Once Upon a Country

by Sari Nusseibeh

  What really spooked everyone, including me, was yet another deadly puzzle. In early 1992, three mysterious murders struck close to home. The first victim, a lawyer from Gaza, was a key player in the political committees. Thousands of people gripped with shock and anger showed up for his funeral. We marched all the way from his home in Gaza City to the graveyard outside of town. No one knew who had done the killing, or who had ordered it. A close friend of the slain man, a respected Fatah veteran, gave the eulogy. I remember his speech well. “I shall not rest,” he pledged to the mourners, himself, and probably God, “until the murderers responsible for this heinous crime have been found and brought to justice.”

  Not only did the speaker fail to track down the killers, but they struck again. Within the space of two weeks, another murder was committed under similarly mysterious circumstances. The new victim was none other but the veteran Fatah man himself. His killing at least narrowed the field of possible killers. Hamas hadn’t had a hand in it, if for no other reason than the second victim’s son was a young and respected Hamas leader. So who was behind the assassinations?

  In the West Bank, unknown assassins also gunned down the Birzeit archaeologist Professor Glock. Glock’s family and most Palestinians were convinced that the Israelis were behind his killing. He had been working on a book documenting the four hundred villages cleansed of their inhabitants and then leveled by the Israelis in 1948. By tracing the origins of the Palestinian refugee problem, went their reasoning, Glock was coming up with evidence that would have greatly strengthened the Palestinian hand in talks related to the refugees and their property. And this was something the Israelis couldn’t tolerate.

  The Israelis claim that Arab hit men did it.

  Two years later, an investigator commissioned by the Glock family to find out who was behind the professor’s murder visited me in my office. He told me that in his inquiries he had discovered that police at Ben Gurion Airport, acting on a tip, had arrested an American Palestinian associated with Hamas. Interrogators found out that the man was linked to a terrorist cell run by Adel Awadallah, the notorious bomb maker and then Israel’s Public Enemy Number One.

  In the confession squeezed out by the interrogating officers, the man fingered Adel Awadallah as the one personally responsible for the murder of Professor Glock. There was more: The reason the private investigator came to my office was to deliver some unpleasant news. The man arrested at the airport told the police that Awadallah was under instructions to carry out another assassination, this time of the Palestinian people’s Enemy Number One, me. My death sentence, which for some reason he hadn’t yet carried out, was punishment for mobilizing the public for peace.

  The Washington talks were becoming an industry. The sixth round gave way to the seventh, the seventh to the eighth. The ninth round rolled around at the end of April. After fifteen months, the wearying process had yet to produce much. To be sure, good ideas were being tossed around, and sitting across a table was a lot better than throwing rocks and shooting. The central figure on the American side was Dennis Ross, a tall, broad-shouldered man with a boyish demeanor and eyeglasses the size of saucers. Despite his obvious support for Israel, he was a man oozing with eager goodwill for Palestinians. It was he who interceded at my request with the Israeli authorities to allow for the free movement and travel of Fatah’s negotiation supporters—all activists with previous records. He also gave the impression of a Boy Scout counselor with no experience of the snake charmers and flying knives of the Middle Eastern souk.

  The best efforts of the Americans notwithstanding, a pattern developed between the opposing sides that made progress incremental at best, and mainly a routine of one step forward, two steps back. The Palestinian side stood firm on wishing to get two matters clearly settled: a viable five-year interim period of autonomy that would have all the trappings of independence immediately transferred to them, and a clearly defined basis for the final-status negotiations—talks that were to center on borders, Jerusalem, settlements, and refugees—which would guarantee a full Israeli withdrawal from the territories occupied in 1967.

  The Israeli side tried to get away with the precise opposite. Their negotiators worked to whittle down the authority of the Palestinian autonomy as much as possible until it was a repackaged Village League, and to frame the final-status agreements in as vague terms as possible.

