister, knowing I liked puzzles and children’s books, gave me Kit Williams’s Masquerade.

  The book is a collection of pictures surrounded by letters, with a short narrative. It is the story of how the Moon, besotted by the Sun, talks Jack Hare into taking her a bejeweled treasure, but the hapless Jack loses the treasure en route. The riddle is the location of the golden hare. You have to look at the picture, read the narrative, and look for a clue to the exact location.

  Within the pages of this book there is a story told

  To solve the hidden riddle, you must use your eyes,

  And find the hare in every picture that may point you to the prize.

  The treasure is as likely to be found by a bright child of ten with an understanding of language, simple mathematics and astronomy as it is to be found by an Oxford don.

  For readers all over England, the treasure hunt was on. All at once, seemingly normal middle-class people were seen climbing up cliffs or burrowing into someone’s garden.

  I read the book in one sitting. Still in England, I ran out to buy some detailed survey maps to take back to Jerusalem. Over months of nightly labor back home I untangled bits and pieces of clues to come up with a theory. I traced the hare to a spot in Sussex overlooking the Isle of Wight. On the survey map, I located a column in a park. At full moon in the middle of August, ran my hunch, the shadow of the tower should point to the spot where the hare was buried.

  I was elated to have succeeded where a million n
ative Englishmen and just as many European adventurers had failed. At once I phoned Bashir’s brother, who lived in England, and persuaded him to meet me at Heathrow. Having grown up together in Jerusalem, he was used to my whims. “And please bring a shovel, pick, and flashlight.” I persuaded Lucy’s sister to pick us both up in her car. From the airport we sped off to Sussex. Luckily, it was a cloudless sky, and the full moon was slowly reaching its zenith as we reached the designated spot. Shortly before the stroke of midnight we got out of the car and walked to the park, only to find it padlocked and encircled by a high iron fence. My friend thought it best to return the next morning. But by the time he got the words out of his mouth, I was already scaling the fence. I needed to get to the column at the top of the hill at the stroke of midnight.

  “There it is,” I exclaimed. Lo and behold, the shadow of the pillar I had identified on the map pointed off into the grass. Taking turns, we dug and dug, and it wasn’t until nearly dawn that I admitted to my friend, now looking on with bemusement at his crazed childhood friend brown with dirt, that like all the other treasure hunters scouring England, I had failed to ferret out the hare.

  Trying to sort out puzzles kept my mind agile enough to figure out the far more dangerous riddles at work in our battle with the Israelis. My instincts told me that the essence of the struggle wasn’t what it seemed to be. The fact that “assertive nonviolence” could slow down even Sharon proved that we weren’t dealing with fascist Latin American–style thugs but with a democracy priding itself on its membership in the club of Western nations. Civilized, intelligent actions work because Israelis, generally civilized and intelligent themselves, are hesitant to answer nonviolence with death squads. Israelis are governed by a strong legal system and will open fire only if they think they can get away with it—for the most part, that is.

  As with Masquerade, I was coming to realize that the nature of our conflict couldn’t be grasped by sticking to the surface, or taking leaders’ words at face value. Union work had shown me at close range how leaders may swear solemnly on Bibles and Korans and Constitutions, but still drop their ostensibly sacred positions in a flash if they feel that their underlying interests are threatened. They draw battle lines, sound the trumpet note, declare their bottom lines with hands on heart, and do the precise opposite if conditions require it. In other words, the problem affecting both sides was a basic lack of honesty.

  This was where my riddle-mongering came into play. What was the truth that both Palestinians and Israelis did their best to hide from? What were our real rather than our pseudo interests?

  As the chairman of a highly politicized nationwide union in partnership with a legion of crack student troops, I was constantly coming out with political statements and leaflets. More important, I was getting to know people from all walks of life and every corner of Palestine. Over time it finally dawned on me that most Palestinians, regardless of the lip service they paid to the slogan of a multinational secular state in place of Israel, wanted an independent Palestinian state. Walid Khalidi, with his “Thinking the Unthinkable,” had been right all along. As a democrat I had no choice but to substitute my old dream of “Palest-El” with the banner of an “independent Palestinian state, under PLO leadership with Jerusalem as its capital.”

  I concluded from these reflections that the essence of the Israeli-Arab conflict wasn’t terrorism or settlements, or even Zionism. It was the simple fact that Palestinians wanted control over the territory conquered by Israel in 1967, and that the Israelis didn’t want to give the territory up. Few people wanted to state this openly, because it involved too much cognitive dissonance, for both sides.

  Once I realized where we were heading as a nation, I began to prick up my ears. No one likes cognitive dissonance, especially not religions or revolutionary movements based on clearly articulated creeds. Palestinian leaders didn’t openly tell their people where we were heading, because the two-state solution flew in the face of a generation of ideology. The old vision of a single, secular, democratic state negated the Zionist project of a Jewish state and sought to reverse the defeat in 1948, whereas the dream of a Palestinian state next to Israel meant making peace with Zionism.

