Once Upon a Country

by Sari Nusseibeh

  Ten more meetings took place between July and early September, with the venues alternating between Mother’s house and the garden of Faisal’s Arab Studies Society. We were now working on the draft. Sometimes Faisal and I worked alone, and sometimes Salah joined us. On the Israeli side, “Ish Shalom” dropped out of the picture, and a man Amirav described as a “professional journalist” took part “to take down the minutes,” as Amirav explained. In all of these talks we focused our attention on the specific stages needed to create a Palestinian state. While Faisal and I agreed to the stage approach, we wanted some tangible signs of independence in stage one.

  This being the first time Palestinians were negotiating autonomy, Amirav was remarkably forthcoming on all issues, short of sovereignty. Faisal and I got—only on paper, to be sure—a Palestinian currency, passport, television station, flag, and above all, East Jerusalem as the capital of the interim autonomy.

  The draft was exchanged between us several times, with Amirav each time insisting on running it past his superiors. All in all, and with surprisingly few bumps along the road, we managed to arrive at a final draft. Now all that was left for Faisal and me to do was formally and ceremonially present the draft agreement to Arafat in Geneva.

  Israeli coalition governments are strange creatures indeed. First it was Peres who tried to win us over to his harebrained “Jordanian option.” Next came Shamir and his band of loyalists offering to sit down with the PLO. And now Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin arrived on the scene to scuttle the deal. On the eve of our scheduled departure for Geneva, by order of Rabin, Faisal found himself back behind bars.

  I was floored. All my years of solving riddles hadn’t prepared me for the crazy dynamics of the rotating Likud-Labor government, which was not one leadership, and not even two, but had multiple power centers, each jockeying for position. Had Samir and Hamzeh been right in their initial suspicions? Had I fallen for a trap designed from the start to lay bare our channels of communication with the PLO? Or to cut Arafat’s support from underneath him by exposing him as another Israeli stooge? I went to the offices of the Arab Studies Society and faxed the draft agreement directly to Arafat’s office in Tunis. Along the top margin I scribbled the news that Faisal had been arrested and that the initiative had been a ploy. My advice was to call off Geneva.

  At the next level of a constantly ascending spiral of surprises, I got a phone call from Arafat’s office. “The chairman wants you to proceed,” I was told. “Too bad about Faisal, but we have to go on. Make your travel arrangements immediately.”

  When I called Amirav, I could tell by his voice that he was just as panic-stricken at Rabin’s actions as I was. His first fear, he let me know, was that I would blame him personally. For this reason he was both relieved and shocked when I told him that the Geneva meeting was still on. “Arafat is ready to receive us in spite of Faisal’s arrest.”

  Amirav agreed to meet me later that afternoon at Mother’s house. Sitting face to face, I stared at a beaten-down, defeated man. “I’m afraid,” he began with a quivering voice, “I can’t make Geneva. Shamir killed the deal.”

  Months of hard work were down the drain because of Rabin and Shamir. Ushering Amirav to the door, I thought to myself that at least I was safe. Since no one on the Palestinian side knew about the initiative, I didn’t have to worry about being jumped by irate nationalists at Birzeit accusing me of treason to the cause.

  Word came from Arafat that he still wanted to see me in Geneva. We had never met, and as I already had the ticket, I thought I would go for the hell of it.

  Arafat had known about me for some time now, both from Abu Jihad and from some of my outlandish public positions. He knew Father and Mother, and during the last few days in Black September in 1970, when the Jordanian army launched its onslaught against him and his Fatah troops, he had hidden out at my aunt’s house in Amman. (Later, the Jordanian army burned the house to the ground after they found it had been his hiding place.)

  Our meeting in Geneva was formal but open. At his suite at the Intercontinental, into which I was escorted by his bodyguards, I mingled with some other guests. That night I was asked to join him for dinner at the home of the PLO representative, where many other guests were present. In retrospect, and having later gotten to know him better, I now believe that his decision not to meet with me in private was calculated: he wished me to be awed by the splendor of his entourage at this first encounter; and he probably wished to maintain a physical distance from me that would allow him later to deny being a party to any compromising deals.

