Once Upon a Country

by Sari Nusseibeh

  A few days later I was arrested. Lucy, who of the two of us is far better at putting two and two together, believes that it was my joint statement with Peace Now that led the Shin Bet to act (because the statement went counter to the image of people dancing on the rooftops at Scud attacks). The demonic image of the Palestinian had to be maintained, especially if by doing so it allowed Jacob and his friends in the Shin Bet to settle some old scores.

  I had imagined it a thousand times. You’re hunched over a secret manuscript when two policemen wearing helmets with sleek visors and black body armor crash their way through the front door and drag you out the back without saying a word, frog-marching you away. (Like Harry Tuttle in Brazil, a movie we watched over and over during the curfew.)

  My arrest was far more mundane. On the night of January 29, 1991, Lucy, the kids, and I were watching A Fish Called Wanda on television when, all at once, a rumbling sound came from outside. I put my head out the window and saw jeeps and a large contingent of soldiers spreading out in all directions. Judging by the firepower, you’d have thought they had cornered Saddam himself. Maybe they were looking for a military cell, I thought to myself before returning to the movie.

  Then came a knock on the door. Lucy opened it, and soldiers politely informed her that I was under arrest. “For what?” I called out, shoving the bowl of popcorn to the side and getting up from the sofa. The commanding officer, with a respectful tone, laconically informed me that he had his orders. He handed me a piece of paper signed by Defense Minister Moshe Arens stating that I was under “administrative detention” for six months, which meant I could be held for six months or longer without charges or a trial.

  There were no helmets, no black body armor, no screams, no coercion, no Brazil; on the contrary, the officer stood there quietly with a slightly apologetic look while I put my things together. Lucy made sure I packed a warm pair of pajamas and my toiletries. Absal and Buraq moved around uncomfortably, unsure what to do. There was a glint of tears in their eyes. Jamal dashed into his room and quickly reappeared with a copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, volume one. (It was only when I started reading it in my cell that I appreciated his discriminating choice.) As I was being led away with my hands pinioned behind me, I turned to my sons and asked them to look at this as just another one of my trips abroad.

  The drive to the Russian compound took twenty minutes. Upon our arrival, they unloaded me from the jeep and marched me in the front gate, booked me, took me into a wing for common criminals, and shut me up in one of the cells. But they left the door to my cell unlocked. Outside of it, the other prisoners, all Jewish, wandered around freely.

  A strange possibility flashed through my mind: with Israeli hysteria at Palestinians mounting because of the Scuds, had the guards left the door unlocked so the other inmates could finish me off? From the looks of my fellow prisoners, I wouldn’t have put it past them. They looked like assassins and drug addicts conjured up by some malevolent spirit to haunt the place. One man had a tattoo on his neck. Another was scar-faced.

  This was just another case of my spotty prophetic powers. Soon after, as I sat on the edge of the bed wondering what this all meant, I heard roars of laughter reverberating from down the hall. “Sari,” said the tattooed man in Hebrew. “Do you hear the radio? Listen, Bibi [Netanyahu] just said at the UN that you’re the head of the spy ring for Hussein.” I lost count of how many times Hamas people had called me a spy; this was the first time the Israeli government had—and in front of the entire United Nations!

  More guffaws came from the next room. With contempt in his voice, the tattooed man continued jokingly, “Listen to what these crazy sons-of-bitches are saying about you.”

  For the rest of the evening I was their guest. “What can we do for you?” they kept asking, as they brought me tea, soap, and cookies. The scene brought to mind the characters in Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, who don’t believe in the establishment because they know from experience how crooked it is. My feelings performed their usual somersaults. Who could have expected such decency inside an Israeli prison?

  As the night hours passed into dawn, my mind spun in dizzying circles around my predicament. I couldn’t figure out why they had arrested me. All I could come up with was that Shamir and his cronies in the security establishment believed that someone who still believes in peace should be put behind bars. Did they want to crush my morale? My sense of hope?

  Melancholy and wistful, I soon turned spiritual. A short passage from the Koran popped into my head:

  In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful.

