Once Upon a Country

by Sari Nusseibeh

  With the establishment of Arafat’s PA and the territorial “autonomy” it brought, many Arabs who lived in East Jerusalem, but outside the municipal border as defined by the Israelis, were beginning to lose their residency rights. In my friend’s case, before he went to bed, he was a resident in his native city; upon waking up, he discovered that he was a tourist and could be expelled at any time.

  His fate, as well as the stories we were hearing from other people, got Lucy and me thinking. Now, just residing across the municipal border as defined by Israel could lose you your residence rights. In Abu Dis, only one wall of our home was within the Jerusalem municipal borders; the other three were in the West Bank. We slept in the West Bank and had breakfast in Jerusalem. Straddled as we were between the West Bank and Jerusalem, the Israelis could claim that we didn’t actually live in Jerusalem. This was another of my paranoid “prophesies” that several years later proved deplorably prescient.

  Lucy and I made the hard decision to move from our hillside view of the Dome of the Rock to the suburban neighborhood of Beit Hanina. What our new two-story house lacked in dramatic view it made up for in safety. The neighborhood was unambiguously within the Jerusalem municipal borders, which meant that the Israelis couldn’t strip us of our citizen rights in Jerusalem.

  The spread of settlements both precipitated and followed Palestinian terrorism. History began playing this lethal dialectical game before Rabin, Peres, and Arafat picked up their Nobel Peace Prize in December 1994. Peres was preaching his slogan of the “new Middle East” in October when Hamas blew up a Tel Aviv bus, killing twenty-two civilians. Rabin’s response—roadblocks and closures—strangled the local Gaza economy. Living standards dropped by a quarter, and unemployment shot up to nearly 60 percent. As the economy began tanking, so, too, did support for Oslo. Hamas, whose terror had triggered the economic downward spiral in the first place, benefited because of the network of social services it ran. The PA’s woefully ineffectual government had nothing comparable.

  In January 1995, a month after the Nobel ceremony, Rabin promised Arafat to halt new settlements and to confiscate Arab land only for roads. Three days later came another terrorist attack, and Israel suspended negotiations. Three days after that—less than a week after Rabin made his promise to Arafat—the Israeli cabinet approved building an additional 2,200 housing units in the West Bank.

  And so it went. That summer Hamas bombed two more Israeli buses, while the Rabin-Peres government adopted the “Greater Jerusalem” master plan, which included more construction on an outer ring of Israeli settlements extending deep into the West Bank.1

  Rabin made additional plans (recently taken out of cold storage by Prime Minister Sharon) to immortalize the Israeli grip on the West Bank by unilaterally drawing a permanent border between Jerusalem and the West Bank. The plan called for thousands of homes and an industrial and commercial zone between Maʾaleh Adumim and the northern neighborhoods of Jerusalem. The idea behind linking up Maʾaleh Adumim with Jerusalem was to split the West Bank in two chunks and turn Arab neighborhoods and villages of Jerusalem into isolated islands.

  I saw all this happen in Beit Hanina, our new neighborhood. Over the years since the Six-Day War, the Jerusalem municipality had confiscated much of the agricultural land in Beit Hanina using the customary white-collar chicanery of zoning it “open” land, thus preventing people from building on it or using it. Now the Israelis had declared the land “derelict and/or abandoned,” and confiscated it using an old Ottoman-era law that deems such land property of the state. One morning on the way to work I saw earthmoving equipment, which would expand the Jewish settlement of Pisgat Zeʾev.

  No one in Israel was listening to Palestinian protests because Hamas terror was creating a frenzied atmosphere in Israel that people likened to civil war. Tens of thousands of anti-Oslo protesters crowded the squares in Jerusalem. Neither Rabin’s legacy as the “bone-breaker” nor the dizzying sums he spent on settlement “security” and expansion lessened their loathing for him and his peace plan. Palestinian terror and Israeli hostility to Oslo went hand in hand. The conspiracy at the heart of my spy thriller was looking terrifyingly on the mark. In one demonstration, headed by Sharon at Zion Square, in downtown West Jerusalem, protesters held up signs of Rabin dressed up as an SS officer. Sharon denounced the Oslo Agreement as an act of treason.

