Once Upon a Country

by Sari Nusseibeh

  In the appointment letter I sent to our nominees, I outlined three main questions I wanted them to ponder as they formed their committee: In a perfect world, how should their particular sector of our society work? What’s the Platonic ideal of, say, a finance department? The next question was meant to bring us all back to earth: How do things look now? What sort of human raw material are we working with? The last question bridged the first two: What are the steps needed for us to get to the first level from our present broken-down reality? By answering these questions, went the letter, we would be outlining a roadmap for our negotiation team. Negotiators would have an exact idea what to seek from the Israelis, and what to avoid.

  The coordinators set to work, and the support they received from the Palestinian professional and business community can only be described as fervent. Hundreds of professionals volunteered their time in the various committees, which over time produced volume after volume of material. More important, they developed valuable networks and relationships for the future. (Many of the ministers in the ensuing Palestinian government were coordinators or members of the various committees in the shadow government.)

  The main reason why hundreds of volunteers worked so tirelessly, and why I sat for two years without pay in a converted lavatory, was because we believed we were creating the state out of its institutions rather than the other way around.

  The emotions in play then are not easy to put into words. Euphoria doesn’t quite capture the mood I experienced each time I walked into the Orient House. Maybe you’d have to go back to Jefferson’s America to find such spirited activity among would-be state-builders. Until then, our technocrats had never been able to meet without drawing Israeli soldiers. When Faisal tried to work scientifically on questions of population statistics at the Arab Studies Society, ham-fisted authorities put a stop to it. Now, in a different climate, a committee gathered empirical statistical scientific data on demographics and income. Capturing knowledge about our emerging nation was for us like wiping away decades of powerlessness by showing ourselves what we were made of—that we, like other peoples, could govern ourselves. We were not “hewers of wood and carriers of water.” That was a message we were certain would seep out over time, from our studies and position papers and training courses, and enter into the psyches of both the Israeli and Palestinian population, and hence their leaders.

  We didn’t mind if our work was passed over by the press and politicians, or that the “man on the street” didn’t know what we were up to. The main show was in far-off Washington; it was there where people expected a dramatic breakthrough. None of this perturbed us in the slightest.

  A couple of brief examples of what came out of these committees show just how much flesh we were putting on “autonomy.”

  The Swedish government provided a grant to produce the first trial broadcast of an independent Palestinian television station. The economic committee, with its seventy-two members, worked with twenty-one experts from the World Bank to put together the first five-year plan for the Palestinian Territories in five volumes, called Investments in Peace.

  An even better example of our entire state-building exercise was the work of the education committee. Fathiyyah Nasru, a professor at Birzeit who had been one of Sameer’s first contacts at the start of the intifada, headed it up. Over months of work she and her 136 coworkers composed fourteen volumes covering every discipline in education. A separate booklet summarized the main strategies for our transformation of Palestinian elementary and secondary schools. (The fact that Fathiyyah’s booklet quotes Noah Webster on American revolutionary education says something about the kind of changes we were aiming at.) The main goal was to uproot the old system of passive, rote learning, which dulls rather than sharpens the creative mind.

  In a society in which tradition and religion can be used to cripple rather than release creative potential, the educational philosophy the committee came up with stressed the ways tradition must serve the present and the future, not enslave them. “As the learner acts upon her present condition she employs the heritage passed down by previous generations creatively and inseparably from her sense of future. Past, present and future are not seen in a sequential linear fashion … Here the human being—the learner—is bending tradition to address her own needs.”

  The pamphlet also contained a subtle warning, one might be tempted to call it a prophesy, to our future leaders: “Even if an authoritarian government were to exist, this government would not be recognized by the Palestinian people as a national government.”

  Madrid was just the icebreaker. The venue now shifted over to Washington, D.C., for the launching of a two-year process. In June 1992, the talks got a lift when Rabin defeated Shamir in the Israeli national elections. The Labor Party softened the Israeli position by permitting Faisal to head the Palestinian delegation. This brought direct negotiations between Israel and the PLO a major step closer.

  The talks were divided into two parts. There were bilateral talks between Israel and the Palestinians, with the main issue being a five-year interim self-government arrangement followed by final status talks. The other talks were multilateral and covered issues such as water resources, the environment, and economic development.

  Abu Ala—later the Palestinian prime minister—was in charge of the multilateral talks. An accountant by training and a member of the Fatah Central Committee, Abu Ala was a man with a practical bent of mind and a biting wit: a rare combination for a Middle Eastern politician. He drew heavily on our committees, and enlisted members of the committees on water, transport, settlements, refugees, and the environment to be delegates to the multilateral talks.

  I made it a point to keep the technical committees separate from the political committees Jibril and I had set up. Indeed, I saw the enterprise as consisting of two separate parts. One part had to do with the building up of a government structure, the other of a party structure. Our future state would need both, though in different ways.

  • • •

  There was no one who had a better idea of what I was up to than Yasir Arafat. He had an actively mistrustful mind, anyway, and he was now becoming uncomfortable that I was acting on my own without asking his permission. Things came to a head with Arafat when he began to suspect I was forming my own private army behind his back.