  I swear, by the early light of dawn,

  And by the darkness of night as it pervades.

  Think not that Your Lord has forsaken you, nor has He withdrawn, for surely

  what will come next is better than what has gone before. Soon your Lord shall

  provide for you, and you will feel pleased.

  Did He not find you an orphan and give you shelter?

  And did He not find you lost and guide you?

  And did He not find you in want and free you?

  Therefore, as for the orphan, do not oppress (him).

  And as for him who asks, do not chide (him),

  And as for the favor of your Lord, do declare (it).

  More surprises were in store.

  The following day I was moved to a prison in Ramle, not far from Grandfather’s tomb. It was there I learned the details of the charges against me. They had detained me, said the government press release, “for subversive activities of collecting security information for Iraqi intelligence.” Government spokesmen announced that several members of an Iraqi spy ring had been caught, some of them Jerusalem residents. The implication was that I had been hauled in as part of a larger sweep. Roni Milo, the normally levelheaded minister of police, told Haʾaretz that I had “performed severe acts of treachery and collaboration with the enemy.”1

  The official order dictated that I be locked up for an initial period of six months, starting on January 31, 1991. It stated that I was “an enemy” and a danger to the “security of the state and the physical and spiritual well-being of its citizens.” The “spiritual” part was what really puzzled me.

  Right-wingers started howling for my immediate expulsion, and even some people on the left were giving the government the benefit of the doubt. My old Israeli comrade-in-arms Yossi Sarid, for whom I had resigned from the union at Birzeit, belonged to Israel’s Foreign Relations Defense Committee. He said he had seen convincing evidence that I was a secret agent. Even my coauthor on No Trumpets, No Drums, Mark Heller, for whom Israeli security sources were infallible, fell for the spy story. It seemed that my friend the chicken peddler was not the only person suffering from war delirium.

  Common criminals, philosophers, Middle East policy wonks, and fiction writers did a much better job of sniffing out governmental fabrications than left-wing politicians—at least in Israel—for the accusations against me brought derision and scorn from the people who maintained their common sense. Lucy was hard at work appealing to everyone for help. I communicated with the Israeli prosecutor’s office through my lawyer, Mr. Spaer—we spoke by phone—that I had no doubt I was being held due to my stance on peace with Israel, conditioned upon the recognition of the rights of the Palestinian nation. My ability to communicate with the world was limited, but plenty of people on the outside spoke out.

  Saeb Ereikat put out a statement on my behalf. “This [arrest] is a message to us Palestinian moderates,” he said. “Israel’s message is, ‘You can forget about negotiations after the war because we are going to make sure there is no one to talk to.’”

  A letter signed by Allen Ginsberg, Arthur Miller, Edward Said, and Susan Sontag and sent to The New York Times stated, “We are acutely dismayed by the continuing detention of the Palestinian intellectual and activist Sari Nusseibeh … We are concerned that the Israeli government is exploiting these difficult days of war against Iraq to c
rack down on precisely those figures whose moderation and opposition to violence will be essential to the conclusion of a just war and to secure peace between Israelis and Palestinians in the aftermath of this war.” In the London Times, another letter was published carrying the names of public figures and philosophers from Oxford, including Isaiah Berlin, H.L.A. Hart, and Peter Strawson. Amnesty International identified me as a “Prisoner of Conscience.” The U.S. State Department declared that I was someone “whom Israel should be talking to, not placing under arrest.” My favorite lines came from a staff writer for the Tel Aviv daily Haʾaretz. “For me it was a deep shock that this fuzzy-headed professor from Birzeit was accused of being a spy. If it wasn’t tragic, it would be comic!”2

  After three days in Ramle, I was driven back to court in Jerusalem, where the arrest order was to be confirmed. A group of supporters was waiting at the back entrance of the court building. In addition to seeing Lucy and my children in the crowd, I also spotted my friends from Harvard, Guy and Sarah Stroumsa.

