Once Upon a Country

by Sari Nusseibeh

  Sitting on my cot for twenty-three hours a day, I found it hard to assess what was really going on. In terms of substance, were the Americans offering anything new? I began to suspect not, after Lucy came by for her weekly visit. She told me that Faisal had called her for linguistic help following his second meeting with Baker. “What is the difference,” he wanted to know, “between self-government and autonomy?” As a born and bred Englishwoman with a fine appreciation for the nuances of words, and a classicist with mastery of Greek and Latin, Lucy assured him that the only difference between them lay in their linguistic origins: autonomy is Greek, self-government Latin. Otherwise, they mean the same thing: self-rule. The Americans were playing semantics.

  At the beginning of April, I got out of prison, but before I could even unpack my bags, the Israeli security people called me to the Russian compound again. “Don’t think that you’re off the hook,” they warned me darkly, with Jacob pointing his index finger at me. “You still have to consider the options of jail or exile.” Meanwhile, a far-right faction of the Israeli coalition representing the settlers threatened to drag down the government if I weren’t put on trial. Geula Cohen, the faction’s leader, accused the government of turning a blind eye to the evildoers Faisal and me. By not putting us on trial, she concluded cogently, the government was already in effect negotiating with the PLO. (Geula Cohen is a former member of the Stern Gang and the mother of Tzahi Hanegbi, the thug who had once attacked Arab Hebrew University students with chains. Father had Cohen’s autobiography around the house: Woman of Violence: Memoirs of a Young Terrorist, 1943–1948.)

  But Faisal and I had nothing to worry about, at least not from the Israelis, because the entire political landscape was changing. Immediately out of prison, I rushed headlong back into politics.

  I’ve always been aware of the dangers of hiding behind words, and Lucy’s late-night chat with Faisal raised a red flag. More flags began to wave when some members of Faisal’s delegation dropped by the house to talk. After the customary greetings—every released Palestinian is fêted—we got down to business. One of my guests excitedly reported that they had actually gotten Baker to change his original proposal, with the new one now promising “self-government” instead of “autonomy.” Just as I had feared, the word government in self-government had created the impression that Baker was offering something new. This capacity for swallowing an illusion, or rather engaging in self-delusion, was to dog our diplomatic efforts for a long time to come. It still does.

  The suspicion that we were being bamboozled deepened. A couple of days later I visited Faisal at his home. When I walked in the house, Faisal was pacing the room. His wife stood aloof in the background, and Hanan Ashrawi sat on the couch, with her legs crossed holding in her hands a draft of what came to be known as Baker’s “Letter of Assurances.” Faisal asked Hanan to give me the letter. I scanned it over and stated rather abruptly, “Oh, I see; what they’re offering is autonomy.” Hanan, uncrossing and crossing her legs again, was visibly irked.

  “Why do you use the word autonomy?” She took a long drag from her cigarette.

  “Because that’s precisely what this letter boils down to,” I told her, and handed it back to her. “Look, if we’re smart, what do we have to lose? But at least we need to get things straight from the outset: this is autonomy.”

  The logic behind the upcoming Madrid Conference was that all sides in the conflict—Israel, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and us—would discuss their differences face to face and in a format jointly sponsored by the United States and the—gravely ill—Soviet Union. In effect, the Americans would run the show.

  Leading up to the convening of the Madrid Conference, Baker and the Palestinian team held several more talks. Faisal, Hanan, and Saeb were the main Palestinian players. Through Akram Haniyyah they were in constant contact with Arafat. Having missed out on the first talks, I was a latecomer. I attended two talks in Jerusalem and a third in Washington, and that one only by chance. (I happened to be there promoting No Trumpets, No Drums.) In all three I detected the magical power of self-delusion furiously at work. In key areas, the Israelis got away with offering far less than during our talks with Amirav.

