Once Upon a Country

by Sari Nusseibeh

  The appalling transformation of hills and valleys by Israel’s settlement activity made me think. I once mistakenly believed that the organic flow of events would inevitably lead to “Palest-El.” Was I now just as naïve in assuming that the mutual recognition of basic interests would inevitably lead to a two-state solution? Was it possible that people could willfully ignore the dictates of logic and reason? Of basic common sense? It seemed so.

  I’ll start with the Israelis. The specter of nearly half a million Israelis calling for the resignation of the war’s architects shook up the political elite. An investigation was ordered, and the subsequent “Kahan Report,” in February 1983, pinned the indirect blame for the massacres at Sabra and Shatila on Sharon. Sharon and then Begin resigned.

  General Sharon was unrepentant about his failures in the West Bank or about the needless war that had cost thousands of lives. After resigning he was back at work almost immediately, launching his next career: building Jewish settlements in vast numbers.

  As unrepentant as Sharon, Begin retreated back to his home, where he would live out the rest of his days gazing out on his handiwork on an opposite hill: the former village of Dir Yassin, now a mental hospital.

  Yitzhak Shamir, a smart, scrappy veteran of the Jewish terrorist underground, took over until the new elections. (My father had witnessed this gnomelike man at work in 1947.) But Shamir lacked Begin’s hypnotic power over the masses, and he failed to muster enough votes to put together a government. In 1984, Likud and Labor decided to form a curious cohabitation called the Government of National Unity. Under the rotating agreement, Shimon Peres became prime minister, Shamir was vice prime minister, and Yitzhak Rabin took over from Sharon as defense minister.

  This shuffle in the government was a signal to the public and the world that things were going to change. In fact, in the West Bank, conditions only worsened. Both societies were becoming inured to a high level of violence.

  A more radical generation of settlers, having been raised to believe that their ancestral home was Judea and Samaria, grew more and more brazen. A few days after Begin stepped down, a right-wing activist threw a grenade in the middle of a Peace Now demonstration, killing a peace activist and injuring several others.

  The so-called Bus 300 Affair was another sign of just how bare-knuckle the conflict was becoming. In spring 1984, Shin Bet agents arrested two Palestinians who had hijacked a public bus. The agents took the Palestinians into a field and beat them to death, death squad–style. South America had finally reached the region.

  In Palestine, violence was also on the rise. When Lucy and I first arrived in the village of Birzeit to teach, the setting was pastoral and the people friendly to the point of naïveté. Traditional religion and tribal law kept human aggression under raps; far from being sources of aggression, tradition preserved a simple, peaceful way of life. Sectarian killings were unheard of, violent crime a rarity. Now, as in the Old City in the 1970s, violence was taking root in the villages and cities of the West Bank, and the traditional authorities were powerless to contain it.

  As resentment among Palestinians mounted, so did the level of anarchy and lawlessness, and none of the political factions was able to exert broad authority. In 1983, Lebanese-like terror had reached Israel in the form of a bus bombing. The number of Israeli victims of terror shot up sevenfold between 1982 and 1985, from two to fourteen. (When I signed a declaration condemning the stabbing of a Jew, the Israelis said it was a PLO propaganda ploy. “Can a cockroach write a statement at all?” the chief of the military asked when he heard about it. “Only on strict telephone orders from Arafat, the terrorist magician,” replied the intelligence specialist on Arab affairs, no doubt with mirth.2)

  One factor in the increase in violence was the growth of the Islamic movement, greatly bolstered by the successes of Hezbollah and other fanatical groups in Lebanon. Suicide bombings in Lebanon, which with deadly effect killed hundreds of Marines whom President Reagan had sent to help end the civil war there, entered into circulation as an odious new paradigm for “conflict resolution.” Hezbollah Radio broadcast reports into Palestine of their “glorious martyr operations.”