  Besides everything else we were doing in the technical committees, we had set up a security committee in anticipation of a future police force. Ex-guerrillas and prisoners needed professional training, so I raised some money to send them off to police academies in Cairo and Amman. Rumors about my hidden agenda for doing so reached Arafat from various sources. As I was to learn, while flying high over the Jordanian desert, my position was becoming tenuous, even dangerous.

  I was on my way to a general leadership meeting in Tunis chaired by Arafat. In the plane sitting next to me was the head of the Communist Party, Suleiman Najjab, a very affectionate and gregarious man with a sense of humor surprising for a man who had had so many close encounters with death.

  Suddenly, after telling me a joke, he took on a somber expression, leaned over to me as if he had something confidential to say, and whispered in my ear, “Arafat is very concerned about what you are doing, and people are filling his head with all sorts of nonsense. Apparently you decided on your own to send some people to do military training in Egypt and Jordan. He knows about it. And he has heard that you are trying to launch some private venture apart from the PLO. If you don’t want everything to blow up in your face, you’re going to have to convince him you’re not trying to usurp him.”

  This was lethal business.

  In Tunis I waited until the day’s business was done before approaching the Old Man. I walked into his office as he sat scribbling on the countless papers always on his desk. I had heard, I began, that he suspected I was trying to do something on the sly. “Let me say that if you don’t trust me, I’ll quit. My job is hard enough as it is. I’m doing it because I believe it is in our na
tional interest. I’ll continue doing it only if I have your trust. If not, tell me now.” I meant every word.

  Arafat respected people who spoke frankly as much as he despised sycophants. The fact that I was being honest and direct made him push aside the mistrust others had been drilling into him. “No, no, don’t worry,” he muttered curtly. “Don’t worry. I trust you. Keep up the good work.” He returned to his stack of documents.

  I didn’t feel fully reassured until I got a call from him the following morning. “I want you to come to the airport. You are to accompany me on a state visit to Vienna. And get yourself a real suit.”

  Arafat made me sit next to him at the official table in the ornate Baroque palace where the meeting was held. Introducing me to his hosts, he said, “This is Sari Nusseibeh, the chairman of our technical and advisory committees to the negotiations. You know, these are essential for our peace efforts.”

  The technical committees spun off countless ideas, papers, books, and paved a career path for dozens of future civil servants. There was also a hidden link between our shadow government in the Orient House and a peace agreement with Israel. Whether by accident or by fate, a casual conversation at a conference on Middle East water was one of the forces that led to the Oslo Agreement.

  The multilateral talks under Abu Ala’s direction made great strides, as experts from all sides developed good professional relationships and thought of practical ways of solving problems.

  The bilateral talks in Washington, by contrast, got no traction at all, nor could they have, given their parameters. By maintaining the public fiction that Israel would never sit down and talk with PLO “terrorists,” Shamir had only added a layer of complication in the negotiations. Everyone knew that Arafat was the only one who could close a deal. Shamir’s successor, Rabin, and Rabin’s foreign minister, Shimon Peres, were also well aware that Faisal wasn’t about to close a deal without Arafat’s approval.

  One day, I was sitting in my father’s former law office (the metal doors were no longer welded shut) when Jad Ishaq, a founding member of the technical committees and the coordinator of the water group, dropped by to tell me about a “fantastic opportunity.” The Swiss were organizing an international conference on water and had invited him to attend. The Israelis would also be there, which had led Bethlehem University, where Ishaq worked, to decline the invitation. Without hesitating, I told him he could bank on Fatah’s support.

  The fact that we and the Israelis would be participants in the conference aroused the predictable boycott instincts. A number of top PLO people made some blustering threats. But in the end they went along. Some of the most vociferous critics actually showed up for the conference.

  Something portentous occurred in Switzerland. Yair Hirschfeld, an Israeli professor of Middle Eastern history, pulled me aside and said he wanted to talk. Hirschfeld, a Vienna-born intellectual, had in fact been involved in countless meetings with us during the intifada. With a razorlike mind not given to fantasy, he locked onto a problem, asked the right questions, and if he was satisfied with your logic, acted without hesitation.

  Hirschfeld wanted my opinion on the glacial pace of the negotiations in Washington. I told him that the talks were fated to poke along, and in fact would go nowhere. Thinking about the Petah Tikva prisoner negotiations, I explained that only by directly involving the decision makers could a breakthrough be possible.

  “Who do you think are the key people on the Palestinian side who need to be involved?” he wanted to know. There were three people, I replied: Arafat, Abu Mazen, and Faisal. I knew of course that Arafat relied on Abu Mazen in the dialogue with Israelis. Abu Mazen always represented a sane understanding of our conflict with Israel. He and Abu Ala worked closely on the multilateral issues. I added Faisal because I also wanted someone on the inside to be involved.

