As a testament to his labyrinthine mind, Arafat asked Tayyib Abd al-Rahim, the head of his cabinet, to bring together five credible people to investigate the findings of the damning financial report. One was a Palestinian judge working in Dubai, another a member of the Executive Committee of the PLO, and three were local academics, including me. When we were first sworn in, Arafat put the entire PA at our disposal. We could call in anyone for questioning, from ministers to messenger boys. Tayyib then narrowed our mandate by putting the security agencies off limits. The first report hadn’t touched on these areas, nor should we.
We swung into action. For three months we conducted hundreds of hours of interviews and meetings, mostly at Arafat’s offices in Gaza. A secretary in Tayyib’s office took down the minutes. But I kept my own notes. What we were digging up was so sensitive and bone-chilling I wanted to make sure I had my own records, if only to use as material for a future spy novel or murder mystery. In the end, all of us on the committee made copies of the final report for ourselves. We felt that the very least we could do was keep a record for history.
Gradually the general picture we came up with of mismanagement and corruption led us back to one of the places we weren’t supposed to look: security. None of my previous dealings with the PA or even with the Israeli government could have prepared me for the levels of cynicism we uncovered. We discovered how power and greed had combined to undermine the world that most of us recognized as our own. The people guiltiest of corruption had no national loyalties, in fact no loyalties at all except to themselves. And they were willing to do anything and betray anyone to pile up riches.
The chairman personally came out clean. Arafat lived a monkish existence with few material needs. He never pocketed anything for himself and was personally far less corrupt than most autocrats, or CEOs for that matter.
His fault lay in his old habit of juggling people and cash, now paying someone off, now turning a blind eye to malfeasance. His management style, if you can call it that, had led to a total absence of organizational structures and budgetary plans, and of standardized rules governing the financial operations of various departments in the civil service. There was no streamlining of financial operations and no way to keep a tab on spending. Employees in the ministries were striking all sorts of deals, minor and major, on behalf of their ministries, with the inevitable bane of “personal commissions” taking priority over cost and efficiency.
The shady deals were so numerous that it would be impossible to catalog them here. A couple of examples will have to suffice. One instance of comparatively petty corruption was the informal car dealership that returnees from Tunis operated together with local cronies. The returnees exploited their tax-exempt status as government officials to import fleets of cars, and then made a killing by selling them at a steep discount.
A particularly appalling example related to the PA’s monopoly over basic commodities such as gasoline. As we discovered, such goods were being brought into the Palestinian areas using Israeli ex-security officers as the middlemen. These officers were now on good terms with some of Arafat’s closest aides: one Israeli was a man complicit in the execution of the two Palestinian hijackers of Bus 300 in 1984—a perverse twist if there ever was one on the theme of normalization between Palestinians and Israelis.3 Together, they smuggled raw materials in and out of Palestinian areas, thus avoiding taxation on both ends. In the case of gasoline, Israeli tankers protected by Palestinian security men delivered gasoline to local stations, and because of the state monopoly, the owners had no choice but to pay steeply inflated prices.
Such racketeering forced the man on the street to pay higher prices, and it denied the government legitimate income. Security officials made millions, and their garish villas soon popped up next to squalid refugee camps. Meanwhile, fortunes were flowing into secret Arafat-controlled accounts.
As we gathered information piece by piece, we came to the conclusion, duly confirmed by Tayyib, that Arafat was aware of every case of corruption. He received and read every report and complaint that landed on his desk. Why, we asked, had he not put an end to it?
Arafat had an amazing faculty for picking out and remembering details. He could look at a disassembled puzzle and recall where each piece was on the table. What he lacked was the power to put the details together and see the pattern. In the case of corruption, he didn’t see how the rot was undermining his ability to govern and to build up a state. Arafat couldn’t make the link between his mismanagement and how a sense of despair was building among his people, despair at the hollow promises of liberation and of a better, more dignified life.
Our final three-hundred-page report emphasized the need to institute standard operating procedures and to require ministries to have in place organizational structures and plans. We gave ample examples of how the absence of these had led to waste, mismanagement, and the misappropriation of funds. The report suggested that the public prosecutor indict twenty top officials for embezzlement as a lesson to others.
The fact that only Arafat was to receive a copy of our report made many people nervous. As our work drew to a close and we were writing up our findings, committee members began to come under pressure. Two received threatening phone calls in the middle of the night. On the day we handed over the report, three committee members, al-Tayyib among them, sensibly made arrangements for extended vacations abroad.
The notoriously sloppy Arafat suddenly took on some features of a Prussian ruler: he expected our report on a certain day at noon, and not a minute later. After three months of hard work we finished the report with fifteen minutes to spare, or so we thought. Flipping through it for the last time, Tayyib spotted a major printing error. He threw his glasses to the table in utter despair. “We can’t give it to the chairman like this,” he groaned, on the verge of tears. Calmly, I took the report, made the necessary changes in the text, and handed it to the secretary, who quickly reprinted the page and collated the report once more. We were in the president’s office at precisely noon, and handed over the report to a beaming Arafat.
Arafat took it, said thanks, have a good day, and did nothing. No one was brought to trial, and the chieftains continued in their ways.