  My return from Europe went without a hitch. Back in Birzeit, the atmosphere was remarkably tranquil. This was one of the times when you get lulled into a false sense of security only to have an awful surprise sprung on you.

  Faisal’s lawyer, Jawad Boulos—a figure I’ll return to at length—asked me to appear in court as a character witness for Faisal, who had to appear because the government wanted to renew his administrative order arrest but needed a judge’s permission to do so. The government, explained Boulos, hadn’t built a case as much as resorted to the hackneyed clichés that had worked so well in the past: that Faisal was a terrorist bent on the destruction of Israel. “If the court can hear what you have to say, they’ll see how ludicrous these charges are.” Boulos didn’t have a clue what I would say—we hadn’t told him about our meetings with Amirav—but Faisal had assured him that my testimony would be important and pertinent. This put me in a bind: Should I divulge in front of the court the secret I needed for the sake of life and limb to keep concealed? Faisal obviously wanted me to.

  Upon arriving at the hearing, I recognized the Israeli “journalist” I had met while waiting outside the courtroom with Amirav. Nodding at them, I headed into the courtroom and gave my statement to a group of jurists and lawyers, hoping of course that it wouldn’t leave the courtroom. “Faisal couldn’t be bent on the destruction of Israel,” I told them, “because he was involved in a groundbreaking initiative with none other than the Likud Party, an initiative he committed himself to despite great personal risk, and if successful it would have legitimized the existence of Israel in the Arab World.”

  That afternoon, radio reports carried more or less warped versions of what they called the “secret initiative.” Amirav was mentioned by name. By the evening, it was the top news story on television, and the next morning the paper Kol HaʾIr carried a full report.

  The storm broke.

  Shamir’s political opponents went to work to scuttle direct talks with the PLO. Defense Minister Rabin ordered the bombardment of a Palestinian refugee camp on the West Bank.

  Shamir at once denied all involvement. “Messrs. Husseini and Nusseibeh,” he told the press, “who are known to be PLO men, exploited Amirav’s naïveté, but this has nothing to do with the Likud, which is united in its negative attitude toward the PLO.”

  Interviewed on Israeli TV, Amirav tried to protect himself by claiming that his talks weren’t aimed at the PLO. All he’d done, he claimed, was to start up talks with “friendly” non-PLO figures such as Sari Nusseibeh. But even that didn’t help him. Viewed by many as a traitor to the cause, he was sacked from Likud.

  The more Amirav sought to duck behind my name as a “friendly non-PLO” man, the worse things became for me among my own public. As before, the pro-Jordanian Al-Nahar spearheaded the media campaign against me. Their claim was that my talks with Likud had been aimed at implementing the old Likud scheme for limited autonomy. On the very next day, a Saturday, I made my way to Birzeit to teach my class. But upon entering the classroom, I didn’t find any students there. Being constitutionally absentminded, I assumed I had mixed up the time, or that there was some big event on campus I had failed to take notice of. Shrugging my shoulders, I drove back to Jerusalem without giving it a second thought.

  The next day the media was still preoccupied with the hubbub surrounding the “secret initiative.” I assumed that things would blow over, as in the past. Most of
the day I sat at home preparing for my Monday morning lecture at nine o’clock. The theme was to be John Locke, liberalism, and tolerance. Typically three hundred students would show up for such a lecture.

  On Monday morning I arrived in the lecture hall, took my place at the podium, and immediately launched into my thoughts on Locke. As soon as I got into a groove, all the worries and excitement of the previous few months vanished. I was caught up in seventeenth-century England and the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

  The lecture finished and most of the students filed out of the hall, while a few stayed behind to ask me some questions. A couple of colleagues in the department also lagged behind, and as I slowly moved toward the door surrounded by a small huddle of pupils, one female colleague informed me in a rather shaky voice that a pack of masked men with clubs were outside in the hallway stalking a “traitor.” It was only when I reached the door that it occurred to me that I was the “traitor.”

