Once Upon a Country

by Sari Nusseibeh

  I was in my office when I got an urgent call. A fight had broken out between Fatah and Hamas students. It was alarming news because a feud between the factions could have gone anywhere: shooting, vandalizing buildings, mayhem. A violent clash on campus would have attracted Israeli soldiers, whose presence would have inevitably brought flying rocks. The entire chain of events—violence, soldiers, rocks, rubber bullets—was so predictable that I stepped in at once to prevent the escalation. The last thing I wanted was to give the authorities an excuse to shut down the university.

  I asked the people involved to come into my office. They had hardly sat down when the recriminations started. For the next ten hours I had to listen to pointless caviling, with neither side willing to apologize or back down. The Hamas students continued to insist upon their rights to enforce the morality of the Ayatollah Khomeini, and their Fatah opponents stood by their moral right to stop them, and to swing back if hit.

  Eventually I’d had enough. By the next morning, I threatened, either the students must resolve their dispute and apologize or I would suspend them. Morning came and they were all as unyielding as before. I suspended all the Hamas people. Adel, the Fatah leader who had defended the women on campus, got off with a warning. Later I hired him to come to work with me.

  The bigger threat than even Hamas came from the PA’s Ministry of Higher Education, and from Israel. By the time Al-Quds began to grow, Hanan Ashrawi had already quit her post as minister out of disappointment with the PA. The new minister was Munthir Salah, a man I got to know when he was the president of An-Najah National University in Nablus. I was also well acquainted with his main adviser, Gabi Baramki, the ex-provost of Birzeit.

  From their first day on the job, Munthir and Gabi gave the impression of men not quite content with their limited power. One of their main tasks was to manage the universities, but all but two universities ran independently of the ministry. With Al-Quds, which was not only independent of their ministry but geographically outside of the PA jurisdiction, Munthir and Gabi looked for ways of exerting control. They and some other people in the ministry were increasingly aware that an institution they had no control over was rapidly changing in unexpected and, for them, uncontrollable ways. Student numbers were booming, research grants were flowing in, new buildings were going up, and an all-too-close relationship with Israelis was being forged. Munthir and Gabi began to think of ways to take over Al-Quds.

  The first attacks were all verbal, and easy to fend off. Critics inside the ministry accused me of being an “expansionist,” using the same Arabic terms we use to discuss Israeli settlements. In a commencement address, I referred to the charge. “Some critics in the Ministry of Education accuse us of being expansionists. They seem to be a bit mixed up.” I paused for a moment the way a standup comedian does when telling a joke. “They think we are an Israeli settlement.” Laughter erupted. Taking on a sober tone, I continued: “But it is our duty as a national institution in Jerusalem to grow; and it is their duty to support this growth rather than criticizing it or standing in its way.”

  Munthir and Gabi soon went well beyond words. The battleground they chose was the medical school. They and others weren’t happy that we had succeeded in leapfrogging over other universities such as Birzeit in establishing it. Munthir’s plan was to wrest it from Al-Quds and place it under his authority. The way he went about it nearly worked: he talked Arafat into signing one of his “presidential decrees” stating that forthwith the medical school would be under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Education.

  Munthir and Gabi had probably been cooking up the deal on the sly for months. I only learned about it in the newspaper the following day. It was quite surprising, to put it mildly, to discover that I had lost one of the university’s main assets. A day later we in the administration got a fax from the ministry with a copy of the decree, demanding immediate compliance.

  Munthir and Gabi must have thought that with a presidential decree the matter was settled and we’d send over the keys to the front door. What they failed to factor in was that I had some experience with presidential decrees, and knew how to navigate around them. I dictated the following fax to the ministry: “We do not recognize the legality or validity of the reasons cited for the issuance of the decree, and we will present our argumentation to the president himself.”

  I took the best tack I knew with Arafat. I sent him a file bulging with documents along with a note explaining why his decree was founded on misleading information. Apart from anything else, I explained, his decree amounted to the confiscation of private property. I was sure, I added in the note, that the most honored chairman had no intention of seizing properties from a nonprofit charitable organization.

  I knew in advance that upon receiving my ten-pound file that Arafat would practice his old art of avoiding a decision. And just as predicted, he shelved the decree and set up a committee, which turned competition over the medical school into yet another mind-numbing process that thankfully went nowhere—and the commission quickly fizzled out.

  The minute word came down that the chairman had appointed a committee, Munthir and Gabi knew they had lost. Down but not out, they mustered their forces and tried a much more ambitious strategy. The best way to get the medical school was to take over the entire university. The new plan, concocted with the then head of the teacher’s union at Al-Quds, was to depose my board of trustees, my administration, and me.

  Munthir took his case to a meeting of the full cabinet headed by Arafat. To his colleagues and the chairman he outlined all the university’s financial difficulties, and how they were a product of my “expansionism” and poor management. Munthir’s performance must have been stellar, because he succeeded in extracting from the cabinet a decisión to replace the entire top administration of the university and to appoint a new board of trustees.

