Once Upon a Country

by Sari Nusseibeh

  They spent hours running through a Chinese menu of all the things they suspected me of doing, or that various prisoners had accused me of. I continued to feign incredulity, all the while doing my best to conceal my trembling hands.

  After a couple of hours, their tactics changed. In a mood of light jesting, as if in a show of having concluded the interrogation, they started telling jokes to one another. Their faces all grins, they beamed at one another and at me.

  After cracking a few jokes, they turned to me laughingly and, as though having forgotten our earlier conversation, came out with several underhand questions. The inflection in their voices was now vulgar, like a conversation between street hoodlums.

  “Your wife is English, isn’t she? (English was repeated between them a number of times, each time with snickers.) “What’s her name? It’s Lucy, right? Luuucy.” (More giggling.) “She drives around in a red Peugeot, doesn’t she?” one crowed. “Yeah, with yellow plates,” another chipped in. “Tell us.” Jacob turned to me in a more serious tone: “Aren’t you worried that some people might think she’s an Israeli? Especially when she’s driving to your home in Abu Dis, with those hairpin curves. Anything could happen. Your own intifada guys could easily mistake her for the enemy.” (“Ha-ha-ha-ha!”) “She could end up burning up inside her car from those Molotov cocktails your leaflets are so full of.” One officer at this point wagged his head in mock commiseration with me. “Poor Luuucy.” A moment of silence followed.

  The conversation started up from a different angle. “You have three children. Your eldest is … Jamal, right. Fair hair, isn’t that right? Jamal, huh, doesn’t this mean ‘beauty’ in Arabic?” Laughter. “And the other two … both go to the same school, don’t they? The school’s just inside the New Gate. Right? Difficult place to turn your car around.”

  The officer with the best Arabic described in photographic detail Lucy’s routine of driving the kids to school through the New Gate and then picking them up later in the afternoon. He knew exactly the time she arrived. He added darkly, “Don’t you know how dangerous that narrow street is? You know, people hang around, and sometimes the soldiers shoot. Imagine, a demonstration can suddenly flare up. Lucy has just driven in. She can’t turn around. The kids are caught in between. Scary thought, don’t you agree?”

  “And what about that old mother of yours?” They pretended to be concerned about her well-being. “She lives in such a big house all alone, right? Aren’t you afraid, in the midst of this intifada craziness, that something could happen to her? People can get so crazy, you know.”

  After five hours of this they sent me back home. It was in the middle of the night, and I began to tie up the logic of interrogation sessions one and two. Their message rang clearly: “We know how to deal with you. If you love your family, you’ll pack up and leave the country.”

  A few days later I met with my Israeli lawyer, Mr. Arnold Spaer, the German Jew from Danzig who had studied with my father in the early 1940s. He told me he had been in touch with the public prosecutor, who said that the government had enough evidence to put me away for fifteen years. They gave me two options: either they would put me on trial or they’d wipe the slate clean if I agreed to go into voluntary exile for three years.

  This forced me to take some of my own medicine. How could I cave in to threats when for years I had been singing the praises of rebels who had defied their interrogators, and at a much stiffer price than imprisonment or exile? I had no choice but to swallow my fears and go on.

  I told my Mr. Spaer that I wanted a trial. I could use it as a platform to defend our rights for a nonviolent rebellion. He delivered to the authorities my response to their accusations, the gist of which was this: “In none of my opinions have I expressed an incitement to violence or the adoption of calls for the extermination of Israel. On the contrary, I have argued that we should adopt a nonviolent strategy, and that we should reach the point where we can negotiate a two-state solution with Israel.”

  The Israelis chose to do nothing. As it would turn out, they were waiting for a more propitious time. The crisis in the Gulf would give them the cover they needed.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Ramle Prison

  I come from there and I have memories.

  Born as mortals are, I have a mother

  And a house with many windows,

  I have brothers, friends,

  And a prison cell with one cold window.

