Once Upon a Country

by Sari Nusseibeh

  Without mentioning Jefferson’s name, I alluded to his legacy during a conversation with Faisal’s lawyer Jawad Boulos. We were in my father’s law office sipping Turkish coffee when I told him I had accepted the position of head of Al-Quds. Jawad nearly fell over from shock. “What do you think you are doing?” he shouted. “You could do anything you want. You could be a minister in the government, or go back to Birzeit as a scholar. Why on earth would you want a job in a worthless institution where you can’t be either a statesman or a proper academic?” He was flabbergasted that I would waste my time with such small potatoes. Everyone on the payroll—professors, cleaning ladies—added up to fewer than 120 people. “And the students! Don’t forget what sort of people you’ve got up there!”

  The way I responded got a laugh out of him. I was dying to pull out the nickel from my pocket but didn’t dare because it would have convinced Jawad that I had finally gone over the deep end. “You’re wrong, Jawad,” I said simply. “Just watch. I can be both a scholar and a statesman.” I poured him more coffee. “Any objections?”

  I meant it, for I took the post only after a careful weighing of comparative advantages. I added up all the factors—the bungling PA, the student body, and Israel’s aggressive expansionism—and concluded that I’d be far more useful trying to revive a dying institution than fighting a losing bureaucratic battle within the PA.

  Then came the unstated political agenda behind my comment to Jawad, which was intimately related to my earlier strategy of forming a shadow government. To an astonishing degree, Al-Quds was a microcosm of the many ills besetting Palestinian society. It was poor, shoddily run, and seething with religious fanaticism. If an effective modern administration could turn Al-Quds around, on a national level such an administration could also dramatically improve the lives of the Palestinian masses, and eventually usher in political liberty. Al-Quds was my laboratory for my thesis about identity, liberty, and the will. The flipside of forging an identity and seizing liberty was to fight the forces aligned against the will. I vowed to prevent the Arab civilization I was raised to love from being squeezed out of my native city by Israeli actions, and there was no better way of doing this than building a fine university on a hill overlooking Jerusalem.

  By January 1995 I was installed at Al-Quds. “Have fun!” my mother told me with a wry grin when I started. At least Jacob and the Shin Bet would leave me alone—or so she hoped.

  The dream of an Arab university in Jerusalem goes back to the high-water mark of Arab nationalism. In 1922 the World Conference of Muslims responded to the Jewish dream for a Hebrew University in Jerusalem by proposing to create a competing Arab university, an effort tripped up by the British Mandatory Authority. In 1995 the Hebrew University had more than 20,000 students and 1,200 tenured faculty, while the Arab university existed more in name than in reality.

  By taking on this project I was following a family tradition started by my father. As Jordanian minister of education in the early fifties, he had managed to extract a governmental decision to establish such a university. King Hussein had other plans, and he shelved Father’s idea in favor of setting up Jordan’s first university in Amman. Father tried again after 1967. Palestinians thought about building a university in the city, and Father backed the plan in spite of annexation, or rather because of annexation. Arabs had to stand their ground. But his opinion lost out to the boycott-minded nationalists in the National Guidance Committee, who argued that the university would come under Israeli control.

  When Al-Quds finally got off the ground, it did so more as a legal technicality than by design. In the late seventies, four separate colleges began to spread out slowly from East Jerusalem to Ramallah, each one with different boards, academic heads, budgets, and purposes. One college was a squabbling Islamic theological institute; another a women’s college housed in a building in front of the Orient House. (It was originally established for the orphans of Dir Yassin in 1948.) A nursing college was established in Ramallah. The largest of the four colleges—and the seed for the institution I was to build—was the science and technology school set up in Abu Dis with the support of Kuwaitis atop one of Jerusalem’s hills near the old village center, about a fifteen-minute stroll from our apartment.

  The four colleges entered into a nominal alliance in the early eighties. Each had applied separately to the Arab Federation of Universities for accreditation but were asked to apply under a single name, as if a single institution. A nominal unity was thus forged. Over the next ten years a coordinating board chaired by the mufti of Jerusalem was established from the four colleges to create actual unity.