  Then there was the brinksmanship du jour: one side or the other would come out with a threat, and the other would huddle together with the Americans to find a solution, which was never more than a stopgap until the next crisis, such as when Rabin expelled 415 Islamic activists to a frozen Lebanese field following a Hamas terrorist attack.

  But just as the ninth round in Washington was getting off the ground, the fourth round of secret talks was under way in Oslo.

  Like everyone else who was not directly involved in the Oslo process, I didn’t have a clue what was happening there. I didn’t know that following the water conference in Switzerland, Hirschfeld had contacted both Abu Ala and Abu Mazen. Abu Ala then met Ron Pundak, a history research fellow, for a long weekend in Oslo, all organized by Terje Larsen, founder of the Norwegian Institute for Applied Science. Eventually, the two sides came up with a six-page Declaration of Principles.

  The closest I got to finding any of this out was a fortuitous chat I had with Abu Ala, who could have told me everything but chose not to. He and his fellow negotiators left everyone in the dark, even President Clinton.

  My chance meeting with Abu Ala took place in an airport VIP lounge—being a member of the “team” had bumped me up to business class—where I was awaiting a flight from Tunis to Paris. I saw him walk into the lounge in his typical unassuming style. He, too, he informed me, was catching the Paris flight, in order to meet one of his sons.

  Happy to see each other, we launched into a long discussion about the Washington talks. While deep in conversation, the VIP officers came to take us to our flight. The security car dropped us at the bottom of the stairs, wished us well, then spun around and drove off.

  The plane was empty. Assuming that the other passengers and crew would board soon, we carried on our conversation. An hour passed and still no one boarded. By now we sensed that something wasn’t right. We stepped out onto the boarding platform and, not seeing a soul, started waving down a passing service vehicle. Finally, the security people who had dropped us off turned up again. They had mistakenly put us on a plane scheduled to leave for Istanbul. Our Paris flight had taken off long before.

  For three hours, until the next Paris flight, and then on the plane, we talked about everything under the sun except Oslo. Abu Ala didn’t mention a word about it, nor did he confess that he wasn’t heading to Paris to meet his son but would be boarding another plane heading to Norway.

  But even without insider information, I had a strong hunch that a peace agreement was around the corner. Being a member of the “team,” director of the technical committees, and working closely with Abu Ala in the multilateral talks, I was in a good position to analyze the unfolding peace process. In Jerusalem, I was also privy to all sorts of unofficial contacts taking place between people involved in the process at one level or another. All evidence to the contrary—settlement construction was continuing at breakneck speed—my reading of the political map led me to believe that something was about to give. I just had no idea what.

  I was so certain that there was serious progress being made toward an Israeli-Palestinian agreement that the day before meeting Abu Ala in the airport I predicted to Marwan over dinner in a restaurant that an agreement would be in the bag by the end of that summer.

  This may have been less a matter of the “prophet of Birzeit” reading his tea leaves than wishful thinking, because the hint of such a dramatic development hit me like the promise of liberation, liberation from fear but also from politics and the stench of ambition among politicians. I didn’t want to wake up one sunny day and find out I had done nothing with my life but politi
cs.

  News of Oslo broke in the summer of 1993, a few weeks before I left for America. I was in Gaza attending a conference when I first heard, and I was so jubilant that I contacted my colleagues at the Orient House and asked them to prepare for a victory celebration. Marwan was convinced I had been in on the secret negotiations. How else could I have known that a breakthrough was imminent?

  I headed out from Gaza the next day and raced up the mountain toward Jerusalem to make it to the party on time. But just as I started plying my way up the last hill, my old beater died on me, something I’d grown wearily accustomed to. I still made it to the Orient House, just too late, and sweaty from standing on the side of the road flagging down a cab.