  In November, one of Rabin’s Jewish opponents murdered him. The setting was as well choreographed as the Hebron massacre: in front of more than a hundred thousand people at a peace rally in Tel Aviv. I recall watching the images on television. Rabin was onstage while the crowd sang a Hebrew peace song of searing beauty. Television images showed him at first mumbling the words awkwardly, then gradually more forcibly, until Rabin sang with a determined pitch. Yigal Amir, with his government-issue pistol, waited until he left the stage before gunning him down.

  I was reminded of the reasons for my “disappearance” recently while reading The Missing Peace, Dennis Ross’s eight-hundred-page history of the Oslo peace process. The book’s broad sweep and the author’s grasp of details make it a riveting read. Ross’s painstaking account of the entire fiasco also left me so despondent at times that I needed a bottle of aspirin just to get through it. The 150 pages on the negotiations surrounding the Wye Agreement rekindled memories of the “Bibi” years and how his bulldozers were working away in the West Bank night and day. Just thinking about it can make a sane man desperate.

  I had no role in any of the talks that preoccupied Ross and the two negotiation teams. President Clinton himself invested hundreds of hours of personal effort in trying to bring the Israelis and Palestinians together. And yet Ross’s eyewitness account leaves the impression that the more effort the various protagonists invested, the worse the situation became.

  After Shimon Peres became prime minister the suicide bombings started up again. With each new attack, Peres’s efforts to cling to power faded. The famous “letter” he had given Arafat at the signing of Oslo, which promised that Palestinian institutions would be allowed to develop and expand, was now worth less than the ink it was written with. (“In the courtroom I can’t cash in the letter on behalf of your university,” my Israeli lawyer later told me when I referred to it in a legal battle to prevent the government from shutting down Al-Quds.) Peres picked up the pace of settlement construction.

  • • •

  All this took place as Israeli flags were coming down from police stations and a few checkpoints. By December 1995, the Palestinian Authority had assumed control over the major towns in the West Bank. This set the stage for Palestinian legislative and presidential elections, which in theory were meant to increase people’s involvement in governing their own lives. In fact, the precise opposite happened, for the minute the often-postponed elections were over, people retreated to a pre-intifada passivity. Many questioned, and for good reason, whether they even had a government. It may have stroked the collective ego to think they did, but while the Palestinian flag was flying high, our land, resources, and basic liberties were being nibbled away. Under the surface, pressure was building, and judging by the chatter in the cafés and on the street, some kind of explosion seemed more and more imminent.

  By the time Israeli elections rolled around in May 1996, Hamas had murdered enough Israeli civilians to bring Bibi Netanyahu to power. Until Labor returned to power three years later, the two sides circled each other like wary combatants out to exploit every sign of weakness. Eventually the Israeli right found a way to embrace Oslo and the inevitable logic of a Palestinian state by redefining the kind of state it would be. It would have little territory, no control over its borders, no capital, or at least not one in Jerusalem, and no economic viability. According to one Likud politician, “Well, they want to call it a state? Fine, they can call it fried chicken if they want to.”

  This was the point in Ross’s book that required the most aspirin, because I had to relive the death of Oslo and all the hopes it had raised. The gr
ueling eight-day Wye negotiations are a good metaphor for this entire period. Sharon—the new minister of infrastructure and a man many Palestinians and Israelis saw as complicit in atrocities against civilians in his role as commander of the infamous Unit 101 in the 1950s, and later as defense minister—greeted his fellow Palestinian negotiators, many of whom had Ph.D.s, as “a gang of thugs.” At Wye, Palestinians got some more land, an airport, and a harbor. In order to get the Israelis to release more prisoners, the Americans gave them their tacit okay to build Har Homa (Jebal Abu Ghnaim in Arabic), a new settlement cutting Jerusalem off from Bethlehem. A few years later most of the released prisoners would either be killed or rearrested, while Har Homa was bustling with settlers.