  —MAHMOUD DARWISH, “I COME FROM THERE”

  IN AUGUST 1991, attention in the Middle East shifted away from the stones and tear gas of the Holy Land to the fertile crescent of Mesopotamia, the land of Gilgamesh, al-Ghazali, Sinbad, and now the killer Saddam Hussein.

  Invoking past border disagreements with Kuwait, but with his greedy raptor’s eyes on its oil wealth, Saddam Hussein began rattling his sabers. Emotions in the Arab world ran high. Then one day the dictator struck. Overnight, Iraqi troops ingested Kuwait.

  I read about the invasion in the morning paper, sitting with Mother at her home. “How could such a thing happen?” I asked her incredulously and already heard in my mind what she was thinking: “Politicians!” My brother Zaki, with his uncanny knack of seeing things for what they were, free of blinkers and delusion, told me, “The countdown has begun. American troops will be in the Middle East before we know it.”

  For me it was appalling that a big powerful Arab state such as Iraq should pounce on its small neighbor. Here we were, year after year trying to expose all the evils of occupation by pointing to a people’s natural right of self-determination, and all of a sudden the bully Saddam crushes a neighbor with his tanks and troops.

  My mind was abuzz with ways our national leadership could express its outrage at this new occupation when Faisal came unannounced through the front door. (He felt as though he were a member of the family, which, given the way Mother always treated him, he was.) As usual when something big happened, we didn’t need to say more than a few words. We instinctively understood each other.

  “You heard?” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  “We have to come up with a strong statement.”

  “Already on it,” I assured him.

  Within hours we put out a press release with a clear and forcible statement expressing condemnation by the people in the Occupied Territories of the new occupation, and demanding that the rights of the Kuwaiti people be respected.

  Unfortunately, the PLO leaders abroad didn’t take their cues from us. Some, such as Nabil Shaʾth, a member of Fatah’s Central Committee, and Abu Iyad, the strongman on the committee, shared our reaction. But Arafat was the head of the organization, and he thought he could use the invasion to score some points for the Palestinian cause. He threw his lot in with Saddam.

  The intifada was over for me. My office had been welded shut, my cover blown, and the intifada had drifted away from its nonviolent moorings. No curtain fell, no ushers passed around a hat for all the victims. The cause died from exhaustion. A “whimper” sums it up better than a “bang.” Or better yet, a series of whimpers, followed by Arafat’s fatal embrace of Saddam. Images of Arafat kissing Saddam on the lips were an embarrassment for us, and a PR coup for the Israelis. With one embrace all our gains seemed to vanish.

  Rabin’s decision to negotiate with the Petah Tikva prisoners had been fueled in part by his appreciation that because of sheer demographics, Israel and the Palestinians had to work out some form of settlement. But these first tentative steps went nowhere. With the seesawing I’ve learned to expect from politics in our part of the world, Shamir now cobbled together a new Israeli government that excluded Labor and therefore Rabin. The government’s new temporary solution to demographics, which they also knew better than Palestinians to be the hard kernel of the conflict, shifted away from a territorial swap to mass immigration from the Soviet Union.

  Shamir, emboldened by the crisis in the Gulf, let it be known that a vague “autonomy” was the most the pernicious Pa
lestinians could ever hope to get. This time he had much of the world’s sympathy.

  When interviewed by a reporter for The New York Times, I admitted that the struggle for the creation of an independent state had reached an impasse. I brought out my trump card by telling him that between the options of “autonomy” Shamir-style and living in a single state as a citizen with rights equal to those of Israeli Jews, “there is little question but that I would opt for equality.”

  No one was listening. In any case, world interest had shifted over to a major theater of potential battle; world players—the United States, the Europeans, the major Arab governments—were beginning to show up on the field. Our conflict was now a sideshow.

  The intifada’s ignominious demise gave me some much-needed time. Over the preceding years, circumstances had required of me to master a certain chameleon-like adaptability: as metaphysician, professor, union activist, rebel, press agent, dissembler. Now I was able to go back to something closer to my real self. I spent more time with my family, my much-diminished circle of student activists, and my cabdriver friends. I also had more time to think and write.

