Once Upon a Country

by Sari Nusseibeh

  He died that afternoon, and we buried him within the confines of the haram, the site of Dome of the Rock and of Solomon’s ancient temple, just inside Lion’s Gate. Hundreds of people showed up at the house on the morning of the funeral. Faisal, seizing the chance to turn the funeral into a political happening, took me aside. “I’m thinking about piloting the funeral procession past a new settlement inside the old city. What do you think?”

  It was a good idea, something Father would have enjoyed.

  With Faisal, Jamal, Absal, and Buraq and me at its head, the large crowd walked up Saleheddin Street, past the main offices of the Electric Company that Father had run. In his honor, the company had shut down, and all its employees streamed out to join the procession. As we walked, we picked up more and more people, until the crowd turned into the largest political demonstration in Jerusalem since the occupation began. We then proceeded through Damascus Gate and into the warrens of the Old City. The crowd was like water from a fire hose aimed into a maze.

  On our journey to the haram, thousands of mourners filed past Ariel Sharon’s new house and a neighboring yeshiva, both provocatively set in the Muslim Quarter. (Both had been paid for by a shadowy group set up by Sharon in 1982 called Ateret Cohanim, with the aim of “redeeming” properties in the Old City. The group also had a hand in the colonization of the Goldsmith’s Souk.) Within earshot of the settlers, our silence broke into nationalist song. By the time we stepped into the haram, thousands were shouting pro-PLO and nationalist slogans. All the while, Jamal, Absal, and Buraq were at my side. They wept as I wept. A friend, seeing me cry, whispered in my ear, “You should hold your tears. It’s not manly.”

  “It would be unmanly if I stopped,” I replied.

  When Father was laid to rest inside his grave (Muslims are not buried inside caskets), I climbed down into the hole and kissed him goodbye.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Sticks and Stones

  FATHER’S PASSING LEFT an absence that will remain with me until my children bid me farewell. But like the funeral, sadness only encouraged more of my riddle-solving and bombshell-devising. The goal of Father’s life was to help his people live in decency and freedom—freedom from foreign oppression, but equally from illusions and from what Kant calls “self-imposed immaturity.” The longer that Israelis and Palestinians continued to ignore the existential facts of our situation, the bloodier and more tragic the conflict would become. Within a year the explosion did occur. And the intifada, as it came to be called, brought to light all the symptoms I now began to diagnose.

  With the calculation of an inevitable rupture in mind, I went back to my workshop. The Israel settlement policy was creating a situation no one would freely have chosen, the Israelis least of all. The Israelis wanted land but certainly not a million rebelling Arabs. On the Palestinian side, no one wanted the occupation, and yet while dreaming of some magical liberation, we were willingly becoming inextricably caught up in it.

  I decided to unpack this curious situation at a political forum held in the National Hotel in East Jerusalem. For some time, the Israeli intellectual and politician Meron Benvenisti (Kollek’s deputy mayor of Jerusalem) had been arguing that the reality being created by Israel’s settlement policy was irreversible. In my talk at the forum I picked up on that theme. One can’t ignore the existence of two realities in the West Bank: that of Palestinians living next to a colossal infrastructure being put in place to support Israeli settlement life.

  A system we had once regarded as alien was fast becoming a normal part of our lives. Palestinians worked as construction workers, gardeners, drivers, and deliverymen. With shekels in their pockets, they were becoming inextricably tied into the Israeli system of consumer goods. Ninety-five percent of what we consumed came from Israel. (By the mid-1980s we were the world’s second largest consumer of Israeli goods.) Hebrew words such as machsom (roadblock) and teudat zehut (ID card) infiltrated our everyday Arabic. Our black humor made frequent use of the familiar Hebrew expression “mavet lʾaravim” (death to the Arabs). The Egged bus, once an alien, awe-inspiring machine, had over time turned into a cheap and widely used form of transportation. Many of the bus drivers were now Palestinians. We had actually gone inside the once alien monster and taken control.