  In 1997 Ehud Olmert, mayor of Jerusalem, supported the American millionaire Irving Moskowitz who used money from a bingo parlor to build a Jewish neighborhood in Ras al-Amud, an Arab neighborhood east of the Old City. Meanwhile, Sharon told West Bank settlers, “Everyone living there should move, should run, should grab more hills, expand the territory. Everything that’s grabbed will be in our hands, everything that we don’t grab, will be in their hands.”2

  While settlers were flooding into the West Bank, a series of fortified roadblocks tightened the noose around Jerusalem by choking off access to Palestinians from the West Bank. Only those with hard-to-get special permits were allowed to pass the checkpoints. Needless to say, settlers zoomed past without question. Palestinians who had worked in Jerusalem found themselves jobless, and students, patients, and worshippers couldn’t get to schools, hospitals, or religious sites.

  The Israeli government, declaring at every opportunity that Arab East Jerusalem was theirs forever, used an effective mix of legal tricks and heavily armed troops from the border police to close down one Palestinian organization after the next. New regulations were introduced, or old ones suddenly enforced, to control the institutions they couldn’t legally drive out. Under the canard of “security,” now easier than ever for Israel to get away with thanks to Hamas, the tightening of the military state of siege on East Jerusalem dramatically throttled free movement between the southern and northern parts of the West Bank. Ami Ayalon, the new head of the Shin Bet and my future partner in peace, began to warn Israeli politicians of a cataclysmic explosion if settlement expansion was not stopped.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Porcupines and Roosters

  I HAD FEW DEALINGS with the Palestinian Authority in these years. There was the occasional meeting with Arafat, and we generally stayed on good terms. I could almost always count on his support for the university. When asked, he backed up a request to the Saudis to finance the building of a medical school, and one to the Japanese to equip it.

  This doesn’t mean that he had forgotten the way I had skipped out on him in Oslo, but we managed to strike an unspoken compromise: I avoided taking up a post in his government, while he informally kept me a part of it. At one point he made me a member of a creature he called his “Jerusalem ministerial committee.” Like so many committees, we didn’t go far beyond informal chats. To help Jibril out, I also agreed to head up the Preventive Security Academy in Jericho.

  On another occasion, Arafat asked me to lead a delegation to the United States. He wanted us to drum up support from American Jews and to persuade them to pressure the American administration to release funds for the PLO. We met with Jewish leaders and the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations.

  My only other major foray into PA politics came about for reasons related to our delegation’s meager success: corruption. Arafat and his authority were barely limping along, though with the PLO in the saddle, Ramallah experienced a building boom. The city boasted new martini bars and a Mercedes dealership. The best legal expression of economic normalization between Palestinians and Israelis was a new casino not far from our police academy in Jericho. Until it was shot up by tank fire during the so-called “Al-Aqsa intifada,” on a typical Sabbath the parking lot was packed with Israelis’ cars. But the man on the street never drank martinis and never gambled. Living standards for him continued to plummet, and the civil service that on paper was supposed to improve the lot of the masses only made things worse. A study by the International Monetary Fund’s Middle Eastern Department found that the unemployment rate among Palestinians in 1997 was 30 percent, double what it had been in 1993. Per capita income dropped by 20 percent.1

  Just as serious for the man on the street was the reputation the PA was gaining as just another version of a sleazy Arab kleptocracy. Corruption charges were now cropping up with depressing regularity. After decades of preaching boycotts, many members of the PA were lining up to make deals with the Israelis and getting rich, while those who had earlier refused to cooperate with Israel out of principle and fidelity to the “cause” found themselves left out in the cold.

