Once Upon a Country

by Sari Nusseibeh

  On a different occasion, it was late at night and I was just leaving the town of Kabatyah in the Jenin district when Israeli Special Forces suddenly leapt out from behind some trees and surrounded my car. I was ordered to turn off the lights. With blackened faces and drawn machine guns they motioned for me to get out of the car. Hands held high and doing my best to look harmless, I complied. One of the soldiers reached into my pocket and pulled out my ID. “Are you Sari Nusseibeh?” he asked, which was a silly question because he had my picture ID in his hand. My first thought was that they had finally nabbed me. Stuffed under the driver’s seat were enough capsules with enough sensitive intifada information to fill a stomach. All they had to do was look. Luckily for me, the trap they had laid was for someone else, and the soldiers wanted to get back to their hiding place. “Get lost,” said the soldier, handing me back my ID and waving me off.

  My fast-thinking secretary averted another disaster. We were about to print out a draft for a leaflet when an army officer came into the office unannounced. Before he could see what was on the computer screen my secretary rushed up to him with a smile and offered him some chewing gum. While she got it out of her purse I managed to delete the document. She saved the day one other time when a different detective came into the office seconds after we had faxed a new leaflet. “What’s this?” he asked, picking up the leaflet from the tray.

  “Oh, it just arrived. Would you like a copy?”

  I first laid eyes on the Shin Bet man personally assigned to my case while at a friend’s house. Hamzeh, Sameer, and I went to visit a poet by the name of Mutawakkil Taha, who had just been released from prison. No sooner had we sat down than we heard a knock on the door. The poet got up to answer it, and found two soldiers at the door. They stepped in and looked around. “Did you see some kids come up this way?” the first soldier asked. Looking puzzled, Mutawakkil shook his head.

  “Some kids threw stones at our patrol car, and we thought we saw them come upstairs.” The apartment was on the second floor.

  The soldier apologized and left. Our host was on his way back to join us wearing an amused smile and doing some theatrics with his arms (a pantomime of a kid throwing a rock) when the door suddenly flew open. In walked my Shin Bet man in civilian clothing, followed by soldiers and detectives.

  We were all ordered to remain seated while the soldiers searched through the house. After the search, we were each asked to go into one of the rooms, one by one. There each of us was stripped naked and thoroughly searched—and I mean thoroughly. Troops ringed the building in case someone tried to crawl out a window.

  The search lasted well over an hour, and yielded nothing. We all told my Shin Bet man—who identified himself as “Jacob”—the same story: we were just friends relaxing after a week of hard work. We weren’t hatching any plots, and we certainly weren’t writing clandestine leaflets.

  As Jacob and his friends were strip-searching us, a hundred thousand copies of the leaflet were being printed only a few blocks away. Hamzeh, Sameer, and I had finished the leaflet that afternoon.

  • • •

  Less than eight months into the intifada, Israel hunted down the man more responsible than anyone for keeping the uprising surprisingly unsullied by terrorist outrages.

  My admiration for Abu Jihad had grown steadily over the years. It spoke in his favor that he was free from the taint of corruption and thuggery infesting the ranks of other PLO apparatchiks. He was also capable of changing with the times. The man who was once considered the Che Guevara of the movement—he had been in charge of commando units—had realized after the PLO’s expulsion from Lebanon that liberation would never come about through a military victory from beyond Israeli borders, but through a mass movement in the territories themselves. The effectiveness of his new belief was now being proven daily.

  Terrorism, in other words, had nothing to do with the Israeli government’s decision to eliminate him. On the contrary, what must have driven the military planners out of their wits was that the enemy’s most potent weapon was not bombs or hate-filled bombast—easy things to counter—but assertive nonviolence and a well orchestrated “white and unarmed revolution.” And having failed to snuff out the source of trouble in the territories, they decided to go after the “mastermind.”

