Once Upon a Country

by Sari Nusseibeh

  The great example of Palestinian political spadework started on December 9, 1987. A traffic accident may have sparked the intifada, but in retrospect the real cause was an intrinsically corrosive force eating away at Palestinian society. It was the degrading realization of being coopted by a system responsible for land confiscation, lawlessness, and mushrooming settlements. It was the feeling of being slowly choked of their breath. The contradiction of using Israeli paint to scribble out anti-occupation graffiti was becoming so insufferable as to make an explosion inevitable. The body, as it were, was finally joining the head.

  For months, tensions had been building throughout the West Bank and Gaza; confrontations at Birzeit were becoming once again a daily affair. On December 4, soldiers storming the campus to end a nonviolent sit-down strike ended up tear-gassing the strikers and shooting two students to death. Many more were wounded. Troops later broke into a hospital and took away the wounded students.

  The next day the UN General Assembly censured Israel for its “grave breaches” of the 1949 Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War. The actions at the university were “war crimes and an affront to humanity.” Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, Israel’s emissary to the UN, proclaimed to the world that Israel’s was the most benign military administration in history, and that the incident at the university had been the fault of rioting students who had attacked Israeli soldiers with rocks and metal rods. No country on earth cherishes academic freedom more than Israel, Netanyahu noted. Freedom, however, was not a license to riot.

  On December 7 something strange started happening. The epicenter of protest shifted from the university campus to the refugee camps. Students didn’t play the leading role here, nor did the diplomats in East Jerusalem; ordinary people did. It began violently when day laborers from a Gaza refugee camp knifed an Israeli labor contractor to death. The killing was a sign of the combustible tension experienced by ordinary Palestinians, for the man they slew had given them employment, yet at the same time he symbolized the military power trampling on their rights.

  Two days later an Israeli tank transport vehicle plowed into a minivan in Gaza, killing four Palestinian workers returning home from work in Israel. Rumors spread that the truck driver was a relative of the dead businessman and was seeking revenge.

  Like lava bubbling and smoking for years until spitting out from a volcano, protests burst out helter-skelter throughout the territories. In Gaza City the masses poured out onto the wide boulevards that Ariel Sharon had bulldozed through the Gaza refugee camps back in 1972. From the ninth of December, violent protests spread out into every village and city in the territories.

  The intifada took everyone by surprise. The PLO leadership, locally and abroad, were as dumbfounded as the omniscient Shin Bet. At first our “professional revolutionaries” didn’t know whether it was a good or a bad thing that people were speaking up for themselves. At first Bashir Barghouti, local head of the Palestinian Communist Party, decided that the unruly street scenes didn’t accord with his revolutionary handbook. It took some time for him to throw the weight of his party behind the rebellion. PLO leaders abroad hedged their bets by issuing a few statements in support of the “heroes and martyrs” in their fight against the “Zionist entity.” In an ex post facto admission a month later, Arafat fudged the truth: “On the first day of the uprising, we decided that our brother demonstrators should not use firearms.”1

  Defense Minister Rabin was in the United States when the trouble started. Upon disembarking from the plane in Tel Aviv, he was bombarded with questions from dozens of reporters. Rumor had it that the defense minister was swaying back and forth under the effects of heavy drink, which may explain the unusual candor of his signature baritone response: “We will break their legs so they won’t be able to walk and break their hands so they won’t throw stones.”2

  Soldiers taking him at face value were later caught on film breaking the bones of sixteen-year-old stone throwers. This only fueled more demonstrations, strikes, and riots, to which the Israelis responded with more broken bones, thousands of canisters of tear gas, home demolitions, and shootings. In the first weeks, Israeli soldiers killed dozens of protesters; hundreds more protesters were wounded or arrested.

  Nothing helped. If at the beginning of December 1987, Israel maintained its grip on the West Bank with seven hundred soldiers, Rabin’s eight thousand troops now weren’t nearly enough to pacify Gaza alone.

  Like everyone else, I was stunned. Most of my life I had been reading about “peoples’ uprisings”—Fanon’s work is full of them—but it was only when I came across the barricades thrown up by local merchants, carpenters, and schoolkids in front of Mother’s house that I experienced one for the first time. It was staggering to witness people in cities, villages, and refugee camps acting on their own and for themselves, as a people with a will, as a subject of history and not just an object of pity or contempt, or as charity cases to be cared for by the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) or controlled by the Israeli military administration, which always gave with one hand and took back tenfold with the other.

  I got so caught up in the mood that I injudiciously told a reporter for the International Herald Tribune, “It’s a kind of exorcism to throw a stone at Satan.” A better way of phrasing this would have been that rocks thrown at tanks were helping to exorcise our demons of humiliation, inferiority, and self-contempt.

  The routines of life changed overnight. Universities and schools were shut, roads blocked by roadblocks and tanks, shops shuttered. Wherever you looked there were violent clashes. The Israelis’ first instinct was to identify Birzeit as the epicenter of the unrest. It had all been hatched in the classroom, they thought.