  Inside the courthouse I was allowed to see Mr. Spaer for the first time. He looked deeply worried. Being a suspected rocket-spotter, guide, and spymaster for Saddam was altogether different from being a scribbler of leaflets. I felt that it was I who had to comfort him. “They have nothing on me,” I said to him, assuring him that we had a good case. “I know exactly what they will bring up, and I can tell you what happened.”

  As quickly as I could, I filled Mr. Spaer in on one of the nocturnal telephone calls I had gotten from Jibril Rajoub in Tunis. After an exchange of pleasantries, I explained, Jibril passed the telephone to an acquaintance who wanted to say hello. He was the Iraqi ambassador in Tunis. It was the only contact I had with an Iraqi during the war, and it was a rather banal conversation. I spoke to him as I might have to a newspaperman. I certainly didn’t direct rockets, or spot them. Taking cover with Lucy and the kids under the kitchen table, huddled with our gas masks, I didn’t even dare look at them. “The Israelis just don’t like my political views, and have turned me into an Iraqi spy in order to shut me up. I think we should challenge them in court,” I forged on. “Their charges are baseless.”

  Mr. Spaer left me for a few minutes to consult with the public prosecutor. Very soon, he returned. “If we challenge the arraignment,” he said matter-of-factly, “the prosecutor will bring up the old files, and press different charges related to your intifada activities. Given the confessions on you, he will ask for fifteen years. On the other hand, if we let matters be, he will drop the six-month detention period to three. Which will it be?”

  It was a bitter choice, and I began to waver. Visions of that iconic shot of Mandela with his hands shackled together, waving defiantly to the cheering crowd, flashed through my mind.

  But Mr. Spaer, a very practical man, talked some sense into me. “The public mood in Israel is absorbed by Iraq and the Scud attacks. Your plea on the witness stand for Palestinian freedom, and your talk about nonviolence, will be totally drowned out by the sound of exploding Scuds. Sari, take the three months.” It was sensible advice.

  And so the original administrative detention order was confirmed, only cut in half. The trip from Jerusalem back to Ramle prison gave me a taste of the personal journey I was about to begin.

  Prisoners call the vehicle that shuttles them around from prison to prison the “postal truck,” as if we were sacks of mail. In the truck I was joined by a group of teenagers; some weren’t yet thirteen. They had been arrested for demonstrating, throwing stones, writing graffiti, or clambering up poles to hoist Palestinian flags on electric lines. It was amazing to see their morale. They all sat huddled together in the “postal truck” laughing, telling jokes, and singing nationalist jingles. When I asked them if they were afraid of prison they assured me it was like going to a summer camp. “We will stay together.”

  The truth is that I rather enjoyed my time behind bars. From the point I agreed to head up the Birzeit union till then, I had been active in politics, with hardly a moment to myself. Prison was a three-month vacation from accursed politics.

  The prison was divided into two sections: one for inmates with blue cards, Arab residents of Jerusalem; and another for those with green cards, West Bank Arabs. (My friend Naser Al-Afandi from Abu Dis was in this section.) In our wing, there were five inmates from East Jerusalem, and twenty-four from Lebanon and Jordan—either Palestinians belonging to Fatah or Lebanese Shiites loyal to Hezbollah. The Jordanian and Lebanese inmates had mostly served their terms, and were waiting to be deported to their countries. Some of the Lebanese had been captured by the army as hostages to be used in prisoner exchanges. One prisoner from Jerusalem was an old friend of mine who in jail had swapped Marxism for Sufi mysticism.

  At first I was in solitary confinement, a glorious state to be in. The long hours alone left me with my thoughts. My first night I listened to the whistling noises of the train in the distance traveling through Ramle on its way to Jerusalem. What a paradox, I reflected, that Grandfather died in Ramle; his daughter moved to Jerusalem; a war divided up Palestine with Ramle on one side; another war rejoined the parts; and now a grandson he never met sits in prison close to his tomb for trying to divide up Palestine again into two states.

  The prison authorities soon assigned me to a cell with another prisoner. By the luck of the draw, the roommate was a Hamas man serving a long-term sentence.