  The assassination of Abu Jihad took place in the quiet suburban neighborhood of Tunis where he lived with his family and where the exguerrilla leader spent much of his free time gardening. It was late. Abu Jihad and Um Jihad, his wife, were in their apartment talking about the latest news: Anthony Quinn was considering playing the character of Yasir Arafat in a new movie. Happy at the latest sign of our cause going Hollywood, his wife went to bed.

  Meanwhile, Ehud Barak was circling overhead in a Boeing 707, radioing instructions down to twenty commandos on the ground. Hearing a noise, Um Jihad got up to see what was happening. She saw her husband with his pistol in hand walking to the front door. She tried to follow him but he waved her away. Then she saw him: a blond man in his early twenties wearing a surgeon’s mask. He looked like a young doctor prepping himself to take out someone’s tonsils. Abu Jihad tried to get off a shot but the young man coolly and without a word emptied the clip from his machine gun into Abu Jihad. Two more commandos emptied theirs before they all left. Not a word was said. A buxom female commando videotaped the execution.

  As chance would have it, I was in Milan making arrangements for the next financial smuggling operation when the killing occurred. Besides feeling the natural shock—but also incredulity at the stupidity of murdering a man who had opted for nonviolence—I knew we had been robbed of an irreplaceable source of strength. Of all Fatah leaders, Abu Jihad had developed the best sense of what was doable—and what wasn’t. And since his moral authority in the West Bank was unquestioned among activists, he more than anyone else, Arafat included, had been in a position to steer the Palestinians toward compromise with the Israelis. Now they had shot him dead. Once again, the comparison with the Israelis’ treatment of the Hamas leader, Yassin, was dizzying.

  On the flight back to Tel Aviv, I felt sorrow I hadn’t known since Father’s death. Back in Jerusalem, a different emotion overtook me: fear. Fury at the killing had unleashed a massive wave of protests, and the violence Abu Jihad had tried so hard to contain now threatened to spill out from every pore of every Arab in the street.

  What came to mind was the way Faisal had turned Father’s funeral into a protest march past Ariel Sharon’s home. There must be some way of spinning this dross into gold, I said to myself, of using these passions to further a strategy Abu Jihad would have endorsed. Instead of allowing his death to undermine what he had built, which was what the Israelis wanted, I sought a way of strengthening our “white revolution.”

  This time I worked alone, without the think tank. In my mother’s living room, I jotted down ideas to take us to the final stage of our civil-disobedience campaign. I wasn’t conscious of this at the time, but the experience of standing at Monticello years earlier had left a residual impression. I wrote a declaration of independence.

  What came out of that evening alone with Mother came to be known as the Husseini Document. Weeks after I wrote it Faisal was released from prison. Eager to get his opinion, I gave him a copy, which he read and then put in the drawer of his desk for safekeeping. Within a few days he was back in jail, and the soldiers who raided his office found the document and assumed he had written it. Hence the name. By this point, however, the “Husseini Document” had already received a thumbs-up from leaders around the territories and inside the jails, and it landed on Arafat’s desk.

  The text set out to formalize our disassociation from Israel, and to institutionalize our evolving civilian rule. This could be done, I proposed, both through a unilateral declaration of independence and by the public establishment of a provisional government, with members appointed from within the territories and from the PLO leadership in exile. Once established, the provisional government would offer to
negotiate with Israel for a two-state solution.

  After the aforementioned office raid, the Israeli security people leaked the existence of a “seditious” document to the press. Ehud Yaari, the Arab expert on Israeli TV, broke the news. Innumerable screeds followed in the Israeli press.

  Among Palestinians there were the usual detractors and critics. “It’s just one more useless fantasy cooked up by Sari,” some said.

  The intifada of the late 1980s was very different from the armed fiasco that broke out in 2000. Our goal in the first intifada was peaceful negotiations leading to an amicable division of historic Palestine. We also knew that the only realistic hope of getting this was by convincing the Israeli public that it was in their self-interest to help us win our independence. Their government’s policies were leading both peoples into a dark pit.

