Once Upon a Country

by Sari Nusseibeh

  Arafat wasn’t at all happy about this. Mistrustful as always, and inclined to interpret everything in terms of raw power, he suspected that PECDAR was really an insidious scheme to usurp him. A deeper reason for his instinctive reaction was patronage. If the money didn’t flow into his coffers, he would lose his ability to buy off possible challengers. He would not be able to continue his tried-and-true “management” style.

  I got a good taste of Arafat’s style of governance during the Madrid period. I was often in Tunis attending meetings of the PLO leadership, which often resembled rowdy boxing matches with fans howling from the bleachers. Members of one extremist faction or the other would scream at members of Fatah, hurling abuse at the peace process and issuing threats.

  Afterward, there would be the inevitable line of people waiting to see Arafat before returning to their respective countries. What surprised me was that many of the people standing in front of his office were the very blustering extremists who had declared themselves hell-bent on recovering every square inch of Greater Palestine, from Tel Aviv to Petah Tikva, and that even to contemplate a two-state solution was to sell one’s soul to the devil. Now these same people stood patiently outside the chairman’s door.

  When I asked Jibril what these people wanted with Arafat, he didn’t mince words. (He never does.) “You want to know what these scum want?” he said, full of scorn. “To put their paws out for money, that’s what the bastards are after.” Arafat juggled the forces aligned against him by paying them off. If he didn’t supply them with money, he feared someone else would. But Arafat had absolute contempt for them, and made sure they felt his disrespect. Jibril shared his contempt: “The shoe of a prisoner from the Occupied Territories,” he would say, “is worth more than the lot of these pretenders put together.”

  Now with PECDAR, and the international largesse under someone else’s control, how was he to keep his enemies in line? And if someone else controlled the money, would he be able to control the politics, too? Maybe a new juggler would emerge.

  After much haggling with the World Bank, Arafat managed to keep PECDAR close to his sphere of influence. Yousef el-Sayegh walked out of a meeting never to return when he found that PECDAR wasn’t going to be completely independent of Arafat’s interference.

  Now with el-Sayegh out of the picture, Arafat needed someone he could trust to run PECDAR—but who would also be acceptable to the World Bank. He thought I fit the bill and asked me to fly to Tunis to discuss a matter of “great national importance.”

  As he and I paced up and down the length of his office, Arafat explained to me the whole story of PECDAR and his worries. “These economists are saying that an economy has to be independent of politics. But how can it be? Politicians are the ones who control the economy. And if the professional economists control the purse strings, they’re just politicians in disguise.” We continued pacing, and I let him ramble on. “But what exactly are they hiding, these economists?” he muttered as if talking to himself. “Who is behind them? Who’s pulling the strings?”

  Arafat finally sat at his desk and stated that he wanted to level with me. “I trust you, Sari.” He explained that Abu Ala would be the director of PECDAR. But Ala was still in Tunis, and PECDAR had to be set up in the Occupied Territories. It still wasn’t clear when the PLO leadership would be able to return to Palestine, so in the meantime, Arafat needed someone to manage the billions pledged by donors. I was to be his man. He told me that he had no one else he could absolutely trust in that position.

  I wasn’t about to get drawn into Arafat’s government, not with a year of freedom in America on my mind. I politely apologized and said that I couldn’t accept the honor. The family matters still required my full attention. After much discussion, Arafat agreed that we could go to the States, but I would attend PECDAR’s board meetings in Washington until I got back.

  • • •

  I was exhilarated to be in Washington. For a decade I had been looking over my shoulder, slipping in and out of taxis to get away from Jacob and his men, fearing for my family, and worrying about Palestinian extremists. In America, I put my worry beads away and enjoyed knowing that no one was lurking in the shadows. It was liberating to be an anonymous nobody. Just a face. A fellow at an institute. A customer at a restaurant with some money in the bank for the first time in years.