  As prison routines go, ours was tolerably humane. The cell itself was minuscule: a bit over ten feet long and five feet wide. At one end was a shower directly above what is variously referred to as a French or Turkish toilet, which is a hole in the ground. A single wall separated the toilet from the narrow gap leading to the locked metal door, with its small iron-barred window. If I wanted to stretch my legs, I began at the bunk bed, took two steps, veered to one side with the third, and took my last step to the door. Then I retraced the four steps backward. Back and forth I went, over and over until I worked up a sweat. I must have looked like a madman, or a fly bouncing against a closed window, over and over and over.

  Once every twenty-four hours we got sixty minutes of exercise in the courtyard. For the first ten minutes we marched at high speed in twos or threes around the yard. This was inevitably followed by a game of soccer, normally Palestinians versus Lebanese. Being locked up in a cell for twenty-three hours a day, I longed for that daily forty-five minutes of soccer. It had taken me twenty-five years since dropping out of Rugby before I finally apprehended the natural affinity between thinking and kicking a ball around.

  The three months in Ramle prison afforded me a bird’s-eye view—or jailbird’s—of the elaborate cultural and political life of prisoners, a subject that had intrigued me for years. I had the uncanny feeling of being at home, like the boys in the “postal truck” heading off to “summer camp.” My fellow prisoners knew everything about my case—their extraordinary communication system was more detailed and accurate than any newspaper. They welcomed me as a member of their club, a mark of distinction far more valuable to me than my embossed Harvard diploma stashed somewhere in a box. Nearly every day I heard faceless shouts from behind the wire-mesh-covered windows overlooking the yard. Prisoners on the other side of the windows recognized me and called out their greetings. I could make out only their fingertips sticking out through the wire mesh, but some shouted out their names and then added, “Remember me? I took your class on al-Farabi.”

  My first day in the courtyard, as I was wandering around enjoying the sun, one of the prisoners from Lebanon approached me and gripped my hand with warm strength. He was a Fatah guerrilla caught offshore by the Israeli marines on his way to carry out a raid inside Israel. Like everyone else, he had heard about my case. He was in charge of interrogating incoming inmates. One of his jobs was to find out if prisoners had confessed to anything during interrogations, and if so, if there was someone on the outside in danger of arrest; another task was to ferret out Shin Bet plants—”birds” in prison jargon. He had spent almost ten
years in jail and was waiting for the Red Cross to return him to Lebanon. Because this could happen any day, he wanted to pass on to me as much insider information about my fellow prisoners as possible.

  In the course of our loop around the yard, he mentioned in passing that one of the inmates he had come across over the past few years was the Arab whom the Israelis had arrested for the killing of the German backpacker in front of the Lemon Tree. But this Arab had confessed to Fatah people in prison that he was a “bird” planted by the Israeli security agency, and that he hadn’t killed that German. That was just his cover story to be able to mingle with prisoners, and then to pass information on to the Israelis. “The man didn’t do it,” said the Fatah guerrilla. “The Israelis did.” My mind raced back to the Arabic-speaking girlfriend who must have been working for the Shin Bet.

  When not kicking around the soccer ball, I enjoyed chatting with the Shiite members of Hezbollah. They were all true believers deeply influenced by Iranian mullahs, of whose religious writings they had a small library. When I was tired of rereading Hitchhiker’s Guide, I read some of their holy books, and engaged my pious colleagues in theological discussions. Of the various Muslim sects, Shiites are typically the most philosophically inclined. They respected my freethinking ways enough to offer me a gift. After hearing that Lucy’s birthday was coming up, and knowing that she was English, two of the Hezbollah men carved out her name in Latin letters on a white domino piece, ornamented it with different colors, and then turned it into a pendant by nailing a hole in its top. They asked me to pass it on to her as a birthday present from them.

  My Hamas cell mate and I had a room on the top floor, which meant that we were living in relative luxury because the rats were usually downstairs, near the kitchens. But they sometimes made their way up to us. On one occasion a rat managed to invade our cell through a hole, and bit my pious cell mate on the nose. We plugged up the hole at once. Combating the bountiful fleas and cockroaches was more of a challenge.