  Their trick was to present Arafat with a list of the new board members, which they did. The only name they didn’t provide was that of my replacement as the president of the university. Their thinking was that they would find a new president once Arafat agreed to the list. But when Arafat signed the minister’s paper endorsing the change of the board of trustees, he made one correction. In the blank spot next to “university president” he slyly added my name. The message was clear: you can get rid of the board, just not Sari.

  I knew nothing about this meeting, and once again it was in the morning newspaper squeezed between the top news of the day that I discovered that I had lost my board. Our reaction was prompt. The next day, in a front-page advertisement in the local paper, the university declared that it was still being run by the same board, and that the Palestinian Authority had no right or jurisdiction to institute changes in an independent organization.

  At the same time, I fired off a complaint to the cabinet, questioning the minister’s motives, information, and methods, and demanding a full hearing in my presence. How could the cabinet take a decision based on one-sided information? I explained in the letter that the minister and the head of the union, in drawing up their report about the university, hadn’t even bothered to interview any of the university’s administrative staff for another opinion.

  The members of the cabinet, tearing a page from their boss’s book, avoided open conflict. They shelved their earlier decision and decided to “look into” the matter again. Once again, Munthir’s stratagem designed to depose me foundered on the built-in inertia of PA decision making.

  As long as Al-Quds seemed little more than a blot of ink on paper, the Israelis left it alone. As soon as they saw the fastest-growing Arab institution left within their “Eternal Capital,” our legal problems multiplied.

  A couple of minor encounters took place in 1998. In our renovation of the compound near the Souk el-Qattanin, workers digging in one of the rooms discovered a secret passageway into an ancient tunnel underneath the Old City. Days later, a platoon of Israeli soldiers showed up and threatened to confiscate the building if we didn’t seal the ent
ryway into the tunnel.

  The other conflict occurred during our graduation ceremony in a building near the Orient House. For students living outside the municipal borders of Jerusalem, it was illegal to attend the event without special permits from the military authorities, permits so impossible to obtain that no one even bothered trying. Unlike today, enforcement of the absurd policy was still lax, so we went ahead with the ceremony.

  By the time it was over, police were surrounding the building and asking everyone leaving the ceremony to show their IDs. They stopped only when I approached the commander of the police unit. “Hi, Dr. Sari,” he said as if we were the closest of friends. Putting his hand out for me to shake it, he asked if I remembered him.

  “I’ve met a lot of police officers,” I mumbled awkwardly, not knowing what else to say.

  He continued beaming. “You have to remember. I was the one who arrested you in Abu Dis during the Gulf War.” He must have been the one with an awkward and slightly embarrassed expression on his face.

  “Oh yes, but you were wearing a different uniform.”

  After a few minutes of friendly banter he withdrew his unit. “Really good to see you, Sari!” were his last words, as he waved at us from his retreating jeep.

  A more serious encounter with Israeli bureaucracy occurred when several graduates from our School of Social Work, who were already employed by Israeli institutions, including the Jerusalem municipality, were suddenly informed that their degrees would no longer be recognized because Al-Quds didn’t have proper Israeli accreditation. Thus began a series of court cases in defense of our graduates.

  Soon, we found ourselves taken to court by a right-wing society calling itself “Betzedek” or “in righteousness.” (The name comes from the Biblical verse, “Lead me, O Lord, in your righteousness because of my enemies; make your way straight before me.”)

  Betzedek went to the Supreme Court requesting that we be shut down for two reasons: first, that we were an institution belonging to the Palestinian Authority in contravention of the Oslo Agreement (the PA was not allowed to operate within East Jerusalem), and next that we were operating within Israel without accreditation from the appropriate Israeli authorities. Betzedek also requested that the Israeli government, in the person of its prime minister, be censored for allowing us to operate illegally.

  Thus began a long battle for survival. The first charge was easy to dispense with. Al-Quds was a nongovernmental, nonprofit institution, and as such we did not belong to the PA. Operating in Jerusalem, therefore, did not contradict the Oslo Agreement. The head of the Israeli Internal Security Ministry said as much in a report he filed with the Supreme Court.

  The issue of Israeli accreditation was a far bigger threat. We were in fact operating with no licenses or accreditation, and in a normal society it would have been perfectly justified to shut us down. But nothing in East Jerusalem was normal. Our initial hope was that the Oslo process would lead to a final-status agreement, liberating our section of the city from occupation and eliminating any need for Israeli permission or accreditation. But with the Oslo process inching along at a snail’s pace, we had to respond to the legal challenge.

  The problem was that applying for Israeli accreditation implied accepting Israeli legal jurisprudence over East Jerusalem. The Palestinian minister for higher education unfurled his “nationalism” by warning Arafat that I was about to accede to the “Israelization” of the university. Others added their voices to the hysteria.

  I was clearly in a bind. Weighing a court order to shut us down on the one hand with the nationalist passions on the other, I sought out Mr. Spaer’s legal advice. What we came up with was a diversionary tactic to win some time. I instructed Mr. Spaer to tell the court that our lack of accreditation wasn’t our fault at all. The Israeli authorities had never made the legal provisions for granting accreditation to an Arab degree-granting institution. For more than fifty years, Israel had never contemplated building, supporting, or even acknowledging an Arab university catering to its Arab population.

