Anyway, the Labor Party was not in power, and Likud was doing all it could to prevent any new division of the Holy Land. Many ideologues on the Israeli right were openly calling for annexation of the territories they lovingly called Judea and Samaria. While the government shied away from talk of open annexation, from our balcony in Abu Dis we stared out at the new mega-settlement of Maʾaleh Adumim, a daily reminder of Israel’s unilateral plans.
As the two peoples rapidly moved toward all-out conflict, a handful of politicians and public figures on both sides agreed that the only viable way to avoid war was a two-state solution negotiated directly between the PLO and the Israeli government. The riddle for me was how to break this message out of the insular world of peace activists meeting at the American Colony. How do you drive home the message to average people that their leaders are leading them to disaster?
In the summer of 1986, I set up a workshop—mostly at my father’s law office—to try to fashion a bombshell.
Father’s thyroid cancer worsened, and over the months I followed the progress of his disease. Banned from Jordan because of my earlier indiscretions, I couldn’t be at the Royal Hospital in Amman to witness King Hussein and Queen Noor kneeling at his bedside after his operation.
The operation kept him alive, but with the stubbornness of a bloodhound the disease wouldn’t let him go. During Father’s frequent trips to the Israeli Hadassah Hospital in Ein Kerem for iodization treatments, Mother was left alone in the house with her memories. In the summer of 1986, as the chances of his recovery were slipping away, she began to reminisce with me about her childhood and the bright, vital, young lawyer who had charmed her. Fifty years earlier the world was intact and whole, full of the sweet scent of orange blossoms. Then the troubles started. “I’ve never known a day of tranquility since then. It’s been one disaster after the next.” Cancer was the last of a long string of calamities shadowing her adult years.
Spending so much time within Mother’s memories, juxtaposed with Father’s refusal to live in a fantasy world or be a victim of hallucinations, helped give structure to the “bombshell” I needed to deliver. I was fed up with politicians saying one thing in public while secretly doing the opposite. The sort of public service my father embodied had no room for such dishonesty, and I decided to do something about it. My “bombshell”—inspired by the medical profession, I also likened it to shock therapy—was to be my tribute to my father’s titanic integrity, and his willingness to step on toes by saying the truth.
The trigger happened one afternoon when, after visiting Mother, I retraced my childhood walks through the streets of the Old City and came to the Goldsmith’s Souk. As I stood there, I struck up a conversation with one of the Jewish students who had taken it over, with the patronage of Ariel Sharon, meter by meter. Judging by his Brooklyn accent, I concluded he was an American.
I explained to him that the souk belonged to my family. “Do you think we want to be here?” he asked, moving his hand in all directions. At first I was encouraged by the question. I half expected to dive into an existential heart-to-heart between two people trapped in an impossible situation not of their choosing.
I was wrong.
“We are destined to be here,” he said. It was as if he was telling me that divinity—the same force that once upon a time told humanity thou shalt not steal—was compelling him to dislodge us from our ancestral land, not because he wanted to do so, but because he had to. It was his mission in life.
I thought up my bombshell on a hot summer’s day. Lucy and I wanted to take the kids for a swim and couldn’t decide where. Broken and neglected, East Jerusalem lacked such public amenities as swimming pools, which left us with the YMCA. “How about Maʾaleh Adumim,” I finally suggested. Lucy at first looked surprised, and then grinned once she surmised that I was cooking something up.
I had always been curious about life on the other side of the barbed wire and the locked gates of this Forbidden City built on Bedouin land. I had heard that to encourage new settlers, one of the first facilities the community had built was a large swimming pool.
We set off on our adventure, with towels and sunblock and loads of curiosity. At the entrance to the pool, we bought the cheap government-subsidized tickets. Jamal, Absal, and Buraq dashed off to swim, while I sat on the edge enjoying the trickle of water on my feet. Then my bombshell hit me. “How wonderfully diabolic!”
I was smiling at myself, my feet splashing playfully, when an attendant walked up and asked me with almost effusive friendliness if I was enjoying the pool.