  Merle Thorpe, the president of the Middle East Peace Institute, in Washington, D.C., came up with an idea. He wanted an Israeli and a Palestinian to put their heads together and come up with a joint picture of what a two-state solution might look like. The New York publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux agreed to publish the resulting book.

  Such a joint thought experiment had never been tried. On the Palestinian side, no one had ever gone far beyond thinking about a two-state solution theoretically, as if they were talking about a futuristic colony on Mars. Some Israelis had given thought to ways of putting flesh on the idea; one such scholar was the Israeli Canadian Mark Heller from the Jaffee Center of Tel Aviv University.

  I immediately liked the idea. Maybe the time had come to dot some i’s and cross some t’s. I had already been involved in authoring working papers and leaflets calling for a Palestinian state; this project gave me a chance to draw up the blueprints.

  Merle Thorpe brought Mark and me together, and we started work. The title Mark proposed, No Trumpets, No Drums, appealed to my distaste for nationalist histrionics. Hoping that the PLO leaders in Tunis would also begin giving thought to the practical elements of nation-building, I sent each chapter as we wrote it to my friend Akram Haniyyah, who had become a close adviser to Arafat.

  For a time, the Gulf crisis looked like a game of tug of war between Western and Arab powers, with the United States issuing warnings and Saddam sticking to his guns. In the Arab world, this sort of brinksmanship shifted attention away from what Saddam was doing in Kuwait and toward his show of muscle, his brazen defiance of America. Knowing that this played well on the Arab street, Saddam went a step further and really got the crowds roaring by invoking the unsettled score with Israel, America’s main ally in the region. Not only would he repel the Western invaders, he boasted, but he would also unleash his famous Scud missiles on Tel Aviv. Many people in the West scoffed. If Israel had made short shrift of the entire Arab world’s armies in six days back in 1967, the American-led coalition would need less than six hours to finish off Saddam and his myth of Arab power.

  On January 17, 1991, the telephone woke me in the middle of a dream. It was my exiled friend Jibril Rajoub calling from Tunis. “It started,” he told me. American-led international forces had begun the attack against Iraq. On CNN that night I heard the euphoric Western media predicting a crushing victory within hours.

  Saddam had asked for it, of this I had no doubt. And yet I didn’t like the chauvinistic tones surrounding the lightning invasion and conquest. Was it necessary to portray the war as if the Israelis and the Americans were fighting the same foes? As if the war was not between the UN-sanctioned coalition and a dictator sitting in Baghdad but between “Western democracy” and “Arab tyranny”? And why present Saddam’s pathetic fight as yet another case of crushed Arab pride? For all these reasons I published an article against any efforts to use the invasion to “humiliate the Arab world and rub the Arabs’ nose in the dirt.”

  The next great Israeli PR opportunity came when Saddam began lobbing his Scuds at Israeli cities. For all too many in the Occupied Territories, the sight of rockets shrieking across the night sky on their way to Tel Aviv was a welcome change from television images of cruise and other “smart” missiles hitting Baghdad, or Israeli phantom jets zooming off to Lebanon. Journalists caught on film images of Palestinians dancing on their rooftops, cheering at the sight of the Scuds. As damage control, I explained the reaction to The Guardian in this way: “If Palestinians are happy when they see a missile going from east to west, it is because, figuratively speaking, they have seen missiles going from west to east for the last 40 years.” I could have cited W. H. Auden instead: “I and the public know / What all schoolchildren learn, / Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return.”

  Shamir made the most of it by inviting into his government the extreme right-wing Moledet Party, a group whose central platform called for the expulsion of all Arabs from Israel’s ancestral “Judea and Samaria.” It was as if in the United States the Republicans were to hand over a Cabinet post to the grand wizard of the KKK.