  At Birzeit everyone was prepared for trouble: the soldiers showed up with their guns and riot gear, while we ordered ambulances, broke out the first aid kits, and prepared the press releases. The army declared the campus a closed military area and surrounded it with troops. The military commander delivered a list to Hanan Ashrawi, demanding that she deliver up students suspected of anti-Israeli behavior. She refused. The commander warned her that if she didn’t comply, soldiers would have to storm the campus. Hanan cautioned them that this could lead to a massacre. “This campus always gives us a lot of trouble,” the officer told her. “[Students] invite trouble. They go out and demonstrate and disturb the peace. They force us to shoot them.”3 He threatened her again, and again she refused. The standoff ended peacefully just before midnight. All the students were loaded onto buses and dropped at their homes. The next day the military ringed the campus and announced that the university would be closed indefinitely. It wouldn’t open again for more than four years. Shabibah, the Fatah youth movement, was outlawed, and soon afterward Marwan was expelled from the country.

  In the first few weeks of the uprising, there was no central leadership, and no broad strategy. The marches and stone throwing were spontaneous, and if there was a leadership at all it was as improvised as the actions. More often than not, every demonstrator did what he thought best, and the more established leaders raced to catch up with him.

  In Gaza, the Muslim Brotherhood movement (later to combine with another Islamic faction to form Hamas) issued its first intifada leaflet, which was little more than emotional rhetoric cheering on the unfolding reality on the street.

  Local Fatah leaders were just as lost as the demonstrators. In Jerusalem, where the main leadership was now centered, two local PLO activists put out a leaflet that was just as rhetorical as that of Hamas. Anyway, the crushing force of the Israeli military response, and the arbitrary arrests that swept hundreds of activists into prison, put a quick end to the authors’ careers. They were already in jail by the time their flyers hit the streets. But unknown even to them, that flyer was to become the first of the monthly serialized leaflets of the uprising.

  Faisal was still in prison, but the informal group that met at the Orient House to discuss and decide on politic
al issues was still going strong, and immediately after the insurrection began, we met. Among those present were Radwan Abu Ayyash, Ibrahim Karʾaeen, Jamil Nasser, Ziad Abu Zayyad, and Hanna Siniora, all associated with the Fatah. Our group would later include figures, including Zahira Kamal and Samir Hleileh, representing other factions. Many of them later became ministers in the PA.

  The waves of arrests and the ubiquitous security patrols on the streets of East Jerusalem made it risky for us to meet, and so to avoid arousing suspicion, we kept our discussions brief and intermittent.

  The only reason we risked this at all was because the intifada, with its anarchic nature bordering on chaos, needed a clearly articulated political direction. As I was generally regarded as being closest to Faisal, and with a lot of practice in penning political statements, I got the job of collating the ideas that came up during the brainstorming and putting them into an organized literary form. As there were good strategic minds not included in our Orient House talks, I added suggestions by people such as my Ramallah friends Izzat Ghazzawi, Sameer Shehadeh, Fathiyya Nasru, and Samir Sbeihat. This latter group constituted an extended think tank, and many of their members would later be arrested or deported.

  Our first attempt was to draft a public declaration. Ziad and I drafted the final document. Just by chance it had fourteen points, like Woodrow Wilson’s famous statement on a “just and lasting peace.” Our Fourteen Points ran the gamut of issues relevant to Palestinians under occupation. No grievance was left out. Israeli administration touched the lives of Palestinians from all walks of life, and thus our demands reflected the immediate concerns of farmers, workers, students, prisoners, landowners, and merchants.

  Our plan was to present our list of demands during a press conference at the National Hotel in East Jerusalem. In ex post facto fashion, we would point to these fourteen points as the political objectives of what had been a spontaneous eruption.

  To give our press conference more breadth, we decided to involve other PLO factions, and to have the conference led by an independent figure. Someone suggested Gabi Baramki, acting president of Birzeit.

  I contacted the representatives of the PLO factions at Birzeit to solicit their endorsement of the statement, and to request representatives for the press conference. Given my relatively recent beating, the first response was less than enthusiastic. Some of the factions only grudgingly agreed to take part. The head of the executive committee of the union, a communist by the name of Tamer Issawi (and a critic of my various diplomatic escapades, in particular my meeting with Peres) told me he would attend only as a member of the audience. It took some convincing before Baramki agreed to chair the event.

  The press conference took place on January 14, almost five weeks into the intifada. The Fourteen Points stated the obvious: that only by ending the occupation would the violence end. One point demanded direct negotiations between the PLO and Israel for the creation of an independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital. Another called upon the Israeli army to withdraw from populated areas, while another insisted on free municipal elections, as well as the free election of members of the Palestine National Council in the Occupied Territories. Other points were far more practical. One pressed the occupation authorities to allow farmers to dig more wells for desperately needed water; another asked that Israel put the taxes deducted from Palestinian workers’ paychecks into a central labor fund.

  The Fourteen Points was far from a terrorist declaration of war. There was no call for arms, no denunciations of the “Zionist entity,” and the document was predicated on the belief in a final peace with Israel and on the democratic empowerment of the local Palestinian leadership. Peace and democracy were at the document’s core.