“I most certainly am,” I replied in my rusty Hebrew.
A charmingly wide grin spread over his face. He wanted to know where I was from.
My answer—Abu Dis—was calculated to shock, and the grin on his face froze. As if by remote control, he turned his head away from me and with automated, clocklike movements darted off without saying another word.
I returned to my plot. Here I was swimming in the settlement, and thanks to my Jerusalem ID, not even Sharon could do a thing about it. They could ignore me, walk away from me as the pool attendant had, they could even despise me as bigots tend to do to lesser humans, but they couldn’t boot me out. What would happen, I asked myself, if one fine day Palestinians simply turned their political aspirations inside out? Instead of seeking independence in a new state, why not seek equal rights within Israel? After all, Israel is controlling our land, resources, and lives, and our taxes helped build the swimming pool in the first place. Why shouldn’t we just demand to be annexed? Demand to be Israelis? Wouldn’t it pull the rug out from underneath the Jewish state? One thing was certain, such a demand would bring the complacent Israelis back to their senses. In no time they would forget all about their settlement projects and their bogus schemes for Palestinian limited autonomy, all their silly talk of Judea and Samaria, and at full gallop would throw themselves into the arms of Yasir Arafat as a savior, embracing the two-state solution as a gift from heaven. In my mind’s eye I saw the settlers in the Golden Souk hightailing it back to Brooklyn.
Still splashing and grinning, Lucy came and offered me a soda from the concession stand. I told her what I was thinking, and she predicted that my fellow activists would call for my head. After all, we had been issuing declarations by the armload accusing the Israelis of illegally trying to annex our lands, calling it unethical, abhorrent, cruel, and dozens of other hoary adjectives. And now I wanted to stand up and ask for annexation! Crazy! Lucy said all this with a twinkle in her eye, which assured me that it was my best idea yet.
The article I wrote in our Al-Mawqef newspaper the following week posed a thought experiment. Looking objectively at the essential Palestinian interest in freedom, I asked which scenario was preferable: autonomy or annexation with full equal rights in Israel? Answering my own question, I said that it stood to reason that as citizens of Israel we would wield far more power in shaping our destiny. A member of the Knesset elected from Tulkarem, say, would not only help pass laws for his home town, or for those areas in the Occupied Territories on which settlements were being built, but he would also participate in legislation for Haifa and Tel Aviv. The ballot box would give us what armed guerrillas never could: control over our own lives, and over theirs.
Within days, my article catapulted me onto the front pages of Israeli newspapers. Then came an invitation for me to participate on a popular Israeli political TV show. “Would you be willing to appear on the same talk show with one of the leaders of the settlement movement,” asked the producer?
“Are you kidding me?” I replied, amazed at the effect of my bombshell.
I turned up at the studio with my hair uncombed, wearing sandals and my favorite T-shirt, old and a bit tattered but the most comfortable one I had. To the chagrin of the producer, who wanted to see sparks fly (police and a medic stood in the back just in case), I adopted an easygoing and chatty pose, and the conversation with the settler was friendly. But with each answer I gave, I could almost he
ar the squeaking sounds of a rusted mind opening to dangers it had never imagined possible.
“Are you saying you would actually run for the Knesset, and become a member?” asked the interviewer.
“Sure, why not?” I replied with a lilt in my voice.
“Are you trying to tell me you would accept the Knesset’s national symbols, the flag, the national song?”
“I’d have to. But don’t forget, Israel is a democracy, isn’t it?”
He looked nervous and asked me what I was driving at.
“Just that if we Arabs were the majority in the Knesset, if we wanted to we could change the symbols, couldn’t we?”
From the audience I heard the loud noise of people stirring in their chairs, following by some indecipherable voices and catcalls.
“And would you accept to be part of the Israeli army?” crowed my interlocutor, this time at a high pitch.
This was one of the questions whose response I had already rehearsed. “What are you talking about? To be allowed to wander around like the soldiers I see, slinging an Uzi over my shoulder? Any day!”