Meanwhile, we were making progress at the university. I didn’t think about it much at the time—working eighteen hours a day has a way of dominating the mind—but the university was shaping up as a model for turning a backward society around.
We set up our administrative office just up the block from Mother’s house, in a British Mandate–era building in the lovely style of that age, next to the Rockefeller Museum of antiquities. From the top floor we had a panoramic view of the Mount of Olives and the walls of the Old City. In contrast with the lavatory at the Orient House, my office was roomy enough to accommodate a table for meetings.
Changes in the curriculum were slowly beginning to bear some fruit. In 1997, two years after taking over, wandering around campus I felt the stirrings of an intellectual community among students and teachers, as well as the budding signs of a new culture of freedom of thought.
All students, whether aspiring engineers or nurses, or thick-bearded theologians, were required to take classes designed to pry open their minds and erode religious and political prejudice. One class was on human civilization. Another required course was simply called “On Thinking.” The inspiration was the Greek spirit of inquiry, the spirit that had animated the best of early Islamic thought—its openness to all that is human, and cold hostility against blinkered fanaticism. If I could have chiseled onto stone a motto for the class, it would have been: if people use their minds and wills they can accomplish whatever they choose, including political liberty.
To combat the evils of rote learning, we introduced a seminar approach to teaching that fostered dialogue, open debate, and respect for opposing opinions. Students were taught the skills of finding, preparing, and defending ideas. There was also a social dimension, as much of this was done as teamwork. The image of t
he lone scholar laboring away was not what I had in mind. The idea was to promote logical, systematic, strategic thinking in a social, collaborative framework.
New departments began springing up. The nursing school morphed into a medical school. For years people at established universities such as Birzeit had been planning to set up a medical school. They’re not cheap to build and, as mentioned, thanks to Arafat’s help we got Saudi and Japanese money to build and equip one. A business school was soon established, and a law school, too. In 1998 we created the Center for the Advancement of Peace and Democracy, named after Issam Sartawi, who was assassinated in a hotel lobby in Albufeira, Portugal, in 1983 by Palestinian militants opposed to his willingness to engage in dialogue with the Israelis. That we managed to open this center without a student uprising was a sign that we were heading in the right direction.
From the moment I took over the university, I was determined to create a department of the humanities. Initially classes were held in cramped quarters in the engineering building. We eventually found a new home for the faculty after I drove past a large, derelict structure in my neighborhood of Beit Hanina. It was on a plot of land that had long ago been donated by the people of the village for educational purposes. I got out of my car and, looking through a broken window, thought it would be ideal for our humanities program. I asked around and discovered that for years it had been used for Muslim religious education, only to be abandoned after infighting between various factions. The last straw came when students beat up the dean.
We took it over—without asking anyone—renovated it with some money from PECDAR, hung up a sign, and opened it up for classes. It happened so quickly that no one stopped us.
My eye next turned to the Old City. Partly inspired by painful memories of the Lemon Tree Café, partly by the political urgency to resist Israeli efforts to extinguish our cultural life within the walls of the city, I began to wander the streets looking for a building to house a new institute. As I envisioned it, the Institute for Jerusalem Studies, as we eventually called it, would counter the parochial ethnic prejudices at work distorting Arab Jerusalem’s heritage of cultural tolerance through what I called in an article the “selfish contention between two ethno-centric tribes.”4
I wanted a place where scholars, writers, filmmakers, archaeologists, and historians from all around the world could study the civilizations that were piled up layer upon layer under their feet. Foreign scholars, even Israelis, could help Palestinians tell the pluralistic history of Palestine and its civilizations, its peoples and its archaeology, as well as gain a better appreciation of the Abrahamic religion, the source of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The mission statement we later designed is as follows:
Because of Jerusalem’s unique constitution as a mosaic crossroad of different nations, cultures, and religions, special emphasis is laid on introducing students especially, but the university community as a whole, to the multicultured heritage of human civilization … The student is thus encouraged to develop a worldly outlook, an appreciation of and tolerance for the other, and a humanist moral code.
I found the perfect location down the street from the old Lemon Tree. It was another badly dilapidated compound at the entrance to the Souk el-Qattanin (Cotton Merchants’ Market), this one dating back to the Mamluk period. Sultan Saif ed-Din Tankaz ordered it built after his visit in 1327. Symbolically you couldn’t conjure up a better place to study Jerusalem’s multilayered heritage, with the compound sitting as it does between the Noble Sanctuary, the Western Wall, and the Via Dolorosa. Just by standing in the medieval bathhouse built into the compound, or in one of the small cells on the roof used by visiting Muslim writers over the ages, you feel the sheer accumulation and diversity of humanity over millennia.
At the time, I was also making plans for another center that at first glance runs directly counter to the pluralistic humanism of the Jerusalem project. Fahed Abu al-Haj, my friend who had had information about my intifada activities tortured out of him, and who then was one of the four negotiators at Petah Tikva prison, was busy establishing a center to commemorate and document the development of the Palestinian prisoner movement. The idea was to bring together in one spot the prisoners’ art, handiwork, stories, letters, and manuscripts.