  Sheikh Yassin’s charity had by now fully morphed into the Muslim Brotherhood, the local Palestinian franchise of the secret Egyptian society responsible for Sadat’s assassination in 1981. But Rabin and his colleagues in the Shin Bet continued to regard Islamic groups as a foil to the secular nationalists.3 Incredible as it may sound today, they continued to believe that Islam could be used to fight Palestinian nationalists, which, before the killing of the two Islamist students at Birzeit, they did. With their coffers full and with more or less a free hand to operate, the sheikh and his minions began to challenge the secular nationalist groups. Their hope was to dominate politics in Palestine, just as the Hezbollah had replaced the PLO after the Israelis drove it out of Lebanon.

  In 1984, I noticed a change among some of my students. All the humiliations of their brief lives, tossed into a religious cauldron, had turned village boys, and sometimes girls, into implacable fanatics, hostile to the sort of liberty I was trying to teach them to love. It was the opposite process from the prison interrogation: instead of self-liberation and identification with the finest fruits of humanity’s thought, ideological inebriation locked them into a narrow, unbending frame of mind. I feared that the Brotherhood could win over the masses—they were far better organized than Fatah, were supported by the military government, and were busy setting up a social network to help people whose lives had been shattered by the occupation.

  While I had no doubt that Palestinians needed and wanted their own independent state, I was becoming equally aware that in the duplicitous world of politics few people dared to openly say so. It was still heresy among many people in the PLO to talk about a two-state solution. At the very most, a PLO member would demand the “unconditional” establishment of a Palestinian state. As for the Israelis, they were doing everything in their power to forestall such an outcome, even though it should have been crystal clear to them that such a state was in their own best interest.

  The more I mulled it over in my mind, the more I realized that both Israelis and Palestinians were refusing to talk about a two-state solution because it implied mutual recognition of the other’s rights as a nation, and because it meant having to admit squarely there was a price that had to be paid. As for me, I could talk about national freedom as much as I wanted, as long as it was just a monologue or a conversation with my students; without active dialogue with Israelis, it would go nowhere.

  It became clear that much of what I had unwittingly bought into was an illusion. Nearly all of the leaflets and statements I was busy endorsing and signing called for the “unconditional” creation of our state. What on earth does unconditional mean? I asked myself. Ali Hassouneh, my friend and travel partner to Amman, explained to me one day, with a jocular but slightly patronizing lilt to his voice, that unconditional meant, of course, unconditional: without negotiations. No strings attached. No conditions. “Nonsense,” I retorted, with just as friendly a grin. I was thinking aloud when I said to him that if a Palestinian state were to come into being, it could do so only through negotiations with Israel. And negotiations required serious dialogue, not with Europeans or a handful of Israeli anti-Zionists who already agreed with us, but with committed Zionist politicians from within the Israeli power elite.

  Two American Jewish visionaries soon left me no choice but to “put my money where my mouth was,” as Father liked to say. They were Professor Herbert Kelman, a Harvard psychologist, and his lovely wife, Rose. The Kelmans realized long before almost everyone else that Palestinians and Israelis would eventually have to sit down and negotiate a deal. And since no one else was fostering dialogue, they decided to start. Herbert and Rose organized joint meetings, slowly and quietly bringing Palestinian and Israeli public figures together.

  One day Kelman rang me up and asked me to take part in a meeting at Harvard. Represent
ing the Israeli side, he told me, would be leftist but staunchly Zionist members of the Knesset, such as Yossi Sarid. Joining them on our side was my father’s friend Walid Khalidi, which didn’t surprise me given his long-standing views. Far more unexpected for me—but fitting well into my riddle—was the participation of prominent figures in the PLO, including Afif Safieh, a longtime director of Yasir Arafat’s office and now a PLO rep in Washington, D.C. Abu Jihad and Arafat, who had met Kelman more than once already, had also signed off on the meeting.

