Once Upon a Country

by Sari Nusseibeh

  More arrests followed. In one roundup the Israelis not only nabbed a number of members of the UNC but also Izzat Ghazzawi and Hamzeh Smadi, my co-worker at the Holy Land Press who helped me with the monthly leaflets.

  All of the detainees were taken to a special prison facility in Petah Tikva. For weeks, I couldn’t find out anything about them. Lawyers were usually able to glean bits of information about detainees’ whereabouts, their charges, and how they were being treated. This time there was absolute dead silence.

  Only when Hamzeh got out of prison two years later did I learn about the nightmarish interrogations. On the wall of one of the interrogation rooms was a chalkboard. Interrogators jotted down several names with lines connecting them. On the top of the chart was the name of my Paris contact Abu Tareq. Immediately under him came the name Sari. Under me were written several other names, including those of Hamzeh and his fellow prisoners. Between some names were solid lines, while between others were question marks. Those under interrogation were asked to fill in the gaps, and to provide the skeletal structure with content. How did all the lines tie up? In particular, could a formal link be established proving that Fatah’s representative in the UNC was taking his direct instructions from me? Or could it simply be—this was what I had been telling the Israelis—that I had a lot of visitors, and if one of them turned out to be a member of the UNC, it had nothing to do with me?

  By now, the experts in the Shin Bet were tired of feeling duped. Time after time they had rounded up UNC members thinking they’d decapitated the leadership, only to discover on the ninth of the next month that there was an invisible network operating in the shadows, keeping the whole thing running. Slowly, they were beginning to cast light on those shadows, and with such high-quality prisoners in their hands, they prepared the rack.

  The interrogation methods were so extreme that four veteran prisoners who had endured hundreds of hours of interrogation in the past now cracked. One was my friend Fahed Abu al-Haj, who had worked with me at my newspaper. For twenty-five days the interrogators put him into a sealed room, chained him in a standing position to a bathroom door so he couldn’t sleep, and only once a day they took off his shackles to allow him to eat and wash himself. Once, an interrogator hit him hard enough that he went temporarily blind.

  They eventually got a signed confession out of him, with a fingerprint smeared on the page for additional proof of authenticity. “In the name of Allah the Merciful,” began the confession, “I, Fahed Hussain Ahmad Abu al-Haj, testify to the following:

  […] Around the month of September 1988, Zuhair Qaisi told me that he was a member of the Unified Command for the intifada and asked me to be his messenger. He was wanted by the Israeli authorities. Zuhair asked me to deliver a small letter to Sari Nusseibeh. I told him I would … I did this, and Sari gave me approximately 4,000 Jordanian dinars [$12,000] to give to Zuhair. This I also did. I as well delivered several letters from Sari to Zuhair and from Zuhair to Sari.

  Several times I delivered drafts of leaflets from Zuhair to the printer. Before December 6, 1988, I delivered letters between Zuhair and Abdul Fattah Shuhaded. Two weeks later Abdul Fattah came to me at Birzeit University and asked me to deliver a letter to Sari and to take money from Sari for the intifada. I gave the letter to Sari, and two days later he gave me 100,000 Jordanian dinars [$300,000]. I gave the money to Abdul Fattah. At the same time, Abdul Fattah gave me a letter to deliver to Sari. Sari gave me 80,000 dinars [$240,000] to give to Abdul.”

  A second prisoner’s confession was even more damning:

  I, the undersigned, testify to the following: I was released from prison on Aug. 18, 1988, and stayed for a month in my home in Al-Fara, a refugee camp, at which point I moved to my home in the village of Birzeit. Two weeks later Zuhair Qaisi visited me in my home on the occasion of my release from prison. We got into a casual conversation about life in prison. Then he visited me again and told me he was wanted by the authorities … He asked me to go to Hassan Abed Rabbo, who works at the Journalist’s Union in Jerusalem, and to take him a draft of a leaflet. I think it was Leaflet No. 32.