The shock many Arab viewers felt when they saw me banter with a notorious leader of the settler movement isn’t easy to describe. The pro-Jordanian daily Al-Nahar came out with the headline “Arab Wants to Convert to Judaism.” Another of the newspaper’s headlines read, “Sari Nusseibeh Wants to Join the Israeli Army.”
Newsweek ran a full-page interview with me on the subject of annexation. Israeli newspapers lined up to interview me.
The bombshell began to work. Sure enough, the left-wing faction of the Labor Party began invoking “a demographic threat” to boost its position that Israel needed to move fast to find a solution with the Palestinians. Gad Yaʾacobi, the minister of economics and planning, realized that by calling for annexation I was tearing up the foundations of the Greater Israel movement. “Sari Nusseibeh,” he wrote in the Jerusalem Post, “is not more moderate than his interlocutors, the advocates of Greater Israel. He’s just smarter. He knows that annexation will eventually lead to the establishment of a Palestinian state throughout the Land of Israel.”6 Another commentator considered my ideas more dangerous than “PLO terror and the specter of an Arab military attack.” A journalist for the Israeli daily Maʾariv cited the Israeli representative of the UN: “If Palestinians begin to think like this, then we’ve really got something to worry about.” One phone caller went so far as to deliver a blunt warning to me at home: “If you keep this up, you’re a dead man.” This was the first of many death threats.
The general mood around the Birzeit campus was that the philosopher had lost his marbles. (One of my closest colleagues dismissed my ideas as an “infantile fantasy.”) But the main student and teacher activists, whose minds had been trained in the interrogation room to separate lies from the truth, rallied around me. Marwan, Sameer Shehadeh, and Samir Sbeihat caught on immediately that my ruse was a tactical move aimed at waking up the Israelis. Either we get our state, or they will have a battle for equal rights on their hands.
My students were not alone in figuring out what I was up to. I continued my morning routine of passing by my parents’ house for breakfast. I didn’t even have to explain to Father what I was up to. “It’s all tongue in cheek,” he explained to stunned relatives and friends.
The Israeli Shin Bet began to worry. Perhaps they thought the PLO had put me up to it; an even more threatening possibility was that a new and hitherto unidentified nationalist leadership had hatched the plot. The security men started to keep an eye on me.
One day a member of the Shin Bet, now doubling as a reporter for the Hebrew daily Maʾariv, rang me up and said he wanted to do a special report on some of my students and me. A few days later this agent-cum-journalist met Marwan, Sbeihat, and me at the Al-Mawqef offices.
Our interviewer had his worst suspicions confirmed. He spent several hours with us, and by the end he was shaking his head in disbelief. Savvy as ever, Marwan and Sbeihat let him know, and in Hebrew no less, that my annexation initiative made sense. Nonplussed, he asked them what they knew about Israeli life, only to discover that they knew as much as he did about football teams, radio shows, and folk singers.
From that point on, Marwan, Sbeihat, and I formed a sort of annexation club, and our frequent talks over cigarettes and coffee normally culminated in hilarious scenarios. Sbeihat excelled at conjuring up new and wonderful possibilities. “Big changes are afoot,” he assured us. One day, he brought to my attention something Shimon Peres had just said in one of his speeches: While Israel holds the key to the present, Peres averred, Palestinians hold the key to the future. Being a Nusseibeh, talk of a key piqued my interest, and I took note. A fair exchange, Peres said, would be between what the Israelis presently hold, our land, and what the Palestinians will come one day to hold, a demographic majority. What he seemed to be saying was that Israel, to preserve the Jewish state, had to relinquish its grip on the Occupied Territories.
My bombshell had been designed to rattle the Israelis, not the Palestinians. Despite Lucy’s warning, I hadn’t expected such hostility, because in my eyes the call for annexation was nothing more than a repackaged version of the mantra of One Secular State that had long been chanted by various factions. The animus got me thinking. The hostility was toward the means, not the goal: heroic-minded “nationalists” still wanted unconditional victory over Zionism, and the idea of using the Israeli system to gain our rights was anathema.