  Five kaffiah-wearing attackers came right at me. As they attacked me with fists, clubs, a broken bottle, and penknives, I tore myself away from them and ran into an open elevator. A female student rushed in with me, taking some of the blows. Frantically pressing the buttons, she realized that the elevator wasn’t working, and rushed out again. One of the attackers clubbed her as she ran away. Now, as I stood by myself with my back to the wall of the elevator, I felt at least protected from behind; they could only get at me from the front. I did my best to defend myself using arms and feet, but I knew it was like swimming against a strong current. If I stayed I’d quickly succumb to exhaustion, and the five assailants would finish me off. For some reason, the American saying “sticks and stones may break my bones” shot through my mind.

  With a rush of adrenaline, I threw my whole body at the hooded thugs, caused a breach as in a rugby match, and dashed pell-mell through the hallway and down the staircase, with the attackers in hot pursuit. It was only upon reaching the ground floor, which was crowded with students, that they fled. By now blood was oozing from my forehead and wrists, and my heart was pounding loud enough to pop my eardrums.

  The colleagues who had been kept away with knives ran up to me. One was the husband of the woman who had warned me in the lecture hall. He offered to drive me straight to hospital. A friend from my Café Troubadour days put my good arm—the other was broken—around his shoulder, and helped me to the parking lot.

  Lucy had just finished teaching when it all began. She heard the hubbub and asked someone what was happening, and got a shrugged response, “Just a traitor.” When she found out what had happened and to whom, she rushed to the hospital, driven by one of my friends.

  In the hospital in Ramallah where I was first taken, the surgeon stitched up the gaping gash above my eyelid. My broken arm was set at the French Hospital in Jerusalem. I noticed that one of my most valuable possessions, the wristwatch I had taken off my father’s wrist as we carried him into the hearse, was gone. Someone had pinched it after it fell off during the scuffle.

  The public reaction was muted, to put it mildly. A few people called or showed up at the hospital, among them the stalwarts Samir and Hamzeh. The university administration came out with a halfhearted and very general statement denouncing political violence on campus. The union said nothing; only its Fatah faction, led by another stalwart, Sameer Shehadeh, came out against the attack. The Fatah student organization couldn’t figure out what to do, so they put out two statements, one in my defense and the other hinting that I had had a good beating coming to me.

  The clearest institutional support I got was from Abu Jihad. Raymondah Tawil—the former Ramallah salon hostess and future Arafat mother-in-law—rang me up to tell me that Abu Jihad was beside himself with fury. His gut instinct, she said, was to finger the Islamic faction. “Who do you think did it?” she wanted to know. I replied that I didn’t have the foggiest idea. “It’s just another riddle.”

  The following day Abu Jihad issued a forceful statement condemning the attack against me by letting it be known that he would “cut off anyone’s hands” who dared lift a finger against me. (One of the attackers, I should add, later came around to my views and eventually married his daughter.)

  Why a riddle? Initially everyone seemed convinced that either the Islamists, who had always had it in for me anyway, were behind it, or the extreme leftists in the Popular Front. The newspapers all said this, as did Abu Jihad. I knew this couldn’t be true. Somewhere in the bowels of Fatah someone was playing a game.

  That the game was serious was confirmed a few days later when a general Fatah leaflet distributed in Jerusalem attacked me. It would also have included Faisal in the philippic had it not been for the last-minute intervention of Jibril Rajoub, a Fatah leader I’ll have a lot more to say about later.

  Out of sheer self-preservation, I determined to get to the bottom of the story. I had shored up support locally and at PLO headquarters, and still I had been beaten. Part of the problem was the structure of Fatah. There was a “militant arm” and a “diplomatic” one, and the two often had nothing to do with each other. I obviously was considered part of the latter, and up to this point I had had few dealings with the activists, called Tanzim, operating on the street.

  The longer I thought about it—and a broken arm and stitches can get the imagination going—the more I was convinced that someone on the outside must have given orders to the Tanzim to nail me. Absurdly, I even suspected Abu Jihad.

  Samir and Hamzeh did some preliminary detective work on campus, and what they dug up only confirmed the message of the leaflets, namely that Fatah was divided. Half the student faction supported me and the peace strategy I represented, and the other half was implacably opposed.