  Betzedek had expected me to sing along with the chorus led by the PA minister of education and his colleagues, who rejected Israeli accreditation on principle. This would have left the Supreme Court no choice but to order our institution closed. Having called their bluff, however, we put the Israeli Council for Higher Education in a bind. Should it offer us legal status in Israel’s Eternal Capital? The Supreme Court ordered it to. But should it comply? Suddenly it was the Israeli government, and not Al-Quds, in the dock.

  Thus began a tortured legal procedure that has yet to end. The Israeli Council for Higher Education first tried to throw it back on us by saying it had never received an application. We should apply in accordance with the regulations. Mr. Spaer replied that his client would be happy to fill out an application, if one existed. The only application and accompanying regulations were in Hebrew, argued Mr. Spaer, and since his client was an Arabic speaker, the Israeli ministry had the legal duty to provide these materials in Arabic, it being one of the official languages of the State of Israel.

  It took the educational authority more than six months to produce the regulations in Arabic. More tortuous procedures followed, reflecting I think the hesitation of many within the Israeli bureaucracy to register an Arab university in a city they were doing everything in their power, including every piece of legal chicanery in the book, to purge of Arab influence.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Holy of Holies

  A POPULAR ARAB CHILDREN’S STORY I heard in grade school was about a hunter slitting the throat of a bird on a bitterly cold and rainy day. A child, seeing the hunter bent over the dead animal and mistaking raindrops on the man’s face for tears, turns to his mother and says, “Look, Mother, that poor man is crying over the bird.” “Don’t pay attention to his tears,” replies the mother. “Look what he’s doing with his hands.”

  Many Palestinians must have had this story in the back of their minds as they observed Israeli negotiators going to and fro out of hotel lobbies and a dozen different international venues talking nonstop about peace, while Israeli settlements were expanding with accelerated speed. Particularly in East Jerusalem, the frenzied growth conveyed one message: Israel would never give our city back to us. For me, driving past the ever-growing Jewish neighborhood of Pisgat Zeʾev every morning was like entering into the official Israeli political mind. Plans conceived many years earlier were materializing into roads, sewage lines, telephone cables, water pipes, tennis courts, and red-tiled villas. There was for me no better contrast than that between the relentless Israeli expansion and the PA’s hapless bungling. By 1999 many people, myself included, had already delivered a eulogy on Oslo.

  We Palestinians felt swindled. Compared with the euphoria generated by the intifada, people’s experience of the Oslo years was one humiliating retreat after the next. Arafat’s approval ratings hit rock bottom.

  The PA’s weakness can be traced back to all the familiar homegrown problems of corruption, bad management, and so on. The majority of Palestinians felt that our leadership, from the chairman on down to members of the cabinet and Legislative Council, were inebriated with the symbols of power. People suspected that too many of their “liberators” were more interested in enriching themselves than in solving the nation’s pressing problems.

  The biggest problem of all was still the occupation. If anything, since the PA’s arrival there had been a massive tightening of the Israeli grip on our land and our lives. The man on the street had lost confidence in a government he held responsible for engaging in a negotiation process that had brought no benefit, that, on the contrary, had given cover for the Israelis to act unilaterally. Dennis Ross’s account captures well the futile back-and-forth between the PA and the Israelis over every issue imaginable, while Israel went full steam ahead with its settlement activity. As in the story of the bird, Israeli leaders’ tearful declarations about peace didn’t tally with what they were doing with their bulldozers.
I saw only the inexorable march of facts on the ground, as if it were all a big hoax and we were the fools.

  A word should be added here about settlement activity. By focusing on the details—a demolition order here, a new bypass road there, a thousand new housing units on a hillside—it’s easy to lose sight of the systematic nature of the expansion. Years that were supposed to build trust between the feuding parties saw a doubling of the settlement population, from one hundred thousand to two hundred thousand: hardly what we had in mind when we danced on the streets after Oslo. That settlers got away scot-free with murder and other depredations quite literally added insult to injury.

  Another source of discontentment, to put it mildly, was the cordon of roadblocks and checkpoints that prevented people from traveling easily between regions controlled by the PA. These “liberated” areas became, as Palestinians said, a series of big prisons.

  People who believed in peace shouted out their hosannas when Ehud Barak and the Labor Party won the Israeli general election in 1999. Barak was widely praised as a man with an ingenious grasp of complex operations. He had studied mathematics, had been a chief person in the daring rescue operation at the Entebbe airport in Uganda, had been a brilliant military chief of staff, and, to top it all off, was a pianist whose hobby was assembling and disassembling clocks. As one would expect, Arabs recalled some of his other exploits, such as his role in the assassination of Abu Jihad or the time he dressed up as a woman and shot his way into a PLO cell in Beirut (“Operation Springtime of Youth”). Yet no one doubted he was a big improvement over Bibi Netanyahu, and his victory at the polls promised to bring the moderates back into the government.