Once Upon a Country

by Sari Nusseibeh

  At one point, Jacob ordered The Monday Report shut. (Lucy’s English-language paper was so popular it had subscribers not only from all the foreign delegations but also from the Israeli newspapers and agencies.) Sometime later, my friend Samir Sbeihat ended up exiled from the country. Another colleague working at the office was arrested. On yet another occasion, the Israelis managed to hunt down Fahed Abu al-Haj, my main contact with groups in Ramallah. Naser Al-Afandi was also arrested again—he had already spent years behind bars. This time (years before Abu Ghraib) the Israelis put a peaked black hood over his head and chained him in a painful squatting position for a month.

  The longer the intifada lasted, and the more of its leaders disappeared into the prison camp or ended up on the other side of the border or dead, the less discipline the UNC was able to impose on the Palestinian people.

  A rash of killings of “collaborators” broke out. The incoming reports from the various regions were alarming. At the beginning of the intifada, we in the leadership had announced an amnesty for all Palestinian collaborators. All they had to do was to admit to it publicly, in the main square of their local village or town, and ask for forgiveness from their fellow citizens.

  I also began to see a new pattern. In one region after the next, provocateurs were returning with guns from safe houses within Israel to which they had fled, helped by the Israeli security services. Also, though Hamas had already begun turning against the occupation, fights were breaking out between Hamas and Fatah activists. Given close family relations among Palestinians, clashes between two people can easily morph into major conflagrations dividing up entire villages. Internecine strife erupted between various factions.

  Similar reports began trickling out from the prisons, where bloody fights pitted Fatah against Hamas. Here, too, fratricide had a pattern. Usually an agent turned out to be the trigger. Violence radicalized the base, and made it more difficult to keep activists behind our “white revolution.” The demands by the factions wishing to push the intifada toward violent confrontation increased, and more and more radical statements made the rounds.

  It didn’t take great strategic intelligence to figure out that a new Israeli offensive was afoot. Killing Abu Jihad, or arresting tens of thousands of people, hadn’t worked. Their new secret war was to administer the blows from within. Playing the Islamic card was, as it remains, a choice strategy in dividing up Palestinian society into warring factions.

  To scuttle Israel’s tactics, I organized clandestine meetings in Jerusalem on Fatah’s behalf, at the house of a devout Muslim and Fatah supporter who didn’t want to see a civil war tear our people apart. Jamil Hamami, representing Hamas, agreed with me to bury whatever hatchets there were between our two movements, and to form a united front against the occupation. During our conversation we began drawing up the first joint Hamas-Fatah leaflet.

  I tried to bring Hamas and Fatah together only because I knew that the Israelis were using Hamas to undermine the secular nationalists. Hamas continued its fight against us, but by this point it had grown strong enough to turn against the Israelis, too. Yassin’s new mantra was for a holy war against Zionism and the PLO, leading to an Islamic state stretching from Tel Aviv to the Jordan River. In 1989, Hamas went on a killing spree against Israeli citizens. The Israeli government now banned the organization and arrested the sheikh after Yassin ordered his minions to kidnap and murder two Israeli soldiers.

  My attempts to prevent the intifada from breaking down into a slugfest with the Israelis were only stopgap measures. Even a defensive stalemate with the occupation—with our throwing rocks, and their breaking bones and throwing us into jail—would spell defeat. Israel had far greater logistic depth of manpower and weaponry. We either continued on the offensive or we lost. And in my thinking, the best offensive weapon in our arsenal was our declaration of independence, the creation of a provisional government, and the invitation to Israel to negotiate on the basis of mutual recognition.

  By way of my Paris contact, I knew just how alluring the Husseini Document was for the PLO. Now with Abu Jihad gone, what the men in Tunis liked best, unfortunately, was the declaration itself; they were less enthusiastic about the other component, the creation of a provisional government in the West Bank and Gaza.