  During that period Zuhair came to me and told me that Sari Nusseibeh had money for intifada activities and he asked me to go to Sari’s office in Jerusalem to pick up the money. The next day I went to Sari and told him that I was sent by Zuhair to take the money that he was holding. (I’ve known Sari since 1985, during my studies at Birzeit University, where I took his course on the subject of Palestine.)

  Sari told me that the money hadn’t yet arrived and that I should pass by again in two days. I returned two days later and discovered that the money had arrived. He gave me $80,000 in front of the American Colony Hotel … Two days later I received $50,000 from Sari from his car (a gray Opel Ascona) … Two days later I received another $50,000 from Sari’s office.

  A third confession, every word of which was of course true, like the others, filled in the few gaps that remained in the Shin Bet flowchart:

  I testify in God’s name: I was appointed by Abu Tareq from the Fatah organization in France to oversee suggestions for Leaflet Nos. 33–35. Abu Tareq appointed me to oversee the process of adding comments on the leaflets. He called Sari Nusseibeh concerning this matter and informed him of my coming to him. There was constant telephone communication between Abu Tareq, Sari, and me.

  I met with Sari Nusseibeh and put suggestions for the leaflets so it would be delivered to Hassan Abed Rabbo … The final say regarding suggested items of Leaflets Nos. 33–35 was Sari’s, since he is Fatah’s top man in the Occupied Territories. This statement I willingly wrote by hand.

  One reason a Manichean view of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, with one side all light, the other all darkness, is impossible to take is that just when you are happily convinced of the total justice of your position and conversely of the bestiality of your opponent’s, your own side shoots itself in the foot, while the enemy actually does something right for a change.

  By the beginning of 1990, Israel was clearly gaining the upper hand. Its attempt to crack the Unified Command and the intifada leadership, and to take down its leaders, was showing the first signs of real promise. In the daily grind of a deepening stalemate, the enormous imbalance of power began to show. The euphoric unity Palestinians felt when the first rocks started flying was breaking down, and for very understandable reasons. The closures and strikes were making economic conditions so dire that just to put food on the table workers were beginning to drift back to their jobs in Israel. The boycott spelled out by the Jerusalem Document, and that was an integral part of the civil disobedience campaign, was running up against the hard reality of raw survival.

  There were grotesque scenes of activists trying forcibly to prevent workers from earning their daily bread in Israel. The inevitable brawls this caused further frayed the social fabric. Fatigue was beginning to set in.

  From the outset, we had been the ones on the offensive, beginning with the outburst of defiance, then the Fourteen Points, the Jerusalem Document, and the declaration of independence. Now all that seemed left of the creative energies of our people’s revolution was disgust—disgust at the occupation and, increasingly, disgust at ourselves for having to put our hands out again just to feed ourselves.

  The roles were now reversed, and it was Israel’s turn to make a move. Defense Minister Rabin had by now concluded that as a political offensive, the intifada could not be defeated by breaking our bones; it had to be countered by an Israeli diplomatic offensive.

  Rabin was a practical man, constitutionally suspicious of ideologies and always more than willing to change course if circumstances demanded it. In his search for a diplomatic opening, he enlisted the expertise of Yaʾakov Peri, the head of the Shin Bet. Through his network, Peri was to make contact with local Palestinian leaders to run suggestions past them that would later appear in the “Shamir Plan.”

  Yaʾakov Peri visited Faisal in jail, where the discussions centered on the idea of holding elections i
n the Occupied Territories. He also contacted Hamas leaders, to see what their views on such a plan might be. (Sheikh Ahmad Yassin was released from jail soon afterward.)

  In the meantime, the four UNC prisoners at Petah Tikva Prison suddenly found themselves on a different footing with their captors. Their food improved, the chains disappeared, and the guards, polite to the point of deferential, ushered them into a room in a different section of the prison, this one with a negotiation table instead of a rack. Now the interrogators wanted to talk politics. “What were the intifada leaders really after?” probed the Israelis on Peri’s instruction. “Did they really want a negotiated peace, as the leaflets claimed?”