  For most Palestinians, Israel had become more than the Shin Bet interrogator or the Uzi-slinging settler and their refrain “mavet lʾaravim.” It was also the Natanya beach facilities for Friday vacations, the Israeli trousers on sale in the Suq Khan el-Zeit in Jerusalem’s Old City, and the special bus that arrived at dawn in the Tulkarem refugee camp district to pick up the women for their jobs at Israeli textile factories. Israel was Shamir with his iguana gape, but also Shulamit Aloni and Amos Oz commiserating with us at the National Palace Hotel. Israel was the Israeli brand of paint used to scribble our liberation slogans on walls.

  Yet all this integration only seemed to increase our nationalism. I ended up by once again underscoring what I saw as national schizophrenia: our actions were making us more a part of the Israeli system, which only intensified our nationalist identity psychologically.

  The body and the head, as I called them, could not stay in such glaring conflict much longer. Something would have to give. The mountain would either come to Mohammed, or Mohammed would have to go to the mountain—in short, we would either have to extract our bodies from the Israeli system or push for full absorption.

  The business with annexation caught Shimon Peres’s attention, and I soon received a call from his office inviting me to meet him at the Foreign Ministry. Joining me were Hanna Siniora and the prominent Palestinian lawyer Fayez Abu Rahmeh. As a foreign minister in his rival Shamir’s Likud government, Peres wished to go behind his boss’s back and jumpstart a political initiative.

  My meeting with Peres in the foreign ministry building was even more controversial than my talking to my old leftist Israeli friends at the American Colony. As chief promoter of the “Jordanian Option” and patron of the first West Bank settlement (the colony of fanatics in Hebron is partly his doing), Peres was far from being a proponent of a two-state solution and negotiations with the PLO. If I had nearly been pilloried after shaking hands with the arch-leftists Yossi Sarid and Shulamit Aloni, what would happen after a meeting with Peres? I asked Faisal Husseini what I should do, and he confirmed my inclination to accept the invitation.

  Peres’s manner was jovial and welcoming, and with broad and gracious gestures, like a king welcoming visiting dignitaries, he offered us sumptuous leather seats. Discussions revolved around the negotiation partner for Israel. My colleagues at the meeting toed the established PLO line by insisting that any political initiative begin with the PLO. Not about to break with the established government position that the PLO was a terrorist organization, Peres politely pushed off that possibility. My colleagues dug in their heels: the PLO had changed, they insisted, and the organization was now ready to recognize Israel’s right to exist. Laughingly, Peres responded that “a tiger remains a tiger as long as he has his spots.” (“Stripes, you mean,” I wanted to chime in, but held my tongue.) “And if the PLO really is serious, it’ll have to shed its spots, in which case the tiger would be a cat, and a cat is certainly no tiger.” It was a wonderfully Talmudic argument.

  “This guy isn’t so bad after all,” I thought to myself as I cracked a pistachio nut in my mouth.

  “And what about you?” Peres turned to us, as if reading my thoughts. “What would be wrong if you were to take the lead and be our interlocutors?”

  Hanna answered for me. “Who are we?” he asked. “We derive our legitimacy from the PLO. It is the PLO you need to talk to, not us.”

  By this point I had said almost nothing. I listened, reflected, and admired all the honorary degrees nailed up on Peres’s wall. After half an hour of this I felt I had to say something, and what came out shocked me as much as it did my PLO colleagues.

  “I’m ready to negotiate with you.”

  Jaws droppe
d.

  “On condition that negotiation be based upon your willingness to withdraw to the ‘67 border, and we be allowed to establish an independent state with East Jerusalem as its capital.” Peres eyed me suspiciously, as if I were hardly the sort of “spotless” tiger he had had in mind.

  “Of course,” I said, “if you declared this to be your intention, you could go down to the Damascus Gate and find a thousand people ready to negotiate with you.” I made it clear that if he and his government refused to make a clear and unambiguous commitment to such a withdrawal, they had no other choice but to sit down with their archenemies, the PLO.

  My point was that if he wished to have local interlocutors, he would have to agree beforehand on the terms of the solution. Failing that, he would have to address the PLO.