  In Jerusalem, Shamir won one important concession after the next by giving the impression that he had agreed to the peace talks only under extreme compulsion. One red line he could not cross, he told the Americans with his legendary histrionics, was talking to anyone from the PLO. The official Israeli position insisted on bilateral talks with a Jordanian delegation that would include—but only as a sub-component—a Palestinian delegation. Naturally Shamir, the same man who had conspired to blow up the King David Hotel in 1946, used the “terrorism” canard to sell his clever negotiation tactic. Sidelining the PLO from the outset also pushed full Palestinian sovereignty, which was what the PLO symbolized, into the margins.

  Shamir got his way—again despite the fact that he had shown that he was more than willing to talk to the PLO in 1987—because the Americans and the Palestinians thought he really meant what he said. Arafat and his people in Tunis, wanting legitimization for Palestinians from the Americans even at the price of PLO exclusion, went along.

  By the time I sat in on my first meeting with Secretary Baker and his two senior advisers, Dennis Ross and Daniel Kurtzer, the idea of a joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation had already been ironed out, and all that remained was to determine who would belong to it. When we showed up at the consulate, Baker expected Faisal to hand him a list of names. But there was some unfinished business to clear away first.

  Baker’s Letter of Assurance contained loopholes large enough for the Israelis to drive cement trucks through. Literally. The letter made no clear reference to the cessation of all settlement activity. Worst of all, East Jerusalem wasn’t to be included in the autonomy plan.

  It couldn’t have been an accident that the Israelis wanted to bracket out the settlements and East Jerusalem. Of the two, the issue of East Jerusalem bothered me most. The fight over Jerusalem was existential, not because it is a magical city but because it was, and is, the center of our culture, national identity, and memory—things the Israelis had to extirpate if they were to have their way throughout what they called Judea and Samaria. As long as we held on to Jerusalem, I was certain we could resist them everywhere else.

  I had known all along that the Israeli plan was to destroy East Jerusalem by ridding it of the people and institutions that had defined it for 1,300 years. From 100,000 settlers in 1989, the number now stood at 137,000. In a few cases, as with the Goldsmith’s Souk, settlers had managed to move inside the walls of the Old City. Sharon, now the Israeli minister of housing, had set up a special committee to buy or otherwise acquire strategic properties in the Old City, and then transfer them to settlers. During the Greek Orthodox Easter in 1990, a group of 150 settlers took over St. John’s Hospice in the Christian Quarter. (They claimed it had once belonged to a Jewish merchant driven out during the riots in 1929.) If such a steep rise in settler activity had occurred during a time of conflict, I asked myself, what would happen if we called a truce without getting the Israelis to agree to a halt in settlement construction?

  In the course of our talks, Baker nearly floored me by his comments about settlements. The U.S. government would not stand for their continuing expansion, he informed us; in fact, President Bush was prepared to take a political risk by requesting Congress not to approve a pending ten-billion-dollar loan guarantee to Israel unless Israel pledged that none of the money would be used for settlement construction, and that no creative accounting would use the American money to free up funds elsewhere in the government budget for settlements. In the long history of American inaction against the single biggest obstacle to peace, this was a first.

  Baker showed far less flexibility, however, with regard to Jerusalem.

  The Letter of Assurance pledged that Arab Jerusalemites would be able to vote in the proposed Palestinian elections for the self-governing council. Beca
use much of the Palestinian leadership resided in Jerusalem, we suggested slipping in the expression “and be elected.” But the matter had already been settled in the back rooms, and Baker wouldn’t budge. I finally proposed substituting the word vote with participate. With imaginative ambiguity, I reasoned, we might be able to achieve something down the road. Baker liked the idea. Turning to Kurtzer, he asked him to see if the Israelis could live with it. We parted on the understanding that during the next meeting Faisal would hand over the list of names for the joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation.

  That evening, we went to Hanan’s house to discuss what to do next. I was confident, buoyed in part by Baker’s earnestness and what he had said about settlements. The American engagement was serious, I told my colleagues, and it seemed to me that the thorny issues of settlements and Jerusalem had been settled. As it turned out, I was only half right.