  Negotiations ensued. Some of the issues raised seemed lifted straight from the Fourteen Points (e.g., withdrawal of the army from population centers), while others had come up in our talks with Amirav. As the two sides discussed topic after topic, the Israelis took notes. In the end, after five days of talks, the Shin Bet men had sketched out a page-and-a-half document outlining a possible approach to negotiating a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A central component in the draft was the holding of elections. In this extraordinary meeting of minds between captors and captives only one point remained unresolved: the prisoners stated emphatically, with half-blind Fahed the most categorical of all, that their agreement would go nowhere without the endorsement of the PLO leadership in Tunis.

  “We know that,” the Israeli officers retorted. “But how do you suggest the PLO leadership get involved?”

  “We’ll have to consult our leaders before continuing,” they told the negotiators. When asked which leaders they were talking about, the prisoners mentioned Faisal and me. “No problem!” the officers said. “If you want, we could even bring them here to visit you, and you could consult with them directly. Or just send a message and see what they say.” The prisoners, understandably nervous and loath to bring us into a trap, asked to see Faisal’s lawyer, Jawad Boulos.

  As an Israeli Arab and the top lawyer for most of the leading Palestinian political prisoners, Jawad was a familiar figure among the Israeli security people. Gregarious, Hebrew speaking, and always immaculately dressed, Jawad was a man they liked and admired. Now they contacted him and invited him to meet the four inmates. It was during his talks with them that he learned both about their confessions and about the subsequent negotiations.

  From the jail, Boulos returned to Jerusalem and headed directly to my home in Abu Dis. “Sari, I just met four guys who informed the Israelis that you were the one who’s been writing the leaflets. In their confession they stated that you and Faisal are the leaders of the intifada.” I was just catching my breath when he handed me the page-and-a-half document. He informed me that the Israelis wanted it to be passed on to Tunis, but the Palestinian prisoners had asked that I look it over first.

  From my house Jawad headed directly to Faisal to tell him what had happened. Faisal’s first reaction to the negotiations was incredulity. “These fools have to stop negotiating!”

  For my part, I immediately faxed the document to Arafat, via Abu Tareq in Paris. By this point I had nothing to hide. The game was over; the Israelis knew my role, and I could stop pretending.

  There was no reply from Arafat.

  • • •

  Prime Minister Shamir disemboweled the Petah Tikva working paper. In its place he put the “Shamir Plan,” as it was called, which went directly counter to a negotiated peace. It talked about elections, but only as a clever means to defuse the intifada. There was no clear indication what would happen after those elections. The plan was little more than a reissue of the old Israeli dream of taking all of our best land and leaving us to sweep our own streets and dig our own sewage lines. No hint of Israeli withdrawal, of giving us back our water and other resources, or of uprooting settlements or military bases. What was the upshot of it? The prerequisite for elections was the return to ordinary life, without protests and stone throwing and unrest, without an intifada. The only baffling thing about the “plan” was that Shamir and his party apparatchiks believed we would fall for it.

  Oddly enough, when the Shamir Plan was announced, Sheikh Yassin made a statement to the effect that elections in the Occupied Territories would be a “welcome step.” Even after branching off into terrorist outrages against Israelis, the sheikh was still playing the Village League politician, doubtlessly to further build his organization at the expense of moderates truly willing to compromise with Israel.

  I was baffled, but also angered. Once again, a historic opportunity to arrive at true peace through a genuine negotiation effort was being squandered by a politician’s small-minded machinations, and after all the blood spilled I wasn’t going to sit passively and watch it happen. I worked away at my Holy Land Press office in Salaheddin Street, doing my best to expose the Shamir Plan as a sham. The statements I came up with alerted the international community and the Israeli public to the plan’s real intentions. (After Shamir was voted out of office in 1992, he would reveal what he had been aiming for: “I would have carried out autonomy talks for ten years, and meanwhile we would have reached half a million people in Judea and Samaria.”2)

  On one hot summer morning in June 1990, my Shin Bet man, Jacob, and his team showed up with soldiers at the Holy Land Press. It was early and I wasn’t yet in the office. They proceeded to gather up all my files and computer discs and place them in boxes. “If we find anything,” they warned my secretary, “we’ll lock you into a hole and throw away the key.”

