Once Upon a Country

by Sari Nusseibeh

“What should we do?” I asked him when he arrived short of breath. The officer felt the man’s pulse and assured me that he was still alive. “Help me carry him to the hospital,” he said, pointing in the direction of the Austrian Hospice down the road.

  Together the two of us, who together weighed as much as the wounded man, tried to carry or half drag the German several blocks to the hospital, then three flights up to the emergency ward. By the time we got there he had bled to death in our arms.

  Fiction may not always imitate life; in this case it did. The events surrounding the death of the German tourist baffled me. When later, sitting in solitary confinement, I thought about trying my hand at writing a political mystery, the first chapter I sketched out had the title “Murder on the Via Dolorosa.”

  The riddle over the slaying started with the Israeli police investigator who took my statement the following morning. He jotted down some notes in a cavalier manner, as if entirely uninterested in solving the crime, and then bid me good day. I asked him what he thought had happened.

  “Oh, you know, some Arab terrorist probably did it,” he stated in the tone people usually use to talk about last week’s soccer match.

  “He had a girl with him,” I told the officer. “What happened to her?”

  The officer explained in his flat, uninvolved manner that she was the victim’s girlfriend. She had been scared witless after the shooting and had screamed frantically for help, but no one came to her assistance.

  “I didn’t hear her,” I informed him, puzzled that she would lie about such a thing. From my apartment I can hear the scuffle of a rat in the tipped-over garbage bins down the alley. Far from screaming, the girlfriend had slinked off as silently as a mouse. “She didn’t scream.”

  “Yes she did,” the officer assured me with the same abstract tone of voice. “She told us she banged on all the neighbors’ doors but no one opened up for her. Finally she ran up to the police station at Jaffa Gate to inform us of what happened.”

  “But Jaffa Gate is in the opposite direction of the footsteps I heard tiptoeing away.”

  My interlocutor was no longer taking notes and was manifestly uninterested in continuing. Wrapping things up, he said dryly that the woman had been so rattled by the experience that she took the first flight back to Germany.

  Something was fishy. The following day, a short item appeared in the newspaper stating that a German tourist had been shot dead in the alleys of the Old City, and that the police suspected Arab terrorists.

  I didn’t buy the story about the terrorists. A killing, especially of a Western tourist, normally would bring the entire weight of the Israeli police apparatus onto the Arab Quarter. Why the apathy? Why had the police allowed the girlfriend to leave hours after the crime? Who was this “girlfriend” anyway? Later, a moneychanger on Saleheddin Street filled in some intriguing details for me. The moneychanger’s cousin managed a hotel, and the girl had been staying at this hotel when the murder occurred. When asked by the manager what she was up to in the country, she said that she was heading down to Eilat to look for her boyfriend. Most intriguing of all, she said all this in Arabic. Her passport was German but she spoke Arabic like a native. The suspicious manager—many Israelis speak Arabic—asked her about this, and she explained that she had worked for some German consultancy group in Saudi Arabia.

  As scattered pieces came together, I was beginning to get nervous. I naturally didn’t believe the tall tale of the Arab “terrorists.” Did this mean that the Israelis had had a hand in the murder? Was it a coincidence that the victim was in my café fifteen minutes before the man’s death? Who was he, anyway? Why had the “girlfriend” disappeared? Months later, the newspapers carried a story about the arrest and conviction of a local Arab for the crime. But years later I learned, from other Palestinian prisoners, that the man had confessed to not having been the murderer, and that he had been planted in jail as an Israeli spy on other Palestinian prisoners.

  One thing was for certain, however: the shadowy world in which I now lived wasn’t the innocent Jerusalem I knew as a child.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Faisal Husseini

  THE MURDER WAS THE LAST STRAW. The city’s rapid decline, the unsolved mystery behind the slaying of the German, and the threat to plant drugs in the café did the trick. In life one has to choose the right battles, and keeping the café open, and continuing our defiant experiment to live in the decaying city, didn’t strike us as the right one. In 1984, Lucy and I shut down the Lemon Tree and moved out of the Old City.

