Once Upon a Country

by Sari Nusseibeh

  Almost instantly, Abu Jihad found someone to replace Sameer, and Abu Jihad and the other factions named new representatives to the UNC. To the chagrin of the Shin Bet, Leaflet No. 7 appeared on the ninth of the next month.

  The Shin Bet experienced similar disappointments over and over. The noose of Israel’s security would tighten, and there would be arrests. The Israeli media would be rife with speculation on the final denouement of the UNC and the hated leaflets, and hence of the uprising. Then, with bated breath, everyone would wait to see if the next leaflet would come out, which it always did. The professionals in the Shin Bet grew ever angrier and more humiliated.

  My involvement in the leaflets deepened as soon as the Israeli government proved its unwillingness to come to terms with the intifada politically by completely disregarding the Fourteen Points. I believed it was imperative that the intifada be sustained, but how? Built in to the anarchic nature of the uprising was the danger that it would degenerate into mere violence, and would eventually die out without having achieved a thing. How could one keep it from self-destruction?

  That the risk of this happening was real can be seen in the basic disagreement between two contradictory strategies within the notoriously squabbling Palestinian factions within the PLO. The UNC, because it included representatives from the various wings of various groups, was by nature ideologically unstable. Some wished to escalate the intifada into an “armed people’s revolution” à la Algeria. With Abu Jihad as our patron, our think tank managed at first to push through our view that the intifada had to remain a nonviolent civilian uprising. Right from the start, Abu Jihad and many others among my colleagues in Fatah agreed with me that the intifada must culminate in peaceful negotiations with the Jewish state.

  My goals were henceforth to keep the civilian uprising going while simultaneously keeping it in line with our stated nonviolent political objectives. The leaflets became the lifeblood of the intifada, because they balanced both.

  The think tank met for a number of brainstorming sessions before we devised a basic strategy for the leaflets. What we came up with—later dubbed “the Jerusalem Document”—became Fatah’s hallmark during the intifada. It outlined a campaign for civil disobedience.

  The Jerusalem Document laid out a step-by-step strategy for severing the vast network of contact points between the occupier and the population under the occupation. To go back to my pre-intifada article, we sought to employ the “guillotine method” in resolving the contradiction between “freedom slogans” and “spray paint.” We wanted to realign the body with the head—to dismantle the ties between occupier and occupied, which ranged from jobs, consumer goods, the payment of taxes, and the use of Israeli-issued cards and IDs to the inherently obsequious rite of seeking permits and licenses.

  But before we broke out our guillotine, we had to call to life self-organized “service” structures, or community-based networks, which could provide security, emergency help, conflict-resolution mechanisms, food supplies, education, and all the other things the occupation had at least theoretically been responsible for. The logical end station of civil disobedience was to be the unilateral declaration of independence.

  Once we finished writing up the plan, I sat down with Izzat Ghazzawi and some other Fatah people in Ramallah to get their opinions. Then a smuggler swallowed the capsule and made his way to Abu Jihad in Amman, who took it directly to Arafat. The timing was auspicious because at that very moment Arafat was huddled together with some other top PLO leaders discussing how to keep the intifada going.

  “We have a plan.” Abu Jihad beamed as he walked in the room and headed straight for Arafat, clutching the document in hand. All those in the room excitedly gave Abu Jihad the green light to send his agreement back to us, and we distributed the document in capsule form throughout Fatah’s network in the territories.

  Back in Jerusalem, I opened up an information bureau called Holy Land Press Service in my father’s old law office on Salaheddin Street. My partner in this was Hamzeh Smadi, my editor at Al-Mawqef. On the surface, the bureau provided news of the intifada to Israeli and foreign correspondents and diplomats. Lucy helped me set up The Monday Report, an English-language weekly aimed primarily at the diplomatic community. It contained an analysis of developments from a Palestinian’s perspective. The Monday Report brought news of events and local leaders in towns and villages, and provided translations of the leaflets. (Cousin Zaki did the Hebrew translations, and another cousin the English.)