  Instead of my father’s old law office in teeming, exhaust-filled East Jerusalem, my office in the Smithsonian looked out on gardens. On lunch breaks I visited ancient dinosaurs and stared up at the Wright Brothers’ airplane.

  Monticello was only a day trip. Lucy and I took the kids there to retrace our steps twenty years earlier—and to reconnect with the history of American democracy. With Clinton in power, America felt even stronger, more vibrant, and more tolerant than in the early 1970s.

  I also had time to think. I was watching American football on television when it occurred to me how much Palestinian politics resembled the gridiron. It’s thankless work to be a linebacker, and the guy with the ball also gets the most bruises. Best of all is to be the coach, and if you can’t have his job, the next best thing is to be a TV commentator.

  I thought I had laid PECDAR to rest but Arafat didn’t give up. Days after I’d settled into my new life in America, he called me. After some small talk, he said he needed me to attend a meeting of PECDAR’s board in Tunis.

  I bought a round-trip ticket and went to the meeting. Once in Tunis, however, Arafat’s game became more and more obvious. The meeting ended, and I wanted to go home, but he insisted I join him and his delegation for an important gathering in Oslo.

  With Arafat, I always did what I wanted without giving him the impression that I was siding against him. (As the Islamic sage al-Farabi taught, sometimes it’s best to keep a leader in the dark about your true intentions.) In this case, weaseling out of the meeting in Oslo didn’t seem like a good idea. I boarded the private jet with him, and off we went. It was only after we were airborne that I found out we would be staying at the royal palace and that the meeting was in fact a state dinner hosted by King Harald V.

  That night at the royal dinner I was on my best behavior. I wore a suit and tie, I combed my hair as best I could, and my mismatched socks were at least the same color. During the meal I managed to keep all the peas on my fork as I puzzled over Arafat’s strategy. His assumption, I concluded, was that I would be so sucked in by the splendor of royalty in a fairy-tale castle that I would take over PECDAR if only for the occasional perks.

  It was during dessert that I decided that by going to Oslo I had done my duty. I was now at liberty to do what I wanted, which was to get out of town. Later, after I retired to my gilded room, I picked up the phone and worked out a route back to Washington via Stockholm. I then ordered a taxi to pick me up in front of the palace at 5:00 a.m. The next morning, as Arafat slept, I absconded.

  I was back in Washington less than twenty-four hours when the inevitable phone call came. “You took off,” said the chairman. And then, he tossed in something I didn’t need to be reminded of: “You are not like your father. He would never have done that! Never.”

  The next time I heard from Arafat, I was still in America, and it came as an indirect message from his wife, Suha. Arafat was in Tunis readying his return to Gaza and trying to cobble together his first government. Suha rang me to let me know that her husband dearly wanted me to be a part. It was tough going for him because a lot of people were balking at the whole deal, worried about how the Palestinian people were going to accept a government of such limited autonomy. Arafat’s choice of messenger was significant. He may have thought that Suha, a person I got along with quite well, would do a better job at winning me over.

  What I came up with was deferential but also noncommittal. If his offer, I asked her to pass on, was being made as a gesture of confidence in and appreciation for my past work, then she was to let him know that from the bottom of my heart I was grateful for his confidence in me—but I’d still
prefer to stay put. If, on the other hand, he needed me because no one else was stepping forward, then he could count on me.

  As it turned out, within days Arafat had more potential ministers than he could use. The date for his return to Gaza was set, and he entered “liberated” Palestine as a hero and liberator. I watched the tickertape and firing guns from my apartment in suburban Maryland.

  Just as I had planned, I reduced my political activities to the bare minimum. I attended the odd meeting in Washington with PECDAR delegates whenever they came, but, otherwise, I relished the freedom from public responsibility. I pushed a baby carriage with wide-eyed Nuzha around the wonderful park that began at the end of the street where we lived. When it snowed, Absal and Buraq took turns taking Nuzha down the hillside on a sled. In Washington, walking toward the Smithsonian along Independence Park, I often stopped dead in my tracks and marveled at my sheer happiness at being in America and doing what I was doing. I felt the stirrings once again of Thaumazein, the sense of wonder at life itself. Who could ask for more?