  Our new apartment was in Abu Dis, a village on a hill just beyond the Mount of Olives. Our neighboring village was Ayzariyah, the Arabic name for the biblical town of Bethany, where Mary, Martha, and Lazarus lived. (You can hear Lazarus’s name in the Arab name for the village.) We didn’t feel as if we really had left the Old City, for from the balcony of our new apartment we could see in the distance the luminous splendor of the Dome of the Rock.

  Living outside the city walls didn’t change a thing for us politically or socially. The center of our lives was now East Jerusalem, which had come to displace Birzeit as the center of nationalist politics. Just as the Old World patricians had been displaced by the National Guidance Committee, which in turn gave way in the early 1980s to the network of grassroots groups organized by student and union activists, a new power center was growing up. This one was located in the Arab Studies Society, in what would become known as the Orient House, and its central personality was Faisal Husseini. We didn’t always agree on analysis or strategy, but disagreement never prevented me from seeing Faisal as more of an elder brother than just a collaborator or co-conspirator. Faisal fondly dubbed me “the revolution’s philosopher.”

  Faisal could spin out yarns from his family history that were a lot more impressive than mine. His ancient roots went right back to Mohammed’s Mecca, and, alas, in the starkest contrast to my clan, his was fabulously wealthy with land, businesses holdings, and connections throughout the Arab world.

  Where he really had a leg up over a Nusseibeh was in being part of political legend. He was the grandson and great-grandson of mayors of Jerusalem, the grandnephew of the grand mufti of Jerusalem, and distant cousin of Yasir Arafat. Most of all, he was the son of the fabled Abdel Kader el-Husseini, the military hero who worked closely with Father and the Herod’s Gate Committee before dying during the siege of al-Castal. Faisal, an eight-year-old at the time, was expected to take up his father’s legacy.

  After undergoing some training in PLO guerrilla camps, Faisal returned to East Jerusalem after the Six-Day War. Like my elder brother, he waded across the Jordan River, braving trigger-happy soldiers. Once word got out in Israel that he was in Jerusalem, a note of panic sounded. “It was as if the son of Ho Chi Minh had come to live in New York City,” said one Israeli, comparing Faisal’s father to the nettlesome revolutionary leader.

  Arafat had also waded the river, and while trying to build up a local military cadre, he often hid out in Faisal’s house. Arafat gave Faisal a gun, which Faisal took but never used. Not long after my first encounter with him, at the Al-Aqsa mosque during the fire in 1969, he was arrested, the gun was found, and he was expelled from the country.

  In the late seventies the Israelis allowed him to return to Jerusalem. Not wanting to get exiled again, he kept a low profile, working odd jobs and steering clear of trouble. No one knew it at the time, but his mind was actively scouring the political landscape, looking for the right place to invest his energies and intelligence. Eventually he grasped something that only the indefatigable Dr. Glock—still zipping past West Bank checkpoints with his yellow Israeli plates in hot pursuit of our past—was thinking: that cultural memory was becoming a major battlefront in our fight for independence.

  Faisal first started the Arab Studies Society in the neighborhood of Musrara, along the seam line between East and West Jerusalem. A couple of years later, it moved to a wing of the Orient House Hotel, which his family owned.

>   At its founding, the society must have appeared to the Shin Bet as a harmless hobby for an underachieving scion of a powerful martyred figure. I can imagine them pitying the poor fellow who had fallen so short of his family’s expectations. What they didn’t properly appreciate was how thickly his father’s blood still ran in his veins. His enemies soon found out just how formidable a foe they had on their hands. For the occupation eager to portray opposition as inherently terrorist and bloodthirsty, Faisal was highly intelligent, urbane, and moderate. No guns, no half-shaven face, no revolutionary hubris. And he spoke Hebrew.

  Fatah activists in the territories figured out what Faisal was made of long before the Shin Bet did. Activists regarded him as their natural leader. When Marwan was coming up with bylaws for Shabibah, he sought out Faisal’s advice, as did Mubarak Awad when he wished to market his Gandhian nonviolence. Whatever the issue—settlements, arrests, house demolitions, or the latest administrative arrest—Faisal presented our views in clear, cogent terms. But he didn’t just talk. After a press appearance where he’d denounce the latest outrage you’d find him arm in arm with the man whose house was about to be bulldozed or whose son had just been killed, or with the wife whose husband had just been arrested. He won the hearts of Jerusalemites by always being on call for their troubles. For Shamir, Sharon, and others of their ilk, who had no interest in dialogue, Faisal was the most dangerous enemy out there.