  In 1996, I saw up close how corruption operated. I was on the board of trustees of the Vocational Training Institute, an organization set up to aid people injured during the intifada. We named the mufti of Jerusalem’s cousin to be the director. When we later suspected him of pocketing sixty thousand dollars we confronted him, but he denied it and, what’s more, refused to vacate his post. We were about to force him out when he went to the mufti, who defended his nephew to Arafat. Arafat, who took what the mufti told him at face value, wrote a letter to the director offering him protection. The first thing the director did was come to me with a triumphant grin and throw the letter in my face. I threw it back in his.

  The corruption debate exploded into the open when the public comptroller, Arafat’s cousin, published the first financial report on the operations of the Palestinian Authority. According to the report, someone in the PA was raking in money. The auditor determined that $326 million, or 43 percent of the entire Palestinian Authority budget, had been squandered through a blend of corruption and poor management. Another shocking fact was that only ten cents out of every dollar in the budget was going for education, health, and social welfare. Arafat’s Office of the President got more, and the security services ate up over a third.

  Far more worrying for Chairman Arafat than public opinion was the international outcry—because his PA was largely propped up by outside financial support and he feared the gravy train could end. The U.S. senator Phil Gramm asked the U.S. ambassador to Israel, Martin Indyk, about the report in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. David Hirst, an intrepid correspondent for The Guardian, lashed out at Arafat for having “thrown up a ramshackle, nepotistic edifice of monopoly, racketeering and naked extortion, which merely enriches them as it further impoverishes the society at large.”2

  The report sparked an unruly debate in the Palestinian Legislative Council. Arafat, always on the lookout for conspiracies ranged against him, detected collusion between the United States and some people in the PA to oust him. In his instinctive zero-sum thinking, which allowed for no neutral power such as public opinion, popular umbrage at corruption had to have been incited by somebody.

  On hand to broadcast this first explosion of democratic dissent within the PA, and on live TV no less, was Daoud Kuttab, the director of Al-Quds University’s newly established television station. Kuttab, the journalist who had been convinced during the intifada that the people in the Unified Command were living in caves, came to me one day and laid out his vision for an independent station that would be neither a government propaganda tool nor a station putting out toothpaste commercials and dubbed American sitcoms. His idea was a national educational television network along the lines of PBS and CSPAN. Television, I thought, could be an “al-Farabi” moment—a way to influence politics indirectly. I agreed on the condition that the station diversify its offerings with children’s programs, women affairs, and open debates on liberty and individual rights.

  I pledged to Kuttab whatever university funds I could scrape together. We got George Soros’s Open Society Foundation and the Ford Foundation to pitch in enough funding for a forty-watt transmitter. Naturally, we asked for and
got from the Israeli and Palestinian authorities no licenses and no permission; and we invited no officials to cut ribbons. Abu Ala, who besides running PECDAR was chairman of the Legislative Council, gave us a tacit nod. In 1997 we just flipped a switch. The first test broadcast showed a goldfish swimming in a fishbowl to Beethoven’s Eroica, which Beethoven dedicated to Napoleon before the emperor turned into a despot.

  No one in the PA cared that we were operating without a license until Kuttab had the temerity to give the Palestinian masses a real-time glimpse into the unseemly details of PA governance. Since Kuttab had gotten Abu Ala’s backing to broadcast the debate, Arafat at first suspected Abu Ala of having masterminded the entire corruption conspiracy.

  Arafat got one of his security agencies to put an end to the broadcast. Like despotic governments worldwide, his people jammed the signals, and instead of a furious back-and-forth between legislators, all viewers got—I watched the debate from home—was a black rectangle. Kuttab responded defiantly by handing out cassettes to other stations so they could broadcast the debates.

  When the jamming didn’t work, Arafat gave the order to lock Kuttab up. With Jibril’s help, I managed to persuade Arafat that Kuttab wasn’t part of a plot but was carrying out important work for a democratic and open society. He was released after a week.

  Following the Legislative Council debate, the council decided to set up a committee to investigate the findings of the comptroller and to come up with recommendations. Some other human rights organizations started their own investigations. Not to be outdone, Arafat established his own official investigative body, which was to report its findings only to him.