  Hamzeh established reliable contact points throughout the West Bank and Gaza. It was largely his doing that Father’s old office became a central switchboard for all information pertaining to the intifada. Even the Shin Bet, with its army of collaborators and surveillance techniques, probably kept a less accurate tab on what was happening on the ground.

  Holy Land Press Service was the perfect cover because, as far as the authorities were concerned, I was collating and distributing material, not producing it. On the surface, it was a fairly innocuous activity for a professor whose university had been shut down. Nor did they realize that my correspondents around the territories were activists who communicated with me and one another through our office.

  In need of a secretary to manage the office, I asked Mother if she could recommend one of her students at the Young Women’s Muslim Society. One morning a young girl named Hanan dropped by. A traditional Muslim, she had a dark and beautiful complexion and a sharp intelligence in her eyes. The school had done its work well: her English and Hebrew were good, and her secretarial skills excellent. Mother swore by her, so I hired her on the spot.

  Hanan eventually became our partner in producing the leaflets. The danger of arrest had by this point become so acute that it was no longer possible to process a leaflet through normal channels. Hamzeh and I did all the typing late at night, not wanting to get Hanan involved in something that could have her end up in prison. Then, one morning, I came into the office and noticed that she was already at her desk. She had a strangely affectionate glimmer in her eyes. A glance over at the fax machine explained the reason. The previous evening, having faxed a leaflet to news agencies as I sometimes did (my common cover story was that someone had picked the leaflet up in the street), I had forgotten to remove it from the machine, and that morning she found it, read it, and realized, as she probably had for a long time suspected, that there was more happening in the office than met the eye. I told her to forget what she had seen, but it was too late. She knew that I was implicated in the famous leaflets.

  Like a good newspaper editor, I knew that the leaflets would maintain their effectiveness only if they were responsive to the constantly shifting challenges and concerns of activists throughout the territories. The inflow of accurate and detailed information was therefore necessary. What were average people thinking? Did they want to increase the strikes and protests? Were they suffering because of them? What did they want from the leadership?

  I tried to glean what I could from the cabdrivers in my Old City haunts, and from my various grapevines. The constant inflow of information to the office, whether from the territories or from prisons (Hanan transcribed the materials smuggled out of prisons in capsules, typed them into the computer, printed out the text, erased it from the hard drive, and burned the original) helped to make sure that UNC’s leaflets always “spoke to the street,” and thus maintained their relevance.

  To dig deeper I carried on conversations with activists, casual enough not to let on that I was coming up with new material for an upcoming leaflet. A man named Abed al-Haleem was one of my best sources, and to this day he’s a friend and coworker who is more privy to subaltern information than most journalists. A tall, spindly man with a long and gentle face, Abed was the Fatah activist responsible for Abu Dis and the six villages around it, and would often stop by my house for a nocturnal conversation over coffee. We could speak only at night because the authorities were on his tail. For twenty-two months he furtively slept at his cousins�
� house or his brother’s or a friend’s. During the day he stayed indoors.

  Abed didn’t know what my role was in the writing of the leaflets. As far as he could tell, I was just a curious professor always ready for a twilight chat. Indirectly, I asked him about people’s attitudes. Much of what he told me found its way into the leaflets. A few days after he unwittingly helped write one, his immediate contact from Jerusalem would pass him a copy at the appointed time. Abed would then arrange for local distribution of the leaflet. He got one copy, photocopied it ten thousand times, and passed bundles on to others, who took them by foot, car, bicycle, and mule to various villages and neighborhoods.

  Another ally I had was Naser Al-Afandi. We met in Abu Dis, where his father ran a small shop and had a few sheep. Naser had already spent years in prison, and between 1980 and 1985 he had shared a cell with Jibril Rajoub. Among their techniques to squeeze information out of him, Naser’s captors hung him from the ceiling in chains, like a butchered lamb.