  To follow the news back home I read The Washington Post—and as rarely as I could. The biggest news was a mixture of ancient Greek tragedy and modern action movie. The Greek playwright couldn’t have picked a better spot for it: on ancient, hallowed ground replete with mythic associations. Nor could a Hollywood director have selected better means: an Uzi in the hands of a Brooklyn-born pediatrician.

  In February 1994, Baruch Goldstein, living in the settlement of Kiryat Arba, outside Hebron, emptied his Galil automatic assault rifle into a crowd of worshippers, dispatching twenty-nine Muslims during Friday prayers in the Cave of the Patriarchs, a Hebron site holy to both Muslims and Jews. In the riots that ensued, nineteen more died and hundreds were wounded. It was the bloodiest single day since occupation began in 1967.

  The main cleric at the mosque in Hebron lashed out at the Oslo Agreement. “Our brothers are being massacred and our leaders are either asleep or negotiating with the Israelis.”1 Pictures of Arafat were burned throughout the West Bank. The local Hebronites greeted Faisal with stones when he tried to go to the scene. And in what was an evil portent for the future, Rabin, who personally loathed the settlers, decided to punish their victims. He slapped a curfew on the entire city of Hebron. His motive was probably blameless; he wanted to prevent reprisals. But by protecting the settlers instead of the Palestinians, he only emboldened the sworn enemies of the Oslo process and of his own government.

  To make matters worse, Rabin pandered to the settlers by pumping billions of shekels into settlement defense and infrastructure. In all fairness, there are always people to buy off in Israel’s fragmented parliamentary democracy, yet by building more settlements, Rabin was feeding the problem he needed to contain. A basic flaw in the Oslo Agreement began to surface. Since DOP, already being lampooned as DUPED, placed no obligatory freeze on settlement activity, Rabin had no compelling reason to confront his fanatics; it was more expedient to confiscate Palestinian land in order to build a bypass road for them.

  The ancient Middle Eastern Moloch was slowly rousing from its slumber. In the wake of the Goldstein massacre, an Islamic student drove a car packed with three hundred pounds of TNT into a bus in the Israeli city of Afula, killing eight and wounding over fifty.

  I had been in America for six months—I was working on a book in Arabic on the concept of freedom, at the Woodrow Wilson Institute—when a delegation from Al-Quds University in Jerusalem passed through Washington. One member of the delegation was Imad, who represented the Fatah employees’ union at the university. Before 1948, Imad’s family was one of the largest landowners in Palestine. His grandfather was a prince who owned five thousand acres of orchard land north of what is now Tel Aviv. In 1948, the Israelis showed up and sent the prince and his family packing. The land turned into a closed military area, and the forty-room mansion became a munitions factory. In the intifada days, Imad used to drop by my house with his colleagues for advice, where he impressed me with his intelligence and wily political instincts. He kept up his contact with me when I was working at the Orient House on the technical committees.

  The delegation was now trying its hand at fund-raising for the poverty-stricken “university.” I place “university” in quotes because the school was in fact a disconnected confederation of four separate colleges—a jumble of buildings, and a student body swarming with Hamas supporters. As for its “administration,” it had a coordinating council drawn from the boards of the four colleges. The original head of the coordinating body was the mufti of Jerusalem, my father’s friend, and the one who married Lucy and me. After he died, my father’s youngest brother, a businessman, replaced him. The school’s first president had just been appointed. He was Faisal’s cousin Hatem, who had until recently been living in exile in the United States.