  I noticed that PLO leaders continued to pour forth their bloodcurdling rhetoric and bravado. “We will never compromise with the Zionist entity,” was the standard line used for public consumption. “We’ll fight to the last man.” Behind the scenes, the same defiant leaders were a lot more pliable than anyone could have imagined. To be sure, there were plenty of people who still preferred shooting to talking. But the top people, from Arafat and Abu Jihad on down, took a pragmatic approach to freeing the Palestinian nation from occupation.

  Israeli leaders were particularly deceitful, though not in the way anti-Semitic hacks claimed. They were even more dishonest than our leaders—itself quite an accomplishment—because the Israelis had morally dealt themselves a bad hand. They didn’t admit that the conflict was essentially over lands conquered in 1967, just as they didn’t dare annex what they called Judea and Samaria, because they knew the world would never support them if they did. Not only did international law bar the expropriation of territory conquered in war—this was the least of their worries—but stripping a people of 78 percent of their land, pushing most of them into exile, and then a few years later taking the remaining scraps from them flew in the face of what can be called fair play. “How much longer is the world willing to endure this spectacle of wanton cruelty?”1 wrote Bertrand Russell a few hours before he died in 1970, referring to Israel’s behavior vis-à-vis the Palestinians. The last thing Israel wanted was for such opinions to become widespread among thinking people.

  Violence was therefore the key. Israel often used violence as a tactical step to provoke a violent reaction, which it then used as an excuse for further violence in pursuit of its political end. The Israeli leaders wanted to create the impression that theirs was a life-and-death struggle against a band of ruthless terrorists (Begin’s “history’s meanest murder organization”) committed to the genocidal destruction of the Jewish state. “Terror” was why the Israelis were in the territories, and terror was the reason they were building “defensive” settlements. In 1982, a government official confessed to a reporter for Haʾaretz that it was a “catastrophe” that the Palestinians were turning away from terror. It would be preferable to Israel for the PLO to “return to its earlier terrorist exploits, to plant bombs all over the world, to hijack plenty of airplanes and to kill many Israelis.”2

  Keeping the focus on the guerrillas provided the perfect cover for preventing a functioning government from developing in the West Bank. The war against PLO “monsters” permitted a permanent state of emergency. All civil dissent within the Occupied Territories was therefore cast as an extension of the international terrorist war of extermination against the Jewish state.

  This analysis explained for me why it was far easier to win over a man like Abu Jihad to dialogue and nonviolence than Israeli leaders, who liked talking about democracy while relying exclusively on military means to suppress a people. The PLO had far more to gain from a nonviolent struggle than the Israelis, for whom a switch to dialogue would have meant having to defend the indefensible and would thus have necessitated an eventual full retreat from the Occupied Territories.

  My analysis also made sense of the temptation, at times overwhelming, of luring the Palestinians into violence. Often it seemed that the Israeli military occupation fought terror only to promote it, because their real enemies were moderates—such as Mubarak Awad or the mayors. There arose a strategy of blaming moderates for the acts of extremists, crushing the moderates, and leaving the extremists intact—just in case they needed them as an excuse to smash the next crop of moderates in the future.

  I felt as if I had figured out the most baffling riddle in our conflict with Israel, and soon enough I sat horrified and intrigued as the Israeli government provided the perfect laboratory to test out my hypothesis. In the summer o
f 1982, General Sharon persuaded Begin to intervene militarily in southern Lebanon. “Operation Peace for the Galilee” got under way on June 6, 1982, the fifteenth anniversary to the day of the Israeli conquest of French Hill in Jerusalem and Ramallah in the West Bank.

  It was an odd time to launch a war against “terrorism,” because not a single bullet had been fired over the Israeli-Lebanese border during the preceding twelve months. The casus belli wasn’t even in Lebanon but in London, where the Israeli ambassador had narrowly survived an assassination attempt. Israel claimed that the PLO had done it, and the PLO denied all responsibility. The real catalyst for the invasion, however, was on the diplomatic front and in the conflict in the West Bank.

  Over the months before the invasion I was becoming increasingly optimistic about the PLO. In 1981, fighting broke out in southern Lebanon between Israel and Fatah guerrillas. President Reagan sent an envoy to negotiate a cease-fire. Both sides agreed on its terms, and there was finally quiet on the northern Israeli frontier. Various forces high up in the PLO wanted to go well beyond a cease-fire by shifting tactics altogether from military strikes to diplomacy. Abu Jihad in particular dropped the militaristic language of armed liberation and began talking peace. Even Arafat seemed to go along with a new moderate tack. Desperately wanting U.S. recognition, he announced his willingness to continue the struggle through more peaceful means, just not at any price. “We are not Red Indians,” he told David Ignatius of The Washington Post during an interview in Beirut.3