  Abu Jihad’s exuberant announcement to Arafat “We have a plan” set us to work. Using leaflets as our means, we got the word out to the masses, and all but a handful of people regarded it as their duty to join the campaign. Employees working for the military administration—tax officers, police officers, zoning officers, teachers, and Israeli-appointed village and town officials—resigned from their posts. As the number of resignations increased, committees were established to fill the gap. Palestinians now had their own police officers, judges, and teachers. A wide-ranging economic boycott kept from local shelves Israeli products that could be produced locally. This turned the local manufacturers into our most enthusiastic loyalists. For obvious reasons, the most popular instruction we included in the leaflets was the tax boycott.

  In the intifada leadership, a major concern was how to support people in the banned underground organizations, various unions, women’s groups and sports clubs, and the families of detainees and the professionals who had quit their jobs with the occupation authority. If we really wanted people to cut off their ties to Israel, we needed large amounts of cash to be brought into the territories and distributed.

  Money smuggling soon became another of my illicit activities. On Abu Jihad’s instructions, I began to work closely with Akram Haniyyah, a Fatah veteran from the National Guidance Committee days who had been expelled by the Israelis just before the outbreak of the intifada and was now living in Tunis. The two of us worked out a system. It wasn’t entirely safe, but it worked. My main contact person regarding money and the leaflets was Abu Tareq, a PLO man I’d met in Paris.

  Our first transaction took place during a visit to a European capital. Akram introduced me to a man in a coffeehouse, who agreed to smuggle money on his business-class flight to Tel Aviv. We met later in an Israeli hotel lobby. Just as in a 007 adventure film, we had identical Samsonite briefcases. He sat down next to me in a lounge chair to read the paper, placing his briefcase next to mine. We made the switch, and I headed back with my first batch of cash.

  I often did the distribution personally, driving my Opel with sacks of money from Abu Jihad, Israeli public enemy number one. Eventually, $150,000 a month was to pass through my hands. It was quite amazing to handle tens of thousands at a time when I had to hit Mother up for loose change for a haircut. While we were counting every shekel at home, Lucy found one of our sons playing with stacks of hundreddollar bills in the bathroom.

  Another of my illegal activities was to help people in the underground evade arrest. When a group of fifty men found themselves on the run, it was my job to find a place for them to sleep. On such short notice, the best I could do was the great outdoors, which made the owner of a local sporting goods shop happy, if astonished. I asked him if he had sleeping bags.

  “Of course,” he replied.

  “Great. Give me fifty.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  A Declaration of Independence

  FOLLOWING MY NATURAL INCLINATION, I did my best to look and act like the good soldier Schweik, naïve and not entirely of this world. My day job as a coffee shop philosopher both was a pose and reality, a convenient cover and precisely where my heart was. With all the exuberance and excitement, I wanted to call people’s attention to the humanism without which our rebellion was doomed to turn into just another Palestinian catastrophe—and farce.

  In 1987 I was invited to the University of Pavia in northern Italy to deliver a lecture. At the entrance of the university I saw posters festooning trees and buildings proclaiming the merits of our cause. This brought back memories of 1967, when we were the pariahs of the world, and the only avid supporter we came across was an English Nazi. The intifada had turned us into the underdog du jour for the European left.

  In Pavia, I chose to give my talk on the predicament of Palestinian prisoners, and my entrée into the subject was the notion of freedom, and how the will was inextricably linked with personal and national identity. I told my audience about my observations of students who had spent long hours in the interrogation cell, and how by refusing to confess, they came out of it with a new sense of self and, often for the first time in their lives, a genuine experience of freedom.

  Freedom, I said, isn’t some innate quality stamped on our foreheads like a product bar code; nor is it something external like a particular passport or the right amount of money in the bank. Freedom is an expression of the will, and the amount you have of it is in direct proportion to your mastery over fear and egotism. By exercising the will, the individual carves out a distinct identity. There was as much Avicenna as there was of my father in that lecture.