  I was ready to go, but as the head of the union I couldn’t. Up to this point Palestinian politicians had held official meetings only with anti-Zionist Israelis, such as the great Hasidic sage and master Joel Teitelbaum, leader of an ultraorthodox religious sect. Anything else was considered illegitimate. On one occasion Father invited the Israeli president, Chaim Herzog, to our winter house in Jericho for lunch, and he asked me to join them. I declined because of my position with the union. The Harvard meeting was no friendly lunch but the first step toward real dialogue, and I knew I had to go. I equally knew that the members of my union would lynch me if I went to Harvard as their representative. This left me two options: either to turn down the invitation and continue my work in the union, or to quit.

  It was hardly a soul-twisting existential dilemma. Fully convinced that it was in my nation’s interest to brush aside a worn-out taboo against open dialogue with our occupiers, I tendered my resignation from the union and set off for Cambridge, Massachusetts.

  The meeting with Sarid and his Israeli colleagues was a lot more pleasant than the mess I faced when I got back home. Around campus, my participation in the meeting changed people’s perception of me. In the eyes of close friends and colleagues, I had ceased being an independent gadfly with strange ideas and had thrown in my lot with the “right-wingers” surrounding Fatah’s official leadership, and more specifically with Arafat himself, who was increasingly thought to have charted a “sellout” course in order to curry favors with the Americans. The most heated ideological skirmishes I had back at Birzeit were with my best students, who, like good students everywhere, despised bourgeois compromise.

  One of these students, a leader of the PFLP faction, came out against me in an anonymous leaflet he signed in the name of his faction. I knew he had written it; I had read enough of the faction’s leaflets to spot his style a mile off. Holding the incendiary tract in my hand, I smiled proudly at his effective use of metaphor and at a polemic carefully crafted so as not to sound bombastic. I visualized the concentrated features on his face—the raised eyebrows and the folds in his forehead—as he penned it. Another inflammatory leaflet floating around campus, also anonymous and also in the name of the writer’s faction, was written by another student and colleague of mine named Marwan Barghouti.

  By this point I, too, was skilled at the art of cranking out leaflets. I typed one up explaining the logic behind my new course of dialogue, signed my name to it, and sent it into circulation. Nearly bent over from bursts of laughter, Marwan commented to me as I was handing the flyers out that my leaflet was the first in Palestinian history to have been signed by the author rather than by his faction, as if I were a faction unto myself. At the time it felt like it.

  It hadn’t taken Marwan long after his arrival on campus to establish himself, together with Samir Sbeihat, as the undisputed leader of Shabibah, Fatah’s student movement. We first met in my political theory class. He was a twenty-five-year-old who had just been released from a seven-year sentence in an Israeli jail. He would go on to a brilliant, if checkered and unfinished, career. He now sits in an Israeli prison serving multiple life sentences on terrorism charges.

  On the surface, his story sounds interchangeable with that of thousands of others. His forefathers were fellahin who for hundreds of years had lived in villages near Birzeit. Marwan was educated at a UN refugee school set up in the village, where he joined a PLO cell. He was soon locked up for throwing rocks at soldiers and shared a prison cell for nine months with Samir Sbeihat.

  Marwan stood out. Short and stocky, as if he had grown out of the rocky soil of his native countryside, he had a flare for polemics coupled with a quick mind that easily sifted and absorbed information. His unflappable self-confidence made him a strong leader. If his mind wandered while reading John Locke in class it was because of his soaring national ambitions.

  What intrigued me most about him was the way he spoke about his previous Israeli captors. In prison he had learned Hebrew, and in his various interrogation sessions, he developed enormous self-respect by not bending to the will of his enemy. He also learned not to hate the Israelis but to glimpse the humanity lurking behind their uniforms. They also, it seems, discovered his.