  Indeed, while one sensed in the Israeli media a grudging admiration for the rebels of the intifada, the points we were scoring would mean nothing if we didn’t get Israelis to understand our position intellectually. The real utility of children’s rocks was to shatter myths and lies that had governed both peoples for half a century. Unrest had to be translated into practical political gains, and this could happen only by our appealing directly to the Israelis’ self-interest as a nation.

  For this reason we told the Israeli man on the street that we didn’t seek to destroy the Jewish state but only wanted to establish ours alongside Israel. The leaflets were unambiguous: the Unified Command accepted UN Resolution 242 and as such the moral and political right of Israel to exist within the 1967 borders.

  One leaflet stated:

  The intifada, the latest form of the Palestinian struggle, voices the Palestinian cry for peace … Our fight is not to cause pain to others but to deliver ourselves from pain. It is not to destroy another state, but to create our own. It is not to bring death to others, but to give life and hope to ourselves and to our children.

  Fueling my optimism regarding the Israeli public was work with the Israelis, primarily the members of Peace Now. In December 1988, after the PLO echoed what we had been stating in the leaflets by agreeing to recognize Israel’s right to exist, Peace Now organized a mass demonstration in Tel Aviv to pressure the government into establishing direct talks with the PLO. For me, the tens of thousands of Jews supporting our independence were like antibodies to the disease of their government’s hard line. I put it like this in an article:

  I see the face of the Zaddik—the Jewish holy man. I see him, or her, as they refuse to serve in the occupied Palestinian state. I see them wearing black, on vigil every Saturday, defying the contempt of their fellow Jews. I see them in the Knesset pursuing, proving, and exposing Rabin’s policies, even more assiduously and meticulously than the Palestinians themselves. I see them performing the miracle of crossing political barriers, as they make solidarity visits to the villages and camps of our occupied Palestinian state, where children had been killed, where houses had been demolished, where trees had been uprooted, where mothers had been forced to miscarry, where curfews were imposed for days and weeks on end, where electricity and water supplies had been cut off for prolonged periods, where true terrorism reigned.

  I kept the face of the “Zaddik” in my mind’s eye as our work turned even riskier.

  Chapter Twenty

  Interrogation

  WHEN I STOOD UP IN ITALY and talked about the metaphysics of interrogation I wasn’t yet clear just how much blood was going to be spilled for an elusive “outer” freedom. While I was certain that civil disobedience, not guns, would over time win our liberty and the liberation of our land, I didn’t know—and still don’t—when it would happen. Another thing I didn’t know at the time of the lecture was that I would soon be in an interrogation cell faced with the choice of fighting occupation or losing my family.

  At the start of the intifada, everyone, from schoolchildren to grandmothers, was marching gladly into clouds of tear gas—a spirit of defiance miraculously animating a million people. Like most Palestinians, I didn’t think twice about involving my family. Lucy, a Palestinian by choice, was as committed as any native, maybe even more. Call it a conscious, deliberate act of will to make the tragic fate of another people her own. Even my son Jamal, not even a teenager, was furtively slipping out the back door at dusk to practice his graffiti skills. From a distance I watched proudly as he and the ragtag band from the local Fatah “cubs” hoisted Palestinian flags and covered walls with anti-occupation slogans.

  In 1990, two years into the insurrection, I was still so intoxicated by the purpose and meaning of winning our freedom that my brothers had to remind me of my fatherly duties. “What the hell are you doing?” my younger brother Hatem, speaking for the others, demanded of me at a family reunion in London. “You can wreck your own life with your wonderful revolution but you don’t have the right to inflict this on your children.” At first I didn’t know what he was talking about. “What do you mean?” I rejoined.

  “Education! Our father gave us the best education, and your children deserve the same.”