  If identity is created and not passively inherited like blue eyes, it admits of degrees. Individuals can have strong identities or almost none. The same holds true for a nation. Like an individual, a nation has to forge its identity through constant acts of the will. As Palestinians, our internal sovereignty and identity consist precisely in freely exercising our will, in defiance of the power employed to crush it. Through an act of the will, our nation can neutralize our jailer’s truncheon and his psychological weapons, and can transform the physical instruments of oppression into symbols of the interrogator’s utter impotence.

  A nation can mysteriously develop a common sense of itself and a common sense of purpose … With this revolutionary consciousness, the national will becomes an instrument with which to achieve inner freedom, and with which to translate this into acts of objective struggle. A nation under occupation, just like a prisoner inside the cell, comes thus to be free through its acts or non-acts.

  Lecturing on questions of identity while playing a part in a spy novel was more my style than being a nationalist leader stirring up crowds. But soon I was given no choice but to take a more public stance.

  From the outset, Faisal and I established a good division of labor. He was the more public figure—he certainly behaved and dressed the part more. With his aristocratic demeanor and royal Husseini bloodline, he was ideally suited to drive home the message that Palestinians weren’t shadowy revolutionaries but civilized people squirming out from underneath a heavy boot. He was the public face of what we called “our white and unarmed revolution.” His Arab Studies Society at the Orient House became a diplomatic center for press conferences and meetings. For my part, I was always happy to play a secondary role in politics—that is, as long as I felt matters were going in the right direction.

  But Faisal’s very civility got him into trouble with the Israelis, who were eager to paint him with the terrorist brush. (One official lampooned him as “the executive producer of the PLO.”) During the intifada he was constantly getting hauled back into prison: a month in, six months out; three months in, two out; and so on. In 1987, at the end of a “town arrest,” the authorities put him in prison for three months, then released him and imprisoned him again for six months more.

  The circumstances behind some of Faisal’s arrests say something about both his role and what the Israelis found objectionable. On one occasion, people
from Peace Now asked him to debate some Israelis at a public auditorium in West Jerusalem. He was ready to do it, and Peace Now launched a major PR campaign to promote the event. Hundreds of Israelis showed up to hear Faisal repeat word for word what we had agreed with Amirav: that both sides must recognize each other’s right to national self-determination.

  Two days later, the police arrested him again and sentenced him to six more months in prison. The impression the Israelis gave was that they arrested Faisal because of his position on nonviolence. (An instructive comparison to make is between Faisal and the Hamas leader Sheikh Yassin, who was left alone by authorities despite his 1988 Hamas charter, which sounds as if it came straight from the pages of Der Stürmer. Article 22 says about the Jews: “With their money they formed secret societies, such as Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, the Lions and others in different parts of the world for the purpose of sabotaging societies and achieving Zionist interests.”)

  When Faisal was in prison, I had to take charge of the diplomatic and media campaign needed to keep the intifada going. The Arab Studies Society at the Orient House became our operation room for preparing visits by foreign and diplomatic delegations: our talks with Václav Havel and Dennis Ross, the U.S. special envoy for the Middle East, took place there.

  In my more clandestine work there were plenty of close calls. Once I was driving around the West Bank with a hundred thousand dollars stuffed into a canvas bag. Not many private cars were plying the roads in those days, and when I noticed another car on my heels, I grew nervous. I swung the wheel at the first turnoff and steered into the back streets of Ramallah. With a quick series of maneuvers, I managed to shake my pursuer. Just to make sure, I made a few more circuitous loops around town, before idling the car in front of the house of a colleague from Birzeit. I rushed in the front door carrying the canvas bag. The astonished professor of English let me stuff the bag under one of the tables. Rushing out, I said I’d be back to collect it soon. Later in the day I returned to fetch the money.