  Peres said nothing, but his smile quickly bent downward into a hardened frown.

  Word leaked out about the meeting, and it wasn’t long after I got home that I heard the news from Birzeit: my former union had expelled me on the grounds that my behavior (i.e., just having met with Peres) had besmirched its reputation. The Fatah youth movement was also restive.

  The next day Faisal decided to drive home the point that my presence at the Peres meeting had been a blessing from on high. He insisted on accompanying me to campus and eating with me in the student cafeteria—”just so that they don’t get the wrong impression.”

  Israeli coalition governments are strange beasts. Soon after the Peres meeting, Faisal ended up under arrest (from this point onward, until the Madrid talks in November 1991, he would spend more time in jail than out), and one evening a self-declared maverick Israeli peace activist dropped by my home. He introduced himself as “David Ish Shalom” (in Hebrew, “David, Man of Peace”), though he confided to me that this was a fake name. A man with wire-rim glasses and sideburns down to his jaw, he told me that he had come to convey a message of mind-boggling portent. It was of the utmost secrecy—hence the pseudonym—and I had been handpicked to receive it. It sounded like a line from a fairy tale, and I therefore paid close attention. “So secret in fact,” the mysterious man continued, “that I didn’t believe it at first.” He promised me that he had checked and double-checked his sources just in case someone was trying to “pull a fast one.”

  Briefly, the man’s message was that within the Likud Party, Shamir and a small group of leaders had concluded that peace had to be reached, but negotiations were possible only “between the two parties that counted,” namely, the Likud and Fatah. Only the two nationalist movements could pave the way for reconciliation between the two peoples. “Ish Shalom” was quick to add that he personally wasn’t a “Likudnik” but only a well-known supporter of peace who had been approached by a member in the Likud’s Central Committee to “sound me out.” If I was willing, my strange guest promised to set up a meeting with a “Likud bigwig.”

  This was a startling piece of news if I’d ever heard one. For starters, I was surprised to hear that people in the Likud were pegging me as a “PLO man.” Since my union days, I had had little contact with the movement, and more often than not the little contact I had was to fend off criticism from them. My clandestine visits to Jordan during the Military Order 854 days left a bad taste in my mouth with regard to many of the PLO functionaries. The figure I liked the most, Abu Jihad, had helped me keep faith that the movement could play a role in ending Israeli occupation. This vague hope, however, hardly qualified me to be the Fatah activist that my nocturnal visitor seemed to think I was.

  Still, my mind whirled with ideas, the first being self-preservation. Even if what the man was telling me was true, the meeting with Peres had already placed me on a dangerous borderline beyond which any move I made would put my actions well beyond the pale to my fellow Palestinians. My next thought, pushing the first to one side, was that it was worth the risk if I could help avert the brewing war between our peoples. Without further ado, even before consulting Lucy, I called the messenger’s bluff. “Well, Mr. Ish Shalom, I’d be happy to hear what your man has to say.”

  David Ish Shalom” introduced me to Likud’s Moshe Amirav in July 1987. Amirav, once a leader of Jabotinsky’s right-wing Beitar youth movement and now a member of the Likud Central Committee, was one of Shamir’s closest allies.

  In this first encounter, Amirav repeated what his messenger had said. A group of highly placed Likud leaders close to Shamir were seriously considering the prospect of a historical pact with the PLO. Fatah and the Likud were mirror images of each other. Both championed their respective public’s nationalist sentiments, and if they could, both would take over the entire country, from the Jordan to the Mediterranean, at the drop of a hat. But since they couldn’t, both parties had to give up on their dreams and split up the country equitably. And in a repartition of the Holy Land, only Likud and Fatah could strike a deal. Amirav added that, unlike Peres and his interminable grandstanding in international forums, Shamir preferred to work in secret, behind the scenes.

  This was stunning news. Perhaps the ice really had been broken, I mused. Perhaps Shamir had what it took to make peace. In any event, I had never heard anything close to this from Peres, who was still hankering after his “Jordanian option.”