  That was the extent of my knowledge about Al-Quds when Imad and his friends showed up at my door. After chatting for half an hour, Imad told me about the sour mood back home, but that he hoped that something could still be done, especially at the university. When I asked him what he was talking about, he looked to his colleagues, who all nodded at him. Imad told me evasively that big changes were afoot at the university. A couple of weeks earlier I had been to Monticello, and Jefferson’s academical academy flashed through my mind. I had to laugh at myself for making such a far-fetched connection. Imad then explained that Hatem had been diagnosed with cancer and would not stay at the job more than a couple of months.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  The Disappearance

  I RETURNED FROM WASHINGTON in the summer of 1994, not long after Arafat and Rabin signed the Gaza-Jericho Accord in Cairo, and he and his fellow exiles began moving into the Occupied Territories.

  On the way back, Lucy, the kids, and I stopped off for a few days in Cyprus. I must have had a premonition of what I was going back to because, sitting in a rental car in front of a pharmacy waiting for Lucy, I thought up the plot to a spy novel. I’d always liked the genre: the flash of the stiletto by moonlight, the smudged lipstick on the cup, the dusting of fingerprints. Thinking up plots—rather than being a victim of one—is even better than worry beads for fending off fear.

  A thought came to me. What would happen if I just vanished into thin air? I imaged kidnappers sneaking up behind the car, thrusting their guns through the open window, and leading me off. By the time Lucy returned from the shop she would find only a smoking cigarette in the ashtray.

  Later in the hotel room I sketched out the elements of the story. My working title was The Disappearance. My main character is Samir Kanaan, whose father is a Palestinian Muslim and his mother a Jew. Samir studied Semitic languages at the American University of Beirut, where the PLO recruited him to work for one of its security agencies. Just before the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, he is sent back to the Occupied Territories to set up a network of resistance cells. Years later, during the intifada, he is randomly arrested by the Israelis and put in jail where he spends several years. With the coming of Oslo, he is released from prison.

  With so many years behind bars, all Samir wants to do is to continue his studies. No politics, no espionage, no cloak-and-dagger adventures, no skullduggery. It is at this point that Jibril approaches him and tells him about his suspicion that an unholy conspiracy has been cooked up by Palestinian radicals and rogue forces within the Israeli security apparatus to wreck the peace process by unleashing a series of suicide bomb attacks against Israeli civilians. Desperate to trip up these plans, Jibril turns to Samir as the only one he can trust. The two shared a prison cell years earlier, and Jibril knows that Samir, a scholar and intellectual, has no political ambitions. The two devise a plan to scuttle the plot. Before they could execute it, however, the Israelis kidnap Samir while sitting in a rental car in front of a drugstore on the island of Cyprus.

  The unwritten novel comes to mind because “disappearance” is also an accurate description of my public life between 1994 and 2000. I wasn’t kidnapped, though
according to some of my old activist friends, I might just as well have been. Leaving the active political fray was for me like slipping away from my parents’ salon during their heated debates over the Suez War or the Cuban missile crisis. As a child I went into my room to play with sticks, and now, in my midforties, I was doing what I had been dreaming about since my first trip to the Shenandoah Valley: creating a university.

  When I first arrived back in Jerusalem I initially thought I would run a research organization out of my father’s old office on Salaheddin Street. But no sooner had I returned than Imad paid me another visit. Hatem, the president of Al-Quds, had in the meantime passed away, leaving the institution, such as it was, rudderless. Imad repeated all the arguments he had used in Washington to convince me to take up the post.

  Many of my friends from earlier days managed to persuade the university’s board to consider me for the job. My uncle was now head of the board, and when he brought it up for a vote, only two members, both pro-Hamas, voted against me. I was offered the job.

  I knew that it would take a Herculean effort, along with a lot of luck, to turn the place around, and I also knew the Hamas students, at 90 percent of the student body, would resist me at every turn. On the plus side, I relished the challenge. Had it been a straightforward administrative job, I wouldn’t have taken it. But it also afforded me the opportunity to participate in our state-building efforts without being involved in politics. Memories of wandering around Jefferson’s academical village once again came to mind. Could academic reform be a form of political activism? It may sound superstitious, but the American nickel, with its image of Monticello, had over the years become for me a talisman I liked to keep around, sometimes in my desk drawer, sometimes in my pocket. I started rubbing it more than ever now.