  The Husseini Document explicitly forecast the scenario of Israeli arrests that might follow. The Israeli government would never tolerate such a government, and any ministers we named to it would be arrested at once. “Let them lock us up!” I told people. “We’ll just keep on appointing new ministers and civil servants to take our places. The more they take in, the more we’ll hire. Each time they arrest the new appointed judge or minister of education or postman, the more the world will see the nature of the occupation. Their fight against our civil service will make a mockery of the occupation.”

  When Faisal finally came out of jail, I felt a deep sense of relief. Hours after his arrival in Jerusalem, I had a closed meeting with him in one of Jerusalem’s hotels. “We need to lay down the preparatory building blocks for our provisional government,” I told him. “I believe this should be your main mission.”

  Whatever I said wasn’t very convincing. “I’m a bulldozer, not a builder,” he said when I had gone through the scenario of the revolving door of appointed and arrested ministers. “My mission is to clear the grounds and defuse the mines. Those who follow me can build.” He spoke like an Old Testament prophet; even so, he left me unconvinced.

  The next time I brought up the provisional government was at a meeting of our think tank at my house in Abu Dis. Faisal was there. I had asked Radwan Abu Ayyash, a journalist, to prepare a paper on ways the various self-rule committees could be brought into centralized governmental departments. The paper he presented was precisely what I had had in mind: what he proposed, and what we discussed, was the structural foundation of a provisional government.

  The provisional government never got off the ground, partly because in November 1988 Arafat announced that he was going to come out with a declaration of independence in Algeria—not at the Noble Sanctuary in Jerusalem as the Husseini Document had advised, and without the establishment of our own government. His declaration was written by the masterful Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, and as such was stirring and finely crafted. From my perspective, it was also long on lofty words and short on practical suggestions to end the occupation.

  Still, even without a government in place, the declaration was an important milestone, and like everyone else, I looked forward to its unveiling. On the day it was to be announced, a few friends and I went around to the mosques and churches in the Old City and asked the clerics to sound their bells and make their calls at the appointed hour. The plan I came up with was to read out the declaration to tens of thousands of people gathered at the Noble Sanctuary. I wanted a people under occupation, the people of the intifada, to congregate at the center of our universe, and to celebrate our independence.

  On the day the declaration was read, Israel slapped a total curfew over the territories and East Jerusalem. It was the most draconian curfew in memory, and life for us came to a halt: no cars, no people on the streets; even the birds seemed to be gone. I should mention here that for my family, curfews were a blessing in disguise. Locked inside, I could finally spend long stretches of time with my sons.

  Curfew or no, I was determined to get to the Noble Sanctuary. And so, defying the authorities and venturing out into the eerie silence of the city, I crossed two valleys on foot, before heading down the Mount of Olives and entering Jerusalem through the Lion’s Gate, where Father was buried. Of the few people who had managed to get through, most were the mosque’s clergy, who lived near the compound. Hanna Siniora and his wife, who is a Christian, were also there. Hanna, a staunchly secular man, looked out of place up on the ancient Temple Mount. He had probably never set foot there before, and certainly not in the company of religious clerics.

  Together, we all walked into Al-Aqsa mosque. At the appointed hour, a
s the bells from the Holy Sepulcher swung, and calls wailed out from the minarets, we all solemnly read our declaration of independence:

  Palestine, the land of the three monotheistic faiths, is where the Palestinian Arab people was born, on which it grew, developed and excelled. Thus the Palestinian Arab people ensured for itself an everlasting union between itself, its land, and its history.

  Resolute throughout that history, the Palestinian Arab people forged its national identity … Nourished by an unfolding series of civilizations and cultures, inspired by a heritage rich in variety and kind, the Palestinian people added to its stature by consolidating a union between itself and its patrimonial Land. The call went out from Temple, Church, and Mosque that to praise the Creator, to celebrate compassion and peace was indeed the message of Palestine. And in generation after generation, the Palestinian Arab people gave of itself unsparingly in the valiant battle for liberation and homeland. For what has been the unbroken chain of our people’s rebellions but the heroic embodiment of our will for national independence. And so the people was sustained in the struggle to stay and to prevail.