One afternoon in my father’s office I sat down and composed an essay for Al-Quds. This time around, my aim was to analyze the root cause of some of our nationalistic blindness. The article was deeply personal, addressing a problem I had been vaguely aware of as a teenager but that over time I had come to regard as debilitating for Palestinians. It was the fatal heroism of the defeated, whose victory lies far out of the realm of political power, and only in the secure regions of the imagination.
Mother had raised me looking off toward her beloved Wadi Hnein, hoping that the lost world would reappear as if by an act of God. The Palestinian past had been stolen from us; for justice to be done, it had to be retrieved.
Mother’s longing, which had only intensified over the years, was less a longing for a place than for the innocent, unblemished moment before all was lost in 1948. If someone were to have handed her the title to Grandfather’s orange groves, she wouldn’t have known what to do with it. She wanted to retrieve the lost time of her youth, not physically go back to a piece of real estate gobbled up by a kibbutz.
In the article, I went on to describe what “retrieval” was in the Arab mind. I likened Palestine to a carpet that over the years following the catastrophe has become cluttered with skyscrapers, settlements, and strangers nestled in our land. For Palestinians, liberation meant grabbing the carpet by all four corners and shaking it to rid it of all that clutter. We could then replant all the lost orange groves robbed from us, and rebuild all the homes and villages that had been destroyed, or they would simply materialize by themselves.
Next I juxtaposed this silly notion of “liberation” with an immeasurably more realistic one, that of annexation and equal rights. Instead of emphasizing a return to the seized lands of the past, I asked, why not emphasize the liberation of the human being? Instead of a dreamlike search for a lost time—which by its very nature is a fantasy—why not focus on a realistic future dream?
We could start, I argued, by struggling for equal rights and the full rights of political self-determination within the State of Israel. Once achieved, we could also implement our right of return within the existing Israeli infrastructure, such as wading in the Maʾaleh Adumim pool. Rather than mentally erasing settlements or Tel Aviv’s skyscrapers, we could physically move into those settlements and skyscrapers.
I should repeat here that I was still speaking tongue in cheek. Palestinians should only be playing games they can win, rather than pursuing futile and morally dubious tactics such as guerrilla attacks against the mili
tary system that the Israelis had perfected, or engaging in flights of fancy. What the article suggested was to operate openly within the democratic and legal systems of the Jewish state. By doing so, it would become obvious to us and to the Israelis that the present Zionist system was incapable of granting us full rights. Either the system has to be replaced, or the Israelis would have to grant us independence.
Father passed away on Mother’s birthday, in November 1986. “It was typical of your father,” Mother fondly quipped afterward, “not to give me a moment of peace.”
He had had one last sojourn to the Hadassah Hospital before we took him home to die. Even in his weakened state, he maintained his sovereign sense of humor, and his civility. When the doctor came by, Father asked him if he had “found it yet.”
“Found what?” the doctor asked, looking at him quizzically.
“Why, that tiny thing.” Father raised his hand and rubbed his thumb against his index finger, as he often did when describing something abstract. “That thing that’s been giving me all this trouble.”
“Oh that.” The doctor laughed, realizing that Father was referring to the Angel of Death. “No, I’m afraid we didn’t quite find it.”
When Father arrived home, he sat for a few minutes on the sunny porch in his robe and pajamas. We all knew the inevitability of his passing, but nevertheless I wanted him to feel forty years younger. “Boy, it’s a lovely day,” I began. “How about a cold beer?”
“Why not?”
I got a bottle of a local brew from a West Bank village, opened it up, and poured two glasses. Father only had a sip or two before retreating back to his bedroom. Later, Mother told me he wanted to discuss something with me.
As impervious to hallucinations as ever, he wanted to talk about his death. “I’d like to tell you what to write on my gravestone.” It was painful and awkward for me, and I tried to change the subject. He continued. “Just write Anwar Zaki Nusseibeh al-Khazraji. Born in Jerusalem 1913. Died in Jerusalem.” The legacy he wanted to leave was the two sources of his humanity: ancient Medina, where the family emerged in the seventh century, and Jerusalem.
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