  Little did I know that Hirschfeld was to continue his trip from Zurich to London to meet with Abu Ala in what later was described as the Oslo process.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Oslo

  IN THE SPRING OF 1992, Lucy gave birth to our daughter. She was delivered by the same old family friend who had helped with Absal’s and Buraq’s birth. I remember thinking, as she lay in the crib in the pediatric ward with her curious-looking eyes wide open and scanning the strange new world around her, that fate had given her a ravenous appetite for knowledge. We chose the name Nuzha for our new baby girl because it is Mother’s name. In classical Arabic it is also resonant of the purity of the desert.

  In the meantime, all our boys were now in high school at the Quaker-run American Friends School in Ramallah. The broad streets leading up to the school felt safer than the cramped lanes near the New Gate that Jacob and his Shin Bet friends had warned me of. In a year Jamal was to head off to Eton, safer still.

  There were some new developments in the legal imbroglio over the Goldsmith’s Souk. Cousin Zaki had managed to get the case before a judge. The proceedings were reminiscent of Kafka’s The Trial, because justice was never a part of the equation. The judge was a family member of one of the settlers, and threw the case out on a technicality. The yeshiva students then picked up the pace of the takeover.

  We all needed a break from Palestine. Sitting in prison, I had dreamt of going off somewhere with my family, writing a book or two, or just watching the birds, as I did as a boy with my pigeons. But then came Madrid, and month after month I worked to lay the groundwork for a future Palestinian democracy. I felt I had done my duty to my people, my own conscience, and the memory of my father. Now it was time for me to return to private life. My old hero al-Ghazali won his freedom by snubbing his nose at society’s expectations and going on a Wanderjahr. My mode of escape was to be with my family. After all the years of overwork and putting them into the line of fire, I dearly wanted to devote myself to them.

  “Out of sight, out of mind” went one of Father’s hackneyed sayings, which I now began chanting to myself like a mantra. If only I could disappear from view the way as a child I fled my parents’ salon! Sticking around in Jerusalem after the PLO establishes a government would only guarantee that I’d be willy-nilly drawn into its machinery. But if I were “out of sight” they’d find someone else, and I could return to Jerusalem after a year or so and glide smoothly back into private life.

  I began scouting for opportunities abroad. The Woodrow Wilson Institute in Washington, D.C., offered me a fellowship starting in the fall. Jamal was going to Eton anyway at that time, and the idea of strolling with Lucy and my other children through a fall forest blazing with colors asserted itself with such force that I snapped up the opportunity without a second thought.

  When I told my friends in the Fatah Higher Committee about my plans, no one could believe it. “Now?” they all exclaimed in unison. “How could you leave now?’“ I reminded them that from the start I had always said that I would leave politics the minute the conflict was over. They obviously thought I had been jesting. When I talk this way, most people just assume that, all my protestations to the contrary, politics runs thick in my veins. People in the technical committees were just as surprised.

  The scoop in the Israeli media was that plans were in the works to prevent me from leaving, not by the Shin Bet but by Fatah. Newspapers reported that I was about to be kidnapped by Fatah activists and somehow taken to Arafat, who wouldn’t hear of my leaving. The journalists may have made up the story, though there was a grain of truth to it. Arafat tried his best to persuade me to stay put. He sent a group of Fatah colleagues and friends to my house in Abu Dis, begging me not to leave the country. Arafat started to back off only when I told him I had serious family reasons for having to go to America. It wasn’t exactly a lie, but nor was it the truth.

  Another reason I needed a break was because I had found myself rubbing my blue worry beads more than ever. Despite the ongoing negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians in Washington, I was getting nervous. “I think people who say they are not afraid probably don’t think
,” I explained to an American reporter. “Thinking and fearing go together. The secret is not to stop fearing: it is to learn how to live with it.” I added with a hint of stoic resignation, “If it happens that someone comes up to you one day and shoots you, that’s it.”

  This may sound like overwrought angst at a time of blossoming peace, but, objectively, things were direr than ever. For the first time in history the Jews and Palestinian Arabs were sitting down face to face, and this was stirring all the demons of the past. Negotiations with the Israelis were a long, drawn-out process touching painful memories half a century old, mainly the expulsion of Palestinians from Israel. Disappointing people’s expectation of finally getting perfect justice for this outrage can be dangerous business. Within Palestinian society, violence and criminality had also set down deep roots, the internal social resistance to them having been broken down. Added to this came the depredations of trigger-happy settlers, whose numbers continued to mount.

  The Fatah people were more worried about my safety than I was; in their estimation, since our farewell party sending off the two busloads of delegates, the risks had substantially increased, or so they feared. I was the cofounder of the Fatah Higher Committee, and a steady stream of Israelis was passing through my lavatory office. I was organizing rallies in support of peace in Gaza and the West Bank, and was constantly meeting with fellow activists to discuss the peace process. I had become a prominent target, and Fatah sent a couple of comrades to shadow me from a distance.

  I only found out about this two weeks later when an exasperated friend and fellow member of the Fatah Higher Committee approached me. “What’s up with you? We assigned a couple of guys to you, but you’re impossible to follow. You’re always going in and out of taxis and buses, into shops, and back into a crowded street. These poor fellows can’t keep up with you.” As in a slapstick movie, my well-developed self-preservation instinct had led me to shake off the very people trying to keep me out of harm’s way.