  Efforts at unifying the four colleges ran into the typical Middle Eastern sands of inertia. The coordinating board, later headed by my uncle, deriving respective powers from the four colleges it represented, controlled the entire operation.

  On my first day on the job I wandered around the Abu Dis campus and wondered if I knew what I was getting myself into. This plot of earth was no sylvan Virginia. In Jerusalem, geography plays havoc on weather patterns. By the time the winter clouds reach the campus they have already lost most of their moisture, hence the barrenness. From the crest of the hill, I looked out over the sprawling settlement of Maʾaleh Adumim. Directly to the east were the desiccated canyons, redoubts of ancient prophets, leading down to the Dead Sea. In front of me was the backside of the Mount of Olives, and the Dome of the Rock.

  I toured a few scattered buildings in the slapdash concrete style of the 1960s and ‘70s. The only ornaments I saw were the Hamas placards festooned to the few trees that managed to cling to life on the denuded, rocky hill.

  My first glimpse into the inner workings of the institution was just as disheartening. The office of president had no independent budget and little authority, and no clear mandate from the board, because the only vision shared by its members was that Al-Quds would somehow hobble along without embarrassing them too much. To make matters worse, at the same time I was appointed, functionaries in the Ministry of Higher Education were floating around plans to attach the four colleges to other institutions, and do away with a university in Jerusalem altogether—which would have been simple, since Al-Quds didn’t even exist on paper. As I now discovered, the school was a legal phantom, registered neither in the PA nor in Israel, and with no operational governing laws or bylaws.

  The biggest hurdle I faced was money. Al-Quds didn’t have a penny in its coffers. Tuition fees covered less than 30 percent of its running costs, with external subsidies to make up for the deficit. Two of its colleges were deep in debt.

  Another formidable obstacle was the visceral opposition I encountered from many of the people I now had to work with. As mentioned, two board members were Hamas sympathizers; others supported me with what can only be called extreme ambivalence. With all the controversies littering my past, they were ready to pull the plug at a moment’s notice.

  The university staff was far more solidly behind me. Most were aligned with Fatah. I also had a number of old friends on the faculty and involved with the union.

  The student body was another story. To quote Kant, it was a crooked piece of timber that I now had to straighten out. These students embodied the radical ideological break between my generation and that of the students. Bearded fanatics, energized by the spirit of Hamas, allowed for no intellectual freedom, and those who tried to introduce some found themselves under constant harassment. People were terrified to speak their minds freely. It was a daunting prospect to reform an institution dominated by a political-religious movement systematically throwing shackles on the mind.

  I traced the source of the disease to a tradition of learning that embodied everything wrong with Palestinian education. Some of these ills I’d seen for years at Birzeit, but never in such a concentrated fashion or without a strong counterforce.

  The four colleges operated more like technical schools, without a humanities program and hence without the freedom of ideas that tend to break up ossified thinki
ng. Rote learning was the norm at Al-Quds, a parrotlike repetition of facts closely aligned with social conformity. Students for the most part reproduced existing social norms, thus merely adding more conformists to a social system already resistant to change and criticism.

  I spent the first three months studying the institution and preparing a plan for its development. Administrative changes, a solid team of supporters, and budgetary strategies were the necessary steps for turning the place around.

  First and foremost, the loose federation of colleges had to give way to a strong single leadership with enough authority to streamline academic, administrative, and financial procedures; find new sources of funding; and introduce new programs. There had to be a single line of authority with a single strategy.

  Working together with my team, we came up with an elegant plan to achieve our two goals. The university would never get out of its financial hole as long as tuition covered only 30 percent of the operating budget. On paper, our calculations predicted that we could derive more than 80 percent of our running costs from tuition and new research, thus decreasing our reliance on unstable external assistance. To increase our relative income from tuition required increasing the number of students, which in turn meant offering more programs, and this required more faculty and staff. The goal of building a real university went hand in glove with creating a budget to finance it. In what seemed to skeptics like a variation on the Ponzi scheme or Reaganomics, we wanted to grow our way out of a chronic deficit.