  I tried my best to conceal my excitement. “What’s the deal being proposed?” I asked coolly.

  Amirav answered that he was still working on the draft. In broad strokes, he said confidently, it was going to be a two-stage proposal. For the first five years, we would get “full autonomy” in all the areas that came under occupation in 1967. After that, a Palestinian state would come into being.

  I had never liked the two-stage model. This was, after all, what had been discussed at Camp David, and had been roundly and rightly spurned by Palestinians. What I was hearing from Amirav, however, made the two-stage solution worth exploring.

  Assuming wrongly that I carried weight inside the PLO, he thought I could act as a conduit. Since all contact between the PLO and Israelis was illegal (a law promulgated by the Likud), I asked him if he had Shamir’s blessing. He assured me he did. In fact, he explained, Shamir dreamed of being a second Menachem Begin. He wanted to go down in history as the man who made peace with the Palestinians.

  We were both well aware of the risks entailed in holding talks. One leaked word could destroy us. Amirav could end up in jail, vilified as a traitor, and I could end up in a ditch, with Lucy widowed and my children orphaned. We had to cover our tracks.

  I made contact with Abu Jihad through the special channel we had established after my Amman visit. Word came back for me to press forward. Abu Jihad had gotten Arafat’s enthusiastic endorsement for the initiative.

  But for me that wasn’t enough. I was familiar enough with the Fatah grass roots to know that I had to cover my back locally. Abu Jihad’s blessing wouldn’t prevent a local zealot from flinging knives in my direction. To shore up my support, I consulted Samir Sbeihat and Hamzeh, my editor at Al-Mawqef (both suspected the Likud might be setting a trap), along with two local Fatah operatives. One was Salah Zuheikeh, whom I had gotten to know at Faisal’s Arab Studies Society.

  I told them all about the mission, and that it had Abu Jihad’s backing. Their job was to keep their noses to the ground, just in case word leaked out and there was a backlash.

  Not only did they pledge their support—if Abu Jihad agreed, who were they to disagree—but Salah even asked to become involved.

  Contacts with Amirav proceeded cautiously. Just to show how serious Likud was, he gradually divulged the names of the Likud inner circle. I could barely believe my ears, though at the same time it only confirmed what Mother had always told me about the duplicity of politicians. The so-called Likud “princes” Ehud Olmert, the present Israeli prime minister, and Dan Meridor were in on it, as was the right-wing youth leader Tzahi Hanegbi. (At the Hebrew University in the early eighties, he and his band of chain-wielding hooligans had beaten up left-wing and Arab students.) Just to prove he had their support, Amirav arrang
ed a meeting at his house in Ein Kerem between Ehud Olmert and me, and on another occasion put me on the phone with Dan Meridor.

  By the time Faisal came out of jail, I already had a fairly good picture of what was on Amirav’s mind. A draft agreement would be worked out and signed in Jerusalem between us, and we would then take it along with us to Geneva, where Arafat was planning to attend a UN meeting of NGOs in September. There he would receive us publicly and give us his blessing. Because the first clause in the proposed draft stated the need for the Likud and the PLO to negotiate directly, the ball would then have been set rolling.

  “Is this guy serious?” Faisal wanted to know. “Does he speak for the government?” I said I thought so, but even though I wasn’t absolutely certain, I argued for calling their bluff.

  Amirav, Faisal, and I had our first meeting at my home in August. Amirav started off by outlining what he called Likud’s basic position. There could be no peace without Likud and the PLO. And any solution that did not recognize the right of Israel to exist or of the Palestinian people to have their own state, or that tried to ignore the PLO, would never work.

  We all knew that this meant a two-state solution, and so that evening we launched into a discussion of the details of establishing one. Likud believed, Amirav explained, that such a state would have to come at the end of an evolutionary, three-year confidence-building incubation period. During that time Israel and the PLO would mutually recognize each other, and the PLO would forswear the use of violence against Israel. For its part, Israel would cease expanding the settlements.

  We liked what we were hearing.