  At the Arab Studies Society, Faisal invited such colossal Jewish intellectuals as Yeshayahu Leibowitz to address Arab audiences at the Orient House. This put him in the dialogue camp, and made the Arab Society a natural home for me.

  Faisal and I first began working together shortly after my return from the controversial Israeli-Palestinian meeting at Harvard. Leftist members of the Knesset, led by the formidable Shulamit Aloni and Yossi Sarid, wanted to hold open meetings with some Palestinian public figures, at the American Colony Hotel. I agreed at once. Faisal also got PLO backing for him to take part.

  The other Palestinians who participated were all associated with Fatah, either loosely or in some kind of leadership role. There was Raymondah Tawil, a fiery lady who during the days of the National Guidance Committee hosted the mayors at her political salon in Ramallah; she was also Arafat’s future mother-in-law. Hanna Siniora and Ziad Abu Zayyad, two editors of the pro-Fatah daily Al-Fajr, also attended.

  This being the first public meeting in Jerusalem of Fatah and Zionist members of the Knesset, Faisal and I prepared a statement affirming our allegiance to the PLO and to an independent Palestinian state. Hanna Siniora printed it up on the front of Al-Fajr.

  The encounter at the American Colony was a breakthrough in many respects; most important, it finally shattered the dishonest silence over the issue of dialogue. The public now knew that Fatah was interested in talking with the Zionists. The Israeli presence similarly sent the message to average Palestinians that at least some Zionists were prepared to publicly accept the PLO and its call for a Palestinian state.

  The American Colony meeting also created a template for joint Israeli-Palestinian committees and protests that eventually came to center around Faisal and the Arab Society. One idea we came up with was to commemorate the sixth of June, the day the occupation began, with a protest march along the former No Man’s Land. Hundreds of Israeli peace activists and Palestinians held black flags and stood along the former border in a call for an open city of joint Palestinian-Israeli sovereignty.

  For many of my student friends, holding a black flag was far from the sort of activism they had been raised in the Fatah clubs to admire. They still preferred more daring exploits, such as stoning tanks or writing graffiti. Still, a slow trickle began to warm up to dialogue. Once, as I was participating with Israelis in a sit-down protest at Damascus Gate, some Birzeit students came for a visit. I sat on the steps outside the gate, sweating copiously because of the heat and holding up a poster with some Arabic-Hebrew-English slogan, and a student who was an expert at stone throwing looked at me with resignation and said, “Is this what you’ve turned us into?” We smiled at each other. I handed him a poster, and he took it.

  It didn’t take long for Faisal’s Orient House to become the power center of Palestinian national politics. Another step along the way came in 1985, when Ziad Abu Zayyad, Hanna Siniora, and I teamed up with an ex-Nasserite from Gaza named Zuheir el-Rayyes, and the mayor of Hebron, Mustafa Natsheh, to establish the Arab Council, founded, with Abu Jihad’s backing, specifically to nurture formal contacts with Israeli Knesset members who agreed with us on the need for a two-state solution.

  As a natural spin-off from the council, we started publishing a weekly newspaper called Al-Mawqef. Cousin Zaki joined the staff after being fired from Al-Quds over a labor dispute. At Marwan Barghouti’s recommendation, we hired Hamzeh Smadi, a one-time Birzeit student from Qabatya, to be the paper’s editor. Another colleague joined us after being released from prison: Fahed Abu al-Haj. Fahed was raised in a rustic rural setting, and he learned to read and write only after the Israelis locked him up for the first time at the age of sixteen. He finished school in jail.

  My first conversation with Fahed in the office is unforgettable, because for me it was a metaphor for the decency, simplicity, and humanity that is as native to Palestine as is its prophetic religion. Freshly freed from years in the prison camp, Fahed had heard that our paper was an Abu Jihad–supported outfit, for him the ultimate stamp of approval. So, he knocked on my door in search of a job.