  My uncle and his fellow board members were all scratching their heads when I tried to show them with graphs and numbers, extending several years into the future, how income and expenditure lines would eventually meet. They went along, I think, because it struck them as the work of a good-natured dreamer, a scheme by the local Don Quixote who should be humored but not taken too seriously.

  This mild tolerance for my plan began to turn into growing hostility the minute I shifted from blueprint to action. All the board members could see once I set to work was a frighteningly escalating debt they felt they would personally have to answer for, whether financially or legally.

  Faculty members also began having their doubts, and for perfectly understandable reasons. The hitch in my plan was the absence of any funds to cover the initial expenditures, especially in salaries. We had no other option but the hard one of tightening our belts. Salaried staff couldn’t quite come to terms with a policy that cut into their monthly checks (at one point we were five months in arrears) at the same time that I was hiring new faculty and employees left and right. The graphs and charts I was always ready to break out at faculty and union meetings were cold comfort. When staff balked, as they often did, I reminded the members of my team that the mind cannot listen to reason when the stomach is hungry.

  A balanced budget would mean nothing, however, without a vision of education. I vowed that under my watch, our primary and driving ambition would be to churn out critical minds. In one of the early policy statements my team and I put out, our task as we saw it was to promote logical humanistic thinking that enabled people to develop strategies to solve problems, both intellectual and political. It was to educate men and women for leadership, peace, and democratic values. This idea went back to my work at the union and the various committees: our liberation won’t come through the barrels of Kalashnikovs or from waving flags. It’ll have to come from ourselves. Nothing could be more inimical to the dictatorship of the dogmatists than this.

  From my operation up on the dusty hill, I followed political developments down below. Between 1995 and 2000, I adopted the stance of an engaged—sometimes bemused but mostly anguished—spectator. If I was rubbing my American nickel in one hand, I had my worry beads in the other.

  It was quite amazing to see how what once would have meant jail time—such as flying a flag or carrying a weapon, as Jibril and his people did—now became routine. There were flags galore, and suddenly plenty of guns. The PLO people who returned from exile included young leaders (the so-called “insiders”) such as Marwan and Jibril, who had been tossed out a few years earlier, but mostly aging revolutionaries who hadn’t seen the West Bank since 1967, some since 1948. These “outsiders” were a mixture of genuine idealists and revolutionaries, as well as a few malevolent thugs.

  The regime they set up confirmed all the fears I had had before I left for Washington. Politically, the center of gravity shifted suddenly from the intifada activists on the “inside” to returning PLO functionaries, and geographically from East Jerusalem to Gaza and the West Bank, where the “outsiders” now lived. Needless to say, the bulk of the ministers were “outsiders,” whereas their undersecretaries were, by and large, competent local people, many of whom had worked in the technical committees and hence had two years of preparatory work behind them. With elaborate studies and finely honed working papers in hand, they were ready to move quickly to build up competent ministries.

  Unfortunately, they faced the reality of working with the returning apparatchiks. The new ministers, dazzled by the trappings of power—the cars, the adulation—had little inclination to study reports or listen to local underlings. Ignoring the multiple volumes already on their desks, our potentates preferred commissioning new reports, which is after all what ministers do. One favorite pastime of many ministers was to gather around Arafat’s desk in Gaza, watching him conduct business and waiting to get their instructions directly from the Old Man. Some ministers, who behaved like demigods to the people under them, journeyed to Arafat to get his permission to hire an office secretary. No wonder that by far the most effective Palestinian institution was also the most independent: PECDAR, run by Abu Ala.