  The outside courtyard was packed with revelers. Flags were everywhere, the loudspeaker was blaring, and faces beamed with joy. The minute I walked in, a few young activists rushed over and hoisted me up on their shoulders. For the next hour I stared down from my perch at the singing throng with their nationalist songs, hardly believing that we had really done it. Peace. Liberation. No more politics! America! Monticello!

  None of us had yet read what the agreement was or knew any of its details. What we knew was what counted: a deal had been struck between the Israeli government and the PLO. Just as I had always predicted, reason had prevailed. This could only lead inexorably to an independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital. How could it not? No one at the Orient House that evening had the slightest doubt that our work had paid off. We had finally achieved our objective of peace.

  The later rancor, so bitterly poisonous, has to be seen in the light of this innocent joy. The suicide bombers plaguing Israeli cities, and Sharon’s twenty-foot wall with watchtowers slicing through our Palestinian lands were still a decade away.

  Everyone likes a good mystery story, and the Oslo Agreement had all the ingredients of a great yarn. There were the secret meetings in an icy, moonlit, far-off European city, where behind the backs of career politicians a couple of professors with their heads in the clouds, as people say, ended up making more progress than the negotiators had over a year and a half of official talks, with all the American pressure and cajoling and with all the Boy Scout skills of Dennis Ross. President Clinton gave the agreement his full backing, and the official signing ceremony was slated for September 13 on the White House lawn.

  We called our agreement the Declaration of Principles. An acronym shortened it to DOP. Once disillusionment set in, wisecrackers had a field day: DOPED, DUPED, and so on. On the eve of its signature, a letter as a preamble was exchanged between the two sides. The PLO agreed unequivocally to recognize Israel’s right to exist, and in return Israel finally acknowledged the PLO as the legitimate political representative of the Palestinians. This implied that the Palestinians would get their own PLO-led government in Palestine.

  The other points flowed from there. The two sides agreed on a timetable for creating a Palestinian Authority, first in embryo form in Gaza and Jericho and then eventually stretching throughout the West Bank. Simultaneously, the Israelis would withdraw their troops from major population centers. Elections would be held. The most contentious issues, such as Jerusalem, settlements, refugees, and borders, were kicked down the road, after some trust was established. These “permanent status” negotiations would begin after two years, with the whole thing wrapped up within five.

  Peres, then foreign minister, promised in a letter he gave to Arafat upon the signing of Oslo that Palestinian institutions in Jerusalem would not only not suffer during the interim period but would be allowed to develop and expand. In hindsight it is easy to trace all the failures of Oslo back to a badly worded clause or a fuzzy detail in DOP. In drafting the agreement, the Palestinians didn’t have any international contract lawyers with them, a fatal mistake when dealing with Israelis.

  What has proven most deleterious from the Palestinian point of view was that the major issues of borders, Jerusalem, and settlements were bracketed out as “final-status” issues to be hammered out within five years. By agreeing to DOP’s amorphous parameters, Palestinians also relinquished the very concrete hope of ever getting back the lands lost in 1948. Only the 27 percent of historic Palestine conquered by Israel in 1967 was on the table, and there was no guarantee that Israel would even agree to hand all of it back. We had to make do with “autonomy” over a few slivers of land, and hope that “final-status negotiations” would give us the rest. Meanwhile, DOP put no cap on settlement construction or on the creation of new Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem. In other words, the Israelis pocketed their gains in 1948, while our part fell under the category of “disputed” territories to be divvied up between the two sides, one vastly superior in military and diplomatic muscle. It was like negotiating a prenuptial by intentionally bracketing out marital fidelity. In other words, DOP was a perfect formula for disaster.

  But in August 1993 no one could have foretold how the agreement would play out, and there was an understandable sense of euphoria. Arafat couldn’t have been happier. Just two years earlier he had been the world’s number-two pariah, just after Saddam. All his funds had dried up and the red phone in his office barely rang. He was one of the world’s last surviving old revolutionaries, and the most forlorn. Now he was basking in the limelight.