  Moderate Palestinians once again came under pressure, this time because the Israeli foreign minister published a document warning his government that one consequence of Arafat’s blunder was the strengthening of the internal Palestinian leadership “that will be less dependent on external PLO leadership and thus will take part in a diplomatic process.” To show the world that there was “no one to talk to,” Shamir promptly painted moderates with the same brush as Arafat. Hundreds were arrested. My friend from Abu Dis, the gentle-faced Abed al-Haleem, was given twenty-seven months.

  As a consequence of the Iraqi invasion, the Israelis imposed a forty-five-day curfew on all Palestinian areas, including Abu Dis. My home was not too far from Jewish areas, and since the Scud rockets were notoriously inaccurate and could carry chemical weapons, we felt as threatened with a gas attack as Israelis in West Jerusalem did. We followed Israeli government directives to seal all windows and doors, and nervously kept the masks on hand for whenever the sirens sounded. We stocked up on lots of videos and food, and huddled together, hoping for the best.

  With the curfew, we couldn’t leave our house, except during the occasional break to get groceries. This reduced my family’s human contact to one another, and sometimes to the bored soldiers patrolling the streets in front of our building. “Sari! Hey, Sari!” I recall the soldiers in a jeep calling up to me. “Come downstairs. We have some graffiti for you to clean up.”

  Our only other lifeline to the world was the radio, television, and most of all the telephone. At night, after a missile had flown over and the sirens had died down, all over the country everyone wanted to find out where it had landed and what damage it had done. Before Israeli TV could flash pictures of the site, people called to check on friends and loved ones. I always called Mother, relatives, friends, and acquaintances, in that order.

  One night, after a missile had passed, I heard a knock on the door. It was my landlord, a simple man from Abu Dis who peddled poultry in the village. “Did you see it?” he asked as he walked in.

  “See what?” I said, wondering about the source of his excitement.

  “The Scud that just flew over?”

  “See it? Are you crazy? I was hiding under the table with my family,” I admitted.

  His eyes grew perfectly round like those of a child watching a circus, or like mine must have looked when Father told me the story of the Night Journey. “From the middle of the dark evening sky it suddenly appeared. It approached with lightning speed. Then, just as it arrived over Jerusalem, it suddenly stopped.”

  “Stopped? In the middle of the sky?” I interrupted.

  “Yes, just above the Al-Aqsa mosque. The rocket froze in place, made a salute, took a bow, and then zeroed back on its target and zoomed downward to the
west. I saw it with my own eyes.”

  On another occasion, my poultry man insisted that I go out with him to the balcony. He wanted to show me something.

  “Don’t you want to see?” In the hushed voice of reverence he said that the face of Saddam Hussein was filling up the full moon. “Come out and see for yourself,” he implored.

  “No, I believe you,” I answered, wanting to get back to a movie on TV.

  During the day, the telephone was ringing off the hook. Journalists covering the Palestinian-Israeli scene were constantly hungry for news and analysis. I spent hour after hour talking to one journalist after the other, explaining why Palestinians felt as they did. I was also in constant touch with Jibril Rajoub in Tunis, who would later become a close friend and partner. Jibril wanted to be updated on what was happening and what the public mood was like.

  I was also in constant dialogue with Israeli peace activists, who were worried about the negative image Palestinians were getting in the Israeli press. They wanted us to issue a joint statement clearly denouncing Saddam’s Scud attacks and his rape of Kuwait. We decided to finalize the wording in person during the next lifting of the curfew.

  At the appointed time, a group of Peace Now leaders arrived by car, led by Janet Aviad—a peace warrior if ever there was one. Before the war started, Janet, an American Israeli and someone who smoked nearly as much as I, delivered an illuminating lecture in which she diagnosed the “Israeli macho” mentality as the main culprit preventing peace between our peoples. It didn’t take us long to agree on a text. As always, sensible people can easily arrive at a compromise once they are aware of the other’s basic concerns. We jointly condemned the use of violence and upheld the universal principles of peoples having the right to be free. Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait had to end, and Saddam had to withdraw forthwith. But we also insisted on the Palestinians’ liberty from the occupation.