  Over the coming weeks, I intensified my calls for negotiations. In the English edition of Fatah’s Al-Fajr, I called openly upon the PLO to show leadership by giving people what they wanted: peace. I urged the PLO to declare a peace strategy. The title of the article was “The PLO Represents the People, Not Itself.”

  I also tried to get my message across to the Israeli public by repeating my argument that the two-state solution was in both peoples’ self-interest, but I pointed out that it was an option that might slip from our hands. “The national psychological readiness for a two-state solution is not a permanent fixture of the Palestinian psychology. It is in the Palestinian heart now, but it can quickly fade if there is no response to this feeling of opening up. It’s like a star or a comet that comes close by and then goes away. One has to catch it when it is close.”1 If they didn’t watch it, I implied, reissuing my old argument, instead of a peaceful movement for independence Israelis might have an antiapartheid campaign on their hands.

  My mood in those days can be felt in a missive I sent to Desmond Tutu on Christmas Day, 1989.

  Your Excellency,

  On this universal day of peace, in this land of peace, a people yearning for peace welcomes you as a messenger of peace, as a symbol of the invincibility of mankind’s moral strength. Whether in South Africa or Palestine, the powers of discrimination, injustice, and usurpation of rights are being challenged by nothing less than the power of the people’s will and their desire for freedom and equality. Our joint struggle against the forces of racism and exclusivism is but one among countless battles waged throughout the history of mankind, and exemplified by the Prophet of Peace, whose birthday we celebrate today, in his struggle to advance the cause of humanity.

  The only official Israeli response I got for my public stance was greater diligence on the part of my private Shin Bet agent. Jacob and his colleagues were methodically filling out their flowchart to pinpoint my place in the leadership. Even without evidence, they began to attack me indirectly. Right from the beginning, their line of attack was calculated to produce fear. They probably did a psychological profile and determined that the best way to control me was to threaten what I loved most, which wasn’t my reputation, career, or my own life and limb. It was my mother, my wife, and my kids.

  One evening, as my family and I sat around at home watching TV, I heard a scuffling sound outside. Someone was moving around in the backyard, where our car was parked. At once I switched on the patio light and went outside. There I saw three overweight masked men around my battered Opel, one of them carrying a gasoline can and a rag, obviously about to torch the car. I shouted and ran at them, which was a foolish thing to do—I was wearing slippers and armed only with the television remote control—but it succeeded in chasing them away. They probably lumbered off because they thought I was a bodyguard.

  Hearing my shouts, a few neighbors came over to help. As we walked around the house to inspect the property, one of my neighbors pointed out freshly painted graffiti on one of the walls. THE PROPHET OF BIRZEIT … went the unfinished message. It looked to me like the work of collaborators. The first sign of this was that they had been middle-aged and potbellied—hardly the picture of the young and agile activists Hamas normally fielded. Their plan was to torch the car and, with the graffiti, create the impression that I was being punished by Muslim factions for my heretical, anti-Islamic ideas. This would in turn show that my efforts at mediation between the factions had not only failed, but that I was one source of their mutual rancor.

  My instinct was later confirmed. My friend Abd el-Halim made some inquiries. We discovered from the local gas station attendant, where the men had bought the gasoline, that they were known collaborators living in the area.

  On another occasion, the Shin Bet used the “leaflet” trick. Israel’s security sometimes issued leaflets of its own, under a concocted name of some hitherto-unheard-of Palestinian “faction.” These had several uses, one of which was to sow confusion among the population or, better yet, spark brawls or infighting. The leaflet war was part of Israel’s offensive to break the will of the insurrection from the inside.