  Rounding out the Palestinian political scene I so assiduously steered clear of, the Fatah Higher Committee, which with the coming of the PA was no longer a secret organization, became a magnet for aspiring politicians. Just as Jibril and I had planned, it represented the local Fatah power base, and as such, the man who emerged as its driving force, Marwan, was initially, after Arafat, the second most popular politician in the country; soon he’d be number one. The committee grew from fifteen members to more than seventy. Those who had helped found it, such as Jibril, Dahlan, and Sameer, belonged to it, as did representatives from the various regions. Even Central Committee members jockeyed to join.

  Jibril and I continued to see eye to eye. (About Hamas and education, for instance, he said, “No one has a right to dictate their crazy vision to our children.”) Back in Palestine, Jibril appointed himself head of West Bank security. No one offered him the job: not Arafat, the Americans, or the Israelis. He just thought up the idea and realized it. He sought and recruited only local Fatah people, mostly former colleagues from his prison camp days. Over time he built up a force of five thousand men in arms. Dahlan created a parallel force in Gaza.

  Arafat went along but, never a man to put all his eggs in one basket, especially when it came to matters of physical power, he got American backing to set up other security forces, heavily composed of returning “outsiders.”

  Faisal wasn’t part of the government because Jerusalem was bracketed out until final negotiations. He focused on Jerusalem. The Orient House, once the headquarters of the local national leadership, acted as an unofficial East Jerusalem municipality. And Faisal had his hands full countering an outbreak of home demolitions, land confiscations, and the nefarious policy of stripping people of their residence permits.

  The most significant development I observed from my perch on the hill was the strangulation of Jerusalem. With our inexperienced administrators generally mismanaging the PA, our government was more or less incapable of figuring out and then countering the Israeli government’s very determined, sober-minded plans. Chomsky had been right: the Oslo Agreement did not slow down the Israelis; if anything, it speeded them up. The thing that stood out most nakedly was the violence. Extremists on both sides, some using bombs and others Caterpillar tractors, soon undermined all the hopes raised by the Clinton-Araf
at-Rabin handshake on the White House lawn.

  The settlements that Oslo had failed to address were growing faster than ever. The slow takeover of the Goldsmith’s Souk, to give an example close to home, continued apace. Meanwhile, Cousin Zaki riffled through crumbling four-hundred-year-old Ottoman records to prove our family’s ownership. He came across so many documents on the history of Jews in Jerusalem that he decided to write a book on the subject. One of his findings came to him as a revelation. According to some of the Geniza records unearthed in an old Cairo synagogue, Jews had in fact welcomed Caliph Omar’s entry into Jerusalem, because it brought an end to the centuries-old Byzantine ban on Jews entering the city.

  Ironically, just as Cousin Zaki was breathing in centuries-old dust to reconstruct the surprisingly harmonic relationship between Muslims and Jews in Jerusalem, the battle for the city was really only beginning. As we had feared during the Madrid negotiations, the Israelis moved quickly to create facts on the ground, changing the geographical and demographic realities to fit the Israeli slogan of Jerusalem as their “eternal and undivided capital.”

  I got my first hint of this soon after I began my work at the university, when a friend (from my “troubadour” days) told me about an experience he likened to Gregor Samsa’s in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. In Kafka’s novella Gregor wakes up one morning to find that he has been transformed overnight into a cockroach. In the case of my friend, already a cockroach according to General Eitan’s telling imagery, he woke up to find himself metamorphosed into an alien. My friend, like me from ancient Jerusalem stock, had lost his rights to live in his native city.

  It was actually the second time he had undergone an involuntary change in his legal status. He had been given an Israeli residence permit when Israel annexed East Jerusalem in 1967. Like him and everyone else in East Jerusalem—my father, my mother, me—it was as if he had “moved” to the city and been granted, out of the munificence of the administration, a green card. Of course, he hadn’t “moved” anywhere; it was Israel that had conquered his neighborhood. Regardless of how many strata of ancestors he had buried outside Suleiman the Magnificent’s walls, his presence in Jerusalem was thus transformed, in the blink of an eye or one quick movement of a bureaucrat’s pen, from a birthright anchored in tradition and common sense to a revocable privilege conferred upon a foreigner.