  Two days later we were back at the American consulate, this time the one in East Jerusalem. Faisal brought along various public figures, and before handing over the list of names to Baker, he read out a list of the sundry daily ordeals Palestinians faced: the checkpoints, the constant searches, the house demolitions, and so on. Faisal wanted American help in improving people’s lives, and quickly. I kept silent, but the longer the conversation drifted away from elections in Jerusalem, the more nervous I got.

  I finally passed Faisal a note to remind him to bring up the elections. He took the note, glanced down at it, and slipped it under the files he had on his lap, but he didn’t bring up elections.

  Molly Williamson, then the U.S. consul general in Jerusalem and a very sharp observer, saw me give the note to Faisal, and must have detected my agitation, because once the meeting ended, she pulled me aside.

  “What’s up?”

  I trusted Molly, and told her precisely what I had written in the note. “But that’s already been settled,” she stated, rather startled. “I thought you knew.” She explained what had happened. Kurtzer had indeed spoken to Shamir, who had put on another of his acts. “Out of the question!” he had snapped. I pictured his gnomelike face taking on a look of implacable resistance. He made it clear to the Americans that he and his government would never permit any ambiguity in the issue of elections. On his watch, no Arabs from East Jerusalem would be able to stand for a Palestinian election in the West Bank.

  The answer had been relayed back to Hanan in Ramallah the previous evening. She had told Faisal, and Faisal had told the PLO leadership in Tunis. All agreed to go along with Shamir’s condition. I felt a bout of nausea coming on.

  Shamir chalked up another victory before the peace talks began. With the Letter of Assurance excluding Arab East Jerusalemites from standing for election, he demanded something that logically followed: that no East Jerusalemite be allowed to serve on the Palestinian negotiation team, just as he wouldn’t tolerate any of the outside PLO leaders. When our side tried to fight this, Baker erupted with the charming but misplaced quip, “The souk never closes with you people!”1

  PLO leaders acquiesced, but this time they huddled together in Tunis and thought up a clever way to maneuver around Shamir. The peace delegation would indeed include only the names of non-Jerusalemites from the West Bank and Gaza. The delegation was to be headed by Dr. Haidar Abdul Shafi, a decent and respected man of great integrity from Gaza who was also the head of the Red Crescent, the Arab Red Cross.

  But behind the scenes a second group that the PLO leaders called a “team” came into existence that day. The ruse was that this “team,” composed of the negotiators as well as of Jerusalemites, would be a higher-order entity of which the delegation was a subset. It would include Dr. Shafi, but also representatives of various factions in the territories, along with Faisal, Hanan Ashrawi, and me. Faisal, who answered directly to Arafat by way of Akram Haniyyah, was to head this team.

  The peace conference was scheduled to open on October 30 in Madrid. In the days leading up to it, the Orient House was full of frenetic activity. There was the predictable rush of public figures trying to elbow their way into the delegation. A lawyer would show up and argue the merits of members of his profession being a part. In the national interest and for the good of all Palestinians, he would invite himself onto the team. Someone else would say that his geographic region wasn’t properly represented. How could his local people support the negotiations if they didn’t have their own representative—in other words, him?

  Faisal did his best to control all the jockeying, and on the appointed day, two blue Pullman buses pulled up in front of the National Hotel to drive the delegates to Amman, from where they would fly to Madrid. The sendoff from the National Hotel was festive. Reporters surrounded the buses and delegates, while muscular Fatah activists filled the streets to keep the delegates safe. Molly Williamson turned up to forestall any last-minute crisis.

  I waved goodbye to the delegates as they sped off down into the desert and back up to Amman. Faisal and Hanan were on the bus, leaving me as the only “team” member left in Jerusalem. I was about to head home when the Fatah activists who had been keeping an eye on the buses approached me and informed me that I needed “protection.”

  “Against what?” I probed.

  “You’re the only one left,” they reasoned. “This makes you a prime target for rejectionists who might wish to cause harm to the negotiation team.” I was like the voodoo doll Hamas could poke to torment the peacemakers in Madrid. Hamas had just formed Izzeddin al-Qassam Brigade, its military wing, named in honor of the 1930s cleric Sheikh Izzeddin Qassam.