  One such leaflet—distributed to what seemed like every mailbox in the territories—denounced me as a “salon prince.” The authors didn’t have Machiavelli in mind; I was a “prince” because of my privileged family background and my “white hands,” unsullied with the blood dripping from the hands of the true intifada activists. I was a guy who vacationed in the Swiss Alps while fellow Palestinians braved bullets. A man with no blood on his hands had no business in politics, and certainly shouldn’t be talking about peace. (To get some captured UNC members to talk about my role in the uprising, the interrogator used my frequent trips to prove that their aristocratic friend was skiing off in the Alps while they were rotting in prison.)

  When an Israeli journalist asked me how I felt about the scurrilous pamphlets, he must have anticipated my taking umbrage because what I said left him wagging his head in disbelief: “Why should it bother me to be described as having ‘white hands’? Surely it’s by a special grace of God that any of us can have truly white hands. I can only be grateful that my hands are white. And I only pray that they be whiter still, and I am grateful that my compatriots can see I’m blessed with this grace.”

  In 1989 the Shin Bet and Agent Jacob got lucky with the latest crop of arrests. One figure they captured was Fatah’s most senior representative in the territories, a man I greatly admired. At the onset of the intifada, he had been immediately placed high on Israel’s Most Wanted List, and went into hiding. Through the two years of unrest, he kept a low profile.

  The two of us had occasional meetings, with Fahed Abu al-Haj acting as our go-between. Fahed arranged clandestine meetings between us in apartment basements, in the middle of fields—wherever we could talk. The main purpose of these risky tête-à-têtes was for me to fill him in on Fatah’s strategy as expressed in its leaflets; he, in turn, passed information on to Fatah’s organizational network. He then let me in on developments within the network. Another way we worked together was in financing the rebellion. He passed on the money I smuggled in from abroad to fugitives on the run.

  As soon as I got word of his capture, I felt a sudden stab of pain. It was the pain of empathy, and of fear. I knew that the interrogators would pull out all the stops to get him to talk.

  Several weeks later, I received a call summoning me to the prison in the Russian compound. Upon my arrival, Israeli army officers summarily marched me from the reception office, through an area covered with coils of rusting barbed wire, and into the prison. There they took me directly into an interrogation cell. They hadn’t officially charged me with anything, so I knew my visit would be brief, unless I slipped up and voluntarily gave something away. But why had they taken me to a cell? They could have asked me their questions just as easily in any one of the
offices or rooms in the Russian compound, outside the prison walls.

  The officers in charge of the interrogation informed me without further ado—no introduction, no small talk, no pleasantries—that they had succeeded in squeezing serious information about me from a prisoner. They now had evidence that not only had I maintained contact with the head of Fatah in the territories, but also that I had sent him large sums of money.

  I didn’t fall for his trap. Instead of talking to my interrogator, I began inspecting my nails. If the interrogators really had forced out a confession, I thought to myself, my heart racing, they would be bringing charges against me, not bragging about their investigative successes. They obviously suspected that the prisoner and I had worked together; they just couldn’t prove it. By sounding me out, they hoped to get a confession out of me so they could bring charges against both of us. I wasn’t biting.

  “Yes,” I told them breezily, “I believe I’ve met this chap before.” I added that beyond this casual meeting, I had no idea who he was or whether he had any connection to the intifada or to Fatah. As far as I knew, he had approached me because I was a public figure. That was the whole story. “A lot of people want to talk to me. Israelis, too. I’m a professor, you know. I’m a polite person and can’t in all propriety say no. My work at Holy Land Press requires that I meet with political activists of all stripes and colors.”

  The interrogators stuck to their original story that they now had something on me. At this point I switched tactics. “Such a mean liar this coward has turned out to be,” I said of the prisoner. “Why on earth would he wish to implicate me if not to hide his true contacts?”

  For several hours we went back and forth: they insisting that they had a smoking gun, and I admitting to have met the prisoner but adamantly denying everything else. Eventually they realized that their trick wasn’t working, and they released me.