  Given the thousands of people killed over the subsequent years of the conflict, Israel would have done well to take our demands seriously. Instead, Israeli policy makers tried to scuttle the conference by threatening to arrest those who attended. We held it anyway.

  With the Fourteen Points, the intifada got a coherent political message outlining how the intifada could end forthwith. Israel’s frenzied reaction to the conference ensured the intifada would continue, in the form of a major civil disobedience campaign. In the serialized monthly leaflets, it quickly got a communication system to spread this message throughout the territories.

  My friend Sameer Shehadeh was in Amman visiting some relatives when the rebellion started. He stayed in Amman for a few weeks and assessed what was happening from the distance of this mountain capital. There he met often with Abu Jihad, and they both recognized that the intifada needed a strategy, and that the Fourteen Points was a good start. Abu Jihad charged Sameer with the task of contacting other faction representatives upon his return to the West Bank, to form what later came to be called either the Unified National Leadership of the Uprising or the Unified Command (UNC).

  Sameer started by putting out a third intifada leaflet, the first one institutionally sanctioned by Abu Jihad and the Fatah leadership. Two factions agreed to sign off on it (the Communist Party still declined), and it was written in a format that remained constant over the next two years. Called Leaflet No. 3, it was also the first of the UNC’s monthly leaflets.

  To help in the brainstorming process of writing the leaflets, Sameer turned to his close friends at Birzeit, both in the union and the student movement. One was Abd el-Rahman Hamad, who kept Sameer abreast of what was happening on the ground in Gaza, and who also was a conduit for disseminating the flyers in Gaza. Fathiyyah Nasru, another of Sameer’s contacts and a colleague of mine at Birzeit, was his contact person in the West Bank. And Izzat Ghazzawi was his link to me in Jerusalem.

  Soon after Sameer’s return from Amman, my conversations with Izzat began. With the Israeli security apparatus hauling in activists by the hundreds, it was important for us to take special precautions when we met to swap political ideas or conspired to come up with strategies. As in many police states, we mastered the art of dropping hints.

  It wasn’t exactly the cloak-and-dagger scene from a spy novel. Izzat and I had our meetings in Mother’s living room. These chats were ostensibly between two innocent intellectuals. If someone had listened in with an electronic bug, he would have heard some interesting banter, but nothing unexpected, given the fact that everyone was speaking about politics at the time. We spoke in general terms and avoided catch-phrases and particular references that might have given rise to suspicion. Izzat didn’t state openly that my input was needed for the new leaflet, and I didn’t dictate word for word how it should read. But Izzat and I knew each other well enough by now to be able to easily encrypt our conversations.

  Almost immediately, with the wide circulation of Leaflet No. 3, the hitherto unplanned street actions in the territories fell in line with the political directions as articulated in the leaflet. It was like watching musicians take cues from a conductor.

  For people at the grass roots, the monthly leaflet—serialized and appearing like clockwork on the ninth of each month—became the indispensable pointer for what to do next. At the end of each thirty-day cycle, street activists and ordinary people swept up in the uprising awaited the fresh issue with a new set of instructions from the mysterious creature called “The Unified Command.” And because, without fail, the leaflets addressed concerns of Palestinians in the most far-flung villages, people came to believe they had a mysterious presence in their midst. The UNC, anonymous, surreptitious, on the run, and yet seemingly omniscient, got the reputation of being an unprecedented new Palestinian force. No wonder the Shin Bet regarded it as enemy number one.

  With the UNC becoming the stuff of legend, speculation was rife as to who belonged to this mysterious leadership issuing these monthly missives. Journalists must have asked me a hundred times about the UNC. In response to my feigned bafflement—”When you find out, let me know”—Daoud Kuttab, the sharpest journalist in Palestine, offered the theory, based on “credible insider information,” that the UNC was a s
pecial PLO task force that had recently infiltrated the borders and was now operating from the pit of a hidden cave in the West Bank, a variation on the old Sheikh Qassam myth. His alternative theory was that the UNC comprised Hebrew-speaking ex-prisoners disguised as Jews and meeting in the coffee shops of the hip Tel Aviv district of Shenkin.

  Israeli media experts, pundits, and professors all joined in the guessing game. Listening to all the theories brought to mind how in The Wizard of Oz the booming voice of the little man behind the curtain gave the frightful impression of a powerful demigod pulling the levers. I suppose we got away with it for so long because the truth—that we were a handful of professors and intellectuals—was so unlikely.

  Just as Sameer finished Leaflet No. 6, the Shin Bet managed to track him down through the printer who worked on the leaflets. Following his arrest, the Israelis arrested a runner with thirty-five thousand copies of the leaflet. They also hunted down a number of members of the Unified Command.

  For 124 days, interrogators used on Sameer their most effective methods of black hoods, scalding and freezing water, and a tight cage, forcing him to stand for days in painful positions. They never got a revealing word out of him.

  Having caught him and some of the leaders of the other factions in the Unified Command, Israel’s top Shin Bet officers must have toasted their victory. They had the leadership of the intifada behind bars—or so they thought. Israeli newspaper headlines lauded the Shin Bet’s brilliant success.