  She had phoned me the minute she saw Jacob’s face at the front door, and I headed over without delay. The street outside the building was swarming with border police, the most trigger-happy in the force. Pushing past them, I ran upstairs. “And what do you think you’re doing here?” I demanded the minute I entered the office. “This is an office. We earn our living here. This is the way we buy our bread.”

  “Go buy some cake instead,” snapped one of the officers in a variation on Marie Antoinette.

  They ordered us out of the office. Then they welded the metal doors shut and on the front of the building pasted a military order. The office was closed for two years by order of the government.

  Soon afterward, stories began appearing in the Hebrew press about all the confessions Israel’s security had from me. One headline described me as the “paymaster of the intifada,” like the smart accountant who keeps Mafia bosses in business. Minister of Industry and Trade Ariel Sharon used the confessions as fodder for his lobbying campaign to get Faisal and me deposited over the border. This was something the chieftains of Gush Emunim had been saying for years. Only after exiling us, Sharon insisted to his colleagues in the cabinet, could the intifada be defeated. He even cited the American invasion of Panama as a useful precedent. In Reagan’s America “a democracy has decided to defend itself because it perceives a threat to its citizens. It is high time for Israel to do the same against those who endanger Jewish life.”

  Sharon’s solution got some traction. One day, as I drove through a West Jerusalem street, I saw a group of Israelis holding banners in front of the prime minister’s house. Some of them were children, and one little girl carried the oversize placard: DEPORT SARI NUSSEIBEH. Tzahi Hanegbi, the former chain-swinging, Arab-beating student activist who also had belonged to Amirav’s circle, publicly called for me to be put on trial.

  The Petah Tikva prisoners headed back to their cells. In the bills of indictment brought against them (Bills 108/89 and 109/89, respectively) the government prosecutor got some things right, others wrong. He rightly fingered me as a conduit for money for financing the intifada and for being responsible for “drawing up reports and leaflets for the intifada.” Where fact faded into fiction was the accusation that I supported calls to “throw firebombs” at Israelis and “fight with knives.”3

  Following the closure of the office, I reduced my illegal activities to the bare minimum. At first I shifted operations over to Mother’s house. In any case, I had les
s to do because Faisal was out of jail and hence could reassume the leadership role that I had taken on in his absence.

  I was relieved to step out of the public eye. From my point of view, the uprising had run into the sand. I still participated in some Palestinian-Israeli dialogue groups and diplomatic meetings, and once or twice I wrote a leaflet. But for me, the intifada’s spirit was dead. The only thing it was now achieving was aimless pain and suffering.

  By November my pursuers had had ample time to sift through all my files and computer discs. They ordered me back to the Russian compound for questioning. This time Jacob had three officers along with him in civilian clothing. All three spoke passable Arabic, and the most fluent one did the bulk of the talking. Pointing to a pile of papers he called “seditious material and literature,” he asked me to identify it. “I’d rather not say anything without my lawyer,” I replied. Feigning a yawn, I added though that the pile “seems in general” to belong to my office. They were “field documents” and I needed them for my work. I asked them to kindly return them at the first opportunity. “A man has to make a living.”

  For four hours they grilled me on the intifada, all the while informing me that in the eyes of the government I was already in “way over” my head. Without spelling it out, they insisted that I was acting in the “danger zone.” As a hint of what could await me, they said they were now on the verge of issuing an order to expel my friend Samir Sbeihat, as they had already done to Marwan, Jibril Rajoub, Mohammed Dahlan, and Akram Haniyyah. They also had enough information on me to expel me, or put me behind bars for years.

  I stuck to my stock narrative of being someone people like to talk to. “No, no, no. You’ve got it all wrong,” I assured them with all the insincerity they deserved. “I’m not an organization person. I just know people. How was I supposed to know that these guys were involved in the intifada?” I knew they didn’t believe me.