  I tried my best to dissuade my protectors from following me home, but to no avail. And so I went, trailed by ten brawny activists sworn to my protection. They got the message that I really didn’t want bodyguards only when Lucy reacted to them. “How do you expect us to live with all these people around?” She was adamant enough that by the next morning my bodyguards had gotten the hint and left.

  Convened by Bush and Gorbachev, the Madrid Conference was heralded by the media as a historic breakthrough—as it was. Given the fact that we’d been at war for forty years, sitting down face to face was a major accomplishment, even if that was the only thing that was accomplished.

  It began on a sour note. Back in Israel, Shamir kept up his act by assuring his constituents that he was playing games in Madrid. The man he designated as head of the Israeli delegation, a savvy lawyer by the name of Eliakim Rubinstein, made some opening remarks that strengthened this impression. Rubinstein, a man with a high, raspy voice, fired his opening salvo by informing his Palestinian counterparts, “Palestine has been occupied territory ever since the Roman empire … We consider the Palestinians to be refugees who have stayed in our country since the time of the Jordanian occupation. We are ready to given them human rights, just not political rights.”2

  When Dr. Shafi’s turn to speak came, I recall the sensation of huddling around the television set with some activists, curious how he would respond to Rubinstein’s humbug. Denounced by the Israelis for decades as bloodthirsty killers, the Palestinian leadership was now in the world’s spotlight. Would Dr. Shafi throw a tantrum? No. This gentle physician from Gaza addressed the world, the Israelis, and us with a self-respecting composure that not only put Rubinstein to shame but also touched the hearts of the average Palestinian: “Ladies and gentlemen,” he began, and referred back to the glory days of Moorish Spain:

  We meet in Madrid, a city with the rich texture of history, to weave together the fabric that joins our past with the future, to reaffirm a wholeness of vision, which once brought about a rebirth of civilization and a world order based on harmony in diversity.

  Once again, Christian, Muslim, and Jew face the challenge of heralding a new era enshrined in global values of democracy, human rights, freedom, justice, and security. From Madrid we launch this quest for peace, a quest to place the sanctity of human life at the center of our world and to redirect our energies and resources from the pursuit of mutual destruction to the pursuit of j
oint prosperity, progress, and happiness.

  We needed to touch all the Palestinian hearts we could. The day the conference opened brought new troubles with Hamas. To protest the talks with the Israelis, Hamas called for a three-day protest strike throughout the territories, to show that the Palestinian public were against negotiation. I was beginning to have second thoughts about having sent my protectors away.

  I knew Fatah had to do something. What I came up with was an ad hoc pep rally in Ramallah. The idea was to show that the average Palestinian wanted peace, and hence supported our delegation in Madrid. We rented a hall, and I got Ahmad Hazzaʾ, a particularly popular Fatah activist who had just finished an eighteen-year prison sentence, to address the crowd. I, too, spoke out in support of the negotiations.

  The hall was so packed that the raucous crowd flowed out into the open yard leading up to it. Activists hung Palestinian flags on every available spot. Songs were sung and spirits were high—so high, in fact, that on the spur of the moment, Ahmad and I decided to lead the tumultuous swarm on a peaceful march to the center of Ramallah. Hundreds of people carried Palestinian flags and olive branches as a statement of our support for peace.

  As we came close to the main square in downtown Ramallah, armed Israeli soldiers, thinking we were up to no good, sped over in their jeeps to stop us. The olive branches we all carried, as in the closing scene of Macbeth, only made them more nervous. I was at the head of the demonstration, and as we got closer to the jeeps, and the possibility of a clash became real, a fellow demonstrator swiftly jerked me away from the showdown with the soldiers and whisked me into a side street. It was Hussein al-Sheikh, an eleven-year veteran of the Israeli prison camp. That day was the first time we met, and he later became one of my partners in turning our pro-peace rally in Ramallah into a nationwide campaign.