  At the time, the children were all attending a Jesuit-run school inside the New Gate. Jamal was just entering high school. It was a fine school, as Jesuit schools tend to be. Besides, I retorted, my sons were having experiences not to be had at any of the world’s fancy prep schools. Hatem scoffed at me. “You may think your revolution is meaningful, but don’t forget you’ve been to the best schools. You should give your children the same choice. Afterward they can decide how to use their education, just as you did.” As always putting his money where his mouth is, my older brother, Zaki, offered to pay for a finishing year at Eton for my three sons after they completed the local high school.

  Why not? I thought to myself. “Okay, you got it. One year at Eton.”

  What won me over wasn’t so much Zaki’s generosity as the unfolding of political events. I was getting nervous about what could happen to me, or to them. “Baba,” said my youngest boy, Buraq, from the backseat of the car as I drove him to school one morning. (He couldn’t have been more than seven at the time.) “I’d like to know something. Was there ever life before the intifada?” The question cut through my heart like a knife.

  The assassination of Abu Jihad was still fresh in my mind. Wherever I looked I saw more activists, many of them close friends, being jailed or dumped over the border. In 1990, on Eid ul-Fitr, the Ramadan feast, soldiers in Gaza opened fire on demonstrators, killing three and wounding hundreds, thirty critically. Around the same time, a group of messianic Jews calling themselves Temple Mount Faithful, their brains addled by years of Greater Israel talk, planned to march up to the Noble Sanctuary and lay the cornerstone for the Third Temple. The minute word of their intentions leaked out, rioting at the Noble Sanctuary left 18 Palestinians killed and 150 wounded by police gunfire. Faisal’s description is worth citing: “All around me, moans were filling the air; curses were rising up in the holy place. The smell of blood mixed with gas and gunpowder congesting noses and eyes. In the midst of this stifling atmosphere, gloomy with death and catastrophe, I began to prepare my plea and my prayer: … Oh God the spirit is full of fears … do not change them to hatred.”

  I was in Ramallah when I heard about the shooting. At the first hint of a potential confrontation, Jamal’s school shut down and sent the kids home. But Jamal didn’t go home; he made a beeline for the Noble Sanctuary and found himself in the midst of gunfire and rioting. A friend who accompanied him was shot in the leg. Jamal saw how the soldiers stationed on rooftops shot into the crowd. A helicopter overhead sprayed the protesters with machine gun fire.

  Mother, Lucy, and I spent two frantic hours trying to find him. When he finally showed up, thankfully in one piece, he had some awful stories to tell, so many in fact that an American television producer for 60 Minutes tracked him down for an interview. Mike Wallace did the segment, which included a videotape that a tourist took showing the soldiers, unprovoked, opening fire. Jamal similarly debunked the of
ficial Israeli account according to which Arabs had thrown stones at the Jewish worshippers, instigating the Israeli response. Speaking innocently and clearly in his perfect English, he put to shame Israel’s ambassador to the UN, Bibi Netanyahu. Netanyahu, expert salesmen that he is (his former job was selling high-end furniture), couldn’t compete with an honest boy speaking matter-of-factly about what had really happened.

  One day I asked an activist friend, Salah, who’d joined us in the talks with Amirav, if he was worried about his own young children. He had just been released from administrative detention.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, don’t you miss them when you get thrown into jail? Don’t you ever ask yourself if it’s worth it, I mean to be away from them?”

  The smile Salah nearly permanently affixed to his face disappeared. He looked at me with uncharacteristic gravity. “It’s all for our children,” he exclaimed lowering his voice to a hush as if telling me a secret. “I go to jail so one day they don’t have to.”

  Salah’s answer summed up to me what we were all doing. We were all struggling to achieve for our children a future without roadblocks, tanks, tear gas, or administrative detention. A future not shadowed by a pervasive sense of our being wronged.

  The noose was tightening, as the Shin Bet edged closer to figuring out the workings of the mysterious Unified Command. No matter how obfuscating or professorial my conversations (speaking about liberation strategies through a gloss on Kant was one of my favorite tactics), and however much I restricted my direct contact with Fatah activists, the continued arrests and interrogations of activists were cumulatively contracting my margin of maneuverability. Time was running out.