  The average man on the street introduced elsewhere in this story was just as exhilarated as the revelers at the Orient House that evening. For him it meant that the long occupation was coming to an end. Arafat, a leader who in his mind embodied his own hopes, was being treated like a head of state, which meant that the state couldn’t be far behind. No more harassment by soldiers, no more road blocks, no more random arrests, no more land confiscation, no more settlements, no more settlers with their Uzis playing feudal masters. There would be jobs and open schools and hope for his children to live as the Israeli children did: in a free world full of opportunities, respected by the world and looked upon as an equal, not a handout case, not a dog.

  There was no lack of critics who didn’t share the average man’s innocent hope. The indefatigable Noam Chomsky tore DOP to shreds by predicting with unerring logic that, because there was no brake on settlements, Oslo meant the end of the two-state solution, the very thing the agreement was supposed to auger. The Palestinian negotiators at the bilateral talks in Washington felt betrayed because the deal had been done in secret and behind their backs. They had poured their lives into negotiations that they thought would lead to statehood, and a small knot of professors had beaten them to the goal. Saeb Ereikat put it this way: “We delegates were the appetizers. The PLO is the main course.” Faisal and most of the delegation were out of the country when the news broke, so they weren’t at the party. Faisal wouldn’t have shown up anyway. As it was, he disappeared from public view for a few days just to absorb the shock.

  Nearly to a man, the negotiators quickly put on a good face and lined up behind the Oslo Agreement. There were also Palestinians who remained critical even after the effect of the shock disappeared. Dr. Shafi refused to go to the signing at the White House because a termination of settlement construction wasn’t part of the package. He shared Chomsky’s suspicions. Abroad, the most prominent critic of Oslo was Palestine’s academic pride and showpiece, Edward Said.

  The most vociferous enemies of Oslo, such as Hamas and some splinter parties on the left, denounced the agreement with visceral pathos; they were against any agreement with Israel. At Birzeit, radical students on the left and Islamic right clashed with their peers from Fatah. “How could Chairman Arafat shake hands with Rabin, a man who shot us and imprisoned us!” The acrimonious debates ended in fistfights.

  In Israel, Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon led the chorus of dissenters, and the country was rocked by massive demonstrations. “We had Arafat by the throat,” they were saying. “He was bankrupt, discredited, at the end of the rope, and instead of finishing him off, you, Rabin, saved him!” After the famous handshake on the White House lawn, the d
emonization of Arafat took on eschatological qualities. He was Amalek, the enemy of Israel. I recall seeing the bumper stickers and road signs tied to trees and shrubs and hanging from cliffs, ISRAEL BʾSACANAII!—ISRAEL’S IN DANGER!

  I spent the last few weeks in Jerusalem preparing for my upcoming sabbatical, and for Jamal’s trip to England. Just as I was getting ready to leave, Jibril was preparing to return from exile. Already in Tunis, my partner in the Fatah Higher Committee was drawing up blueprints for a security force in liberated Palestinians areas. He preferred being in charge of security because he realized that it was where the real power lay.

  Arafat was making his own plans—high-flying designs for himself and the country he assumed he would soon lead. No longer a pariah, he relished the cameras and the black limousine that took him from the presidential guesthouse to the White House—and more than anything the prospects of vast streams of foreign aid. The international community, delighted that the once-intractable conflict would soon be solved, pledged billions to finance Arafat’s future Palestinian Authority, PA for short.

  There was just one hitch. The donors were more than willing to assist in the creation of a viable Palestinian government. What they weren’t about to do was hand the money directly over to Arafat and his cronies in the PLO. They pushed for the establishment of an independent and efficient development organization modeled on the fund created to rebuild Lebanon after its civil war. The World Bank, in deference to the donors, drew up statutes for the establishment of the Palestinian Economic Council for Development and Reconstruction (PECDAR). The World Bank asked the venerable Palestinian economist Yousef el-Sayegh to be at the helm.