  A week after my thrashing, some friends from Peace Now invited me to speak at a Tel Aviv rally. Standing on the stage with my cast and bandages, I read out a statement in Hebrew to thousands of Israeli peace advocates in the crowd. (Cousin Zaki had helped me write it.) The statement reiterated my commitment to negotiations and a peaceful solution to our conflict. “And they can’t beat that out of me,” I said to a roar of applause.

  A few weeks later I flew to Paris with Lucy to recuperate. There I met Abu Tareq, a man with whom I would have regular contact during the intifada in the coming year. He had moved to Paris from Beirut during Israel’s invasion to establish an international contact point for Abu Jihad, who had sent him there, fearing that the Israeli siege of Beirut might cut the PLO leadership off from all contact with the world.

  It was in Paris that some of my suspicions about my attackers were confirmed. Abu Jihad obviously hadn’t had a hand in it. Abu Tareq told me that his boss had set up a committee to investigate the beating, which they determined might have been an “internal” Fatah job.

  Back in Jerusalem, I finally found out what happened. My friend Fahed Abu al-Haj tracked down the perpetrators, even naming them individually. All were students at Birzeit, and a couple I knew quite well. One, the biggest and most brutal of the five, a C student, was suspected of working for Jordanian intelligence. The others later realized their mistake and came to my office months later to apologize. Two even came over to my side politically.

  The picture I formed of the plot goes something like this: Just as Rabin’s security people were irate at our initiative with Likud, so was Jordan’s security. In the background, of course, had been the Israeli-Jordanian rapprochement at the time, worked out in meetings between King Hussein and the Labor Party’s Shimon Peres. And out of this common interest to derail us, the two organizations decided upon a division of labor. Rabin locked Faisal up, and I ended up with a broken arm.

  Fatah had several offices in Amman charged with operating Tanzim cells in the West Bank. Communication took place by capsule. One day, the Tanzim contact for the Birzeit Fatah student movement received a capsule from his operator in Amman. Straight from the intestines of the smuggler, the message was unambiguous: Sari is a traitor and must be dealt with at once.

  Chapter Ei
ghteen

  The Exorcism

  IT AMAZES ME TO THINK that the best writers of spy novels and murder mysteries live tranquil lives on quiet well-lit streets, and that the sounds of bombs or the crackle of gunfire echo only in their imaginations; whereas the people who experience crime and killing rarely have the luxury of writing about it. At first I looked at my beating as meriting a mystery-packed novel I hadn’t the time to write. Within a year it seemed a rather harmless episode at best deserving an extended footnote. The real drama, a three-year insurrection against Israeli rule known as the intifada, began after my arm had healed.

  In December 1987, I stumbled across Father’s account of the 1948 war. He never published it; my uncles had advised him against it because his description of Arab generals as “grinning apes” would only have brought trouble.

  Most of the stories I already knew from family lore, though the conclusions Father drew hit me with special poignancy. With the Palestinian insurrection against Israeli rule at the front of my mind, I felt that Father’s call for Arabs to do some national “spadework” was uncannily relevant.

  The trouble with us Arabs is that we do not like spadework. Spades are not desert instruments. But we must, I think, realize that other people do not either and that, therefore, our plausible charm notwithstanding, they are not likely to work for us. Our great tradition is now threatened with extinction. The Palestine hoax is only a preamble. That it need not be, that we can still preserve our tradition, enrich it and by doing so make a contribution of value to the world, goes without saying, but we must accept the challenge, seek no shortcut, and get used to the idea of using a spade.

  Father’s archetype of the true Arab, and the model against which he measured himself, was doubly romantic and admirable: the true Arab for him was a being of such dignity that he disdained material wealth and physical comfort. Even life itself was of little value when measured against the higher call of honor. Father loved reciting the odes by ʿAntara, the pre-Islamic warrior poet of the desert. ʿAntara considered the highest reward of battle neither plunder nor the sweet taste of victory but rather the safeguarding of honor. In Father’s estimation, it was here that Arab leaders, generals, and aristocrats had so woefully failed. The only ones who acted like true Arabs were those who knew something about working with spades: the fellahin, men and women who had toiled the earth for generations.