  “How much do you want?” I asked him.

  “Whatever you want to pay me.”

  “Just tell me.”

  “Dr. Sari, whatever you want to pay me.”

  I suggested sixty Jordanian pounds, a pittance.

  “Thank you, Dr. Sari.”

  “Will this be enough for you?”

  “Dr. Sari, thank you.”

  I tried to press him on his needs, but each time, he responded only with gratitude. I ended up jacking his salary up to eighty.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Annex Us!

  BY 1986 THE MAIN ENGINE DRIVING the increasing levels of violence in the Occupied Territories was the settlement movement. Back in 1983, General Rafael Eitan, Israel’s highest-ranking officer at the time, had drawn up blueprints for one hundred new settlements between Jerusalem and Nablus. “When we have settled the land,” went his prognosis, “all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged roaches in a bottle.”1 It seems the Israeli military authorities enjoyed likening us to cockroaches. Just as General Eitan predicted, three years later, settlements were springing up in every corner. Fortresslike suburban enclaves such as Halmish (built on the al-Nabi Saleh forest, renowned for its dense stand of trees that astoundingly managed to survive the Ottoman years) ringed the West Bank like a necklace, or a noose. Sixty thousand Israeli settlers lived in the occupied West Bank. It became an everyday sight to see, perched on a hilltop, settlements with swimming pools and sprinkler systems within eyeshot of dust-bitten villages where people had to walk a mile for a bucket of water—water, of course, pumped from West Bank aquifers. One settlement in the Jordan Valley was able to expand because the government, having confiscated one of Father’s farms after the 1967 war, had handed it over to them.

  The situation in East Jerusalem was worse. When I arrived back in the Old City in 1978, I discovered that successive Israeli Labor governments under the municipal leadership of Teddy Kollek had allowed Arab East Jerusalem to decay, while building modern neighborhoods for a total of thirty thousand Israeli settlers. Now the number was one hundred thousand, and spiraling upward fast.2 As a sign of our losses in Jerusalem, our family’s saga of the Goldsmith’s Souk took a new twist when some Israeli religious zealots clutching guns moved in and refused to budge. The police said it was a property dispute that only the courts could adjudicate. That the souk had belonged to the Nusseibeh family for centuries didn’t impress them. Cousin Zaki then began to dig through four-hund
red-year-old Ottoman documents to prove our ownership.

  More settlements brought more rock throwing, more arrests, more rubber bullets, more abuse. Amnesty International reported cases of prisoners being hooded, handcuffed, and forced to stand naked without moving for many hours at a time.3

  In 1986, fifty soldiers toting machine guns broke into the home of Birzeit’s acting president, Dr. Gabi Baramki, and dragged him outside. They drove him handcuffed to campus and proceeded to ransack the administrative offices there. Soldiers confiscated schoolbooks, magazines, and newspapers. From there they continued on to the student dorms, arresting dozens of activists.

  In December 1986, a group of soldiers showed up at the campus to hunt down more students. Hanan Ashrawi closed the main gate to prevent them from storming the campus. A sniper, taking up his position, narrowly missed her. The bullet ricocheted off the paving stone in front of her, and she leapt backward just in time to avoid the next one. The sniper, agitated at her quick maneuvering, shouted out at this graduate of Thomas Jefferson’s university, “You Arabs are all animals!”4

  With more violence came more demagoguery on both sides. Anti-Semitic literature smuggled in from Egypt circulated in the refugee camps and in cities such as Hebron. On the Israeli side, a poll taken by the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute found that 42 percent of young Jews between the ages of fifteen and eighteen supported the Orthodox rabbi Meir Kahane’s call to expel all Arabs.5

  The solutions that politicians proposed to defuse the ticking time bomb were a singular mixture of wishful thinking and Sartre’s mauvaise foi. President Reagan, in a good example of the latter, took up an entirely disembodied ideal then being bandied about by Shimon Peres, the man of a thousand masks, and his clique within the Labor Party: it was the “Jordanian option” linking Palestinian destiny with Jordan. But this was a case of too little, too late. By this point the nationalist genie was out of the bottle, and to most Palestinians it took on the features of Yasir Arafat.