  A good example of Marwan’s authority took place several years after we met. Repression by the authorities, along with the frequent closures (once for six months at a stretch), invited angrier, more violent protests, which in turn led to more repression. In the spring of 1985, tensions at the university were riding so high that a mob of students attacked the American consul general’s car while he was visiting the campus.4 The consul general escaped from a lynch mob only after Marwan rushed to the center of the crowd, put his hand into the air, and snapped his fingers. The screams and shaking fists stopped at once. No one dared to lay so much as a hand on the man. “My name is Marwan Barghouti,” Marwan said to the shivering consul general, who had just watched his life pass before his eyes. “I am the chairman of the student council here.”5 Later that year, the military authorities placed Marwan under administrative detention for six months. Two years later he would be deported from the country by the Israeli authorities, as was Samir Sbeihat.

  History famously likes playing tricks. Hegel talks about its “cunning,” its “capers” and its “pranks.” Military governments are especially susceptible to history’s law of unexpected consequences. In our case, the Israelis used every means they had to suppress the nationalist movement in the West Bank, and all they succeeded in doing was to encourage boomerang-like political activists to conduct business in the very place where Israelis most wanted to cement their rule: Jerusalem. The tighter the squeeze on the West Bank, the more Jerusalem returned to its pre-1948 status as the center of an Arab political movement. And in Jerusalem the government couldn’t so easily throw us into a dungeon, or nail us into a casket, without an outcry from the Europeans and Americans—or increasingly from our Jewish friends in Peace Now, many of whose leaders also lived or worked in Jerusalem.

  The cold war spread a glimmer of mystery and danger over a city already suffused with the atmosphere of a spy novel. Agents from various Western and Soviet bloc security and diplomatic services met for cloak-and-dagger meetings. With some luck, at the American Colony Hotel, across the street from my parents’ home, you might see men with dark glasses in the corner or the ubiquitous Mossad Man whispering to an Arab collaborator working as a waiter.

  I experienced my first murder in the dead of winter 1983, when I also took up the habit of rubbing worry beads. The killing took place on my doorstep under the Ecce Homo Arch.

  Problems at the Lemon Tree Café had been mounting, and in yet another paradox, the more dealings I had with Israelis, the greater the ills besetting the hostel and café—such as the time Shin Bet agents tried to recruit one of our sexy Scandinavian waitresses to work for them as an informant. On another occasion a security official summoned me to police headquarters in the Russian compound and intimated that if I didn’t “make a deal” with them they might “accidentally” find heroin in the place and charge me with running a drug ring.

  The murder took place on a cold and drizzly evening. On my way home to our apartment on the Via Dolorosa, I dropped by the café as usual for a quick double espresso. It was late, and business was slow. At a table across from me sat a European couple talking quietly, seemingly unruffled by the tensions poisoning the city. The man, a German backpacker with a frame as big as an ox, had arrived at the hostel sever
al days earlier, but had had to book a room at a different hostel because ours was full. Now he was back with a dark-skinned woman who appeared to be his girlfriend.

  They got up and left before I did. On my way home I passed them. They were ambling slowly, arm in arm, and kissing.

  Within five minutes I was upstairs in our living room getting ready to watch the evening news on television. The room had two large windows looking out to the Via Dolorosa, an old cobbled lane with no cars and, on this bone-chilling evening, no people.

  Just before switching on the TV, I heard a muffled sound followed by a heavy thud. Lucy, who had just put the children to bed, came into the room. “What was that?” she asked referring to the strange noise. We both moved toward the window, and in the silence of the night, we heard the distinct sound of footsteps walking quickly up the alley at a right angle to the Via Dolorosa. Putting my head out the window, I saw the German man from the café lying facedown on the steps of the Catholic convent across the street, with a stream of blood oozing out of his neck.

  “Someone’s been shot.” I turned to Lucy in fright.

  “I’ll call the police,” she said. “You go downstairs.”

  In seconds I was standing above the dying German backpacker, unsure of what to do. I heard the sound of someone shouting and running in our direction. Looking down along the Via Dolorosa, I saw it was a lone policeman. An Arab.