The plan began over a plate of hummus in Ramallah. Every day after dropping off my sons at the Quaker Friends School, Fahed and I used to meet at my favorite restaurant. One morning he began talking about the prospects for peace, and how very soon we would be neighbors and partners with the Israelis, and the hundred-year conflict would be stuff for history books. “What will happen to the heritage of the prisoners?” he asked me. “All this history will be lost if we don’t do something.” One fear was that ambitious young historians and researchers at the Hebrew University would gather together all the artifacts and write the history for us.
Together we came up with a plan to document the prisoners’ movement by gathering together poems, letters, memoirs, and leaflets. I gave Fahed a computer and a room to work in. He started with notes he had written in prison and smuggled out in small capsules. My secretary typed them up and edited them. I wrote an introduction, and we published it under the title Behind Iron Bars.
Now I decided to integrate the project into the university, and make Fahed its director. The first thought was to name the center after Nelson Mandela. In the end we commemorated the memory of Abu Jihad, the PLO leader assassinated by Israeli commandos in 1988, by calling it the Abu-Jihad Center for Political Prisoners’ Affairs.
On the face of it, it sounds like a stretch to liken a prison document center named after Abu Jihad to peaceful efforts at dialogue with the Israelis. But in my mind they are two sides of the same coin. The prisoner movement was one of our greatest national success stories. Prison was a forge that proved that nonviolence could defeat the interrogator, humanize an inherently unjust penal system, and instruct prisoners in the art of sovereignty. And Fahed was the model director. In and out of Israeli chains since the age of sixteen, he had become a thinking man who believed in peace and coexistence with Israel.
We at Al-Quds launched a number of joint Palestinian-Israeli projects aimed at fostering academic and scientific cooperation. Just as my father took me by the hand in 1967 and signed me up for an archaeological dig, I felt that science was an important point of contact between our two societies. Real lasting peace is made between peoples, not governments. For our students, working with Israeli scientists constituted an open meeting of equals, regardless of how wide the gaps were in resources or training. The bravery of the prisoner facing down the interrogator was matched by the bravery of the student and researcher defying the Palestinian culture of boycotts, but also his own inner fears and insecurities, or his antipathies and stereotypes.
An open attitude toward cooperation with Israel turned Al-Quds University into the leading research university in Palestine. In the early years the Belgian government financed the most successful project we had, which ran for three years and targeted the areas of agriculture, environment, and public health.
More projects were to follow. Kuttab’s television station, which evolved into the Al-Quds Institute for Modern Media, got funding to produce a Palestinian-Israeli version of Sesame Street. The hope was to inculcate children on both sides with mutual respect and tolerance. Our Big Bird was Kareem, a proud but amiable rooster; the Israelis’ was Kipi, a porcupine. The subjects dealt with by our rooster-porcupine team ranged from the physical and sexual abuse of children, to the environment, women’s rights, public health, and family planning. Lucy collaborated with us, producing an accompanying magazine.
When I took over the university, a lot of people told me I was asking for trouble, and sure enough trouble came by the bucketload. What kept the university from sinking in those first turbulent years was faith in a vision and strategy shared by a handful of loyal colleagues willing to put in long hours.
By 1998 the university was up to five thousand students, with
the percentage of Hamas students down precipitously from 90 to 50 percent. We were hardly rolling in funds, but at least salaries were being paid on time, and we were growing. As we grew, so did the opposition. One day, worn out by fights on various fronts, my staff and I withdrew to my office. I could see the exhaustion on their faces. I told them to go out and see the movie The Matrix. Life is really all a game, I mused, and it’s up to our creative imaginations to set the borders between imagination and reality. What people think about us, and we about them, depends on us. No matter how many powerful enemies we have, they can’t break our will.
Some of the problems were perfectly understandable. A close friend of mine who ran the Israeli Studies program couldn’t stop complaining about his students. “They can’t even write a proper paper, let alone do research.” I had to pick up his spirits with the Arabic equivalent of “Rome was not built in a day.”
A far bigger problem was Hamas. With their numbers and influence waning, they were putting up a fight. In fall semester 1998 they threw a fit when I tried to show the incoming class Destiny, a film by the Egyptian filmmaker Youssef Chahine. The film is about the Iberian Muslim philosopher and Cordoba judge Averroes, who has always been for me the embodiment of the spirit of free intellectual inquiry and rationalism. Chahine made the film to coincide with Averroes’s millennial anniversary, and as a warning against the dangers of Muslim fundamentalism. The Hamas students on campus naturally didn’t want to see it, or allow others to. At the last minute, the dean of students canceled the showing to avoid a riot.
But the conflict didn’t end there. At one point I kicked out the leader of the Hamas student group because of a rock-throwing incident on campus. I got rid of a few more ringleaders after a brawl with some Fatah students. The dispute began after the Fatah students organized a folk dance in which women participated. For the Hamas students, mixed dancing was such a grievous contravention of Islamic law that they hung posters calling the women whores. This was too much for the Fatah activists, and they began tearing down the posters. The Hamas students attacked the Fatah students, who struck back.
Once Upon a Country Page 44