Once Upon a Country

by Sari Nusseibeh

  Among Palestinians, disappointment was immediate. To begin with, the coalition Barak put together included Orthodox religious parties and the ex-refusenik Natan Sharansky. Both would prove unreliable bedfellows, to say the least, in questions of peace with the Palestinians. Once installed as prime minister in July 1999, Barak turned away from the Palestinian problem and tried to reach a deal with the Syrians. When he talked about the peace process with us at all, he made it clear, first with hints and eventually with a full throat, that he was no fan of the underlying theory in the Oslo process that small trust-building measures were necessary before the two sides tackled the more contentious issues.

  Arafat tried to get Barak’s attention with some hollow threats. I recall one meeting I attended. By this point Arafat always assumed that Israelis were listening in on every word. Addressing his invisible interlocutor on the other end of the microphone he was sure was hidden in a potted plant or a piece of furniture, he declared with as much dramatic force as he could muster that the situation was becoming intolerable and might well “explode” if negotiations didn’t lead to a breakthrough. He picked up the phone and called the head of the Ministry of Food Supplies to instruct him to make sure the silos were filled with flour because of the “impending” political crisis. For all of us who heard such talk, it was obvious he was blowing smoke to get the Israelis to pick up the pace of negotiations.

  Barak came out with his own threats, which at least to the Americans sounded far more persuasive. He announced to the Americans and Palestinians that there were to be no more partial steps or trust-building moves. Even the agreements made by the previous Likud government he suspended. He wanted to go directly to the end game, a final comprehensive settlement. Once his strategy with the Syrians had failed, he returned to the Palestinian issue, and came up with the idea of a dramatic summit with President Clinton, and warned that without it, his government wouldn’t survive. It was a high-stakes game, an all-or-nothing approach: either total agreement or apocalypse. You’d think a clock-maker would be used to fidgeting with something until it was fixed. But his approach to the peace process was either the clock worked to the second, or it was pitched onto the rubbish heap.

  Clinton went along, and offered Camp David as a venue.

  Arafat’s response was that the two sides weren’t ready. The backchannel contacts with the Israelis didn’t yet promise a successful summit. Ever cautious, ever afraid of traps—he was a man who had escaped from a hundred of them over his lifetime—he tried to weasel his way out of it. But Clinton cornered him, and in the end Arafat had no choice but to attend against his better judgment.

  For once, I agreed with Arafat. The two sides were already making public declarations that were totally irreconcilable with each other. Given these positions, I couldn’t see how an agreement could be reached.

  An idea Mark Heller, my coauthor on No Trumpets, No Drums, floated in an article in The Jerusalem Post made a lot more sense to me at the time than a summit fated to failure. By prior agreement of the two sides, Palestinians could declare a state with their ideal borders, and Israel could simultaneously recognize an independent Palestinian state in the borders Israel deemed best. The two sides could then enter into negotiations to bridge the difference between the two borders. That way, at least, we could keep the “peace process” alive.

  I still managed to maintain my distance from politics. Indirectly, I was of course aware of the general mood. On campus, students were grumbling about the “peace process,” and talk of another intifada made the rounds.

  I was still attending meetings of the “Jerusalem Ministerial Committee” Arafat had talked me into joining, which often began with Faisal giving a grim report on the rapid takeover of East Jerusalem, such as the outer ring of fortified settlements being connected to Jerusalem through a series of bypass roads. As I’ve experienced often over the years, chatting seemed to be the preferred compensation for seriously addressing the mounting difficulties faced by the inhabitants of East Jerusalem.

  The more I heard, the darker my pessimism grew. That the left-wing Labor Party was continuing to carry out the right-wing Likud’s policies only confirmed the impression that nothing substantial was being achieved at the negotiating table. I agreed with the general feeling on the street that our leadership was simply deluding itself, and us, by pretending that this whole process was leading to the end of occupation. In March 2000, I attended a UN-sponsored meeting on Palestinian rights held in Hanoi, where I gloomily predicted that the chances for a separate and viable Palestinian state were quickly disappearing from sight.

  Soon after I returned, in May 2000, there was fresh confirmation of this melancholy hunch: the city of Jerusalem granted approval to a group funded by Irving Moskowitz, the American bingo king, to build a two-hundred-unit Jewish settlement in Abu Dis, not far from our campus. Barak was also employing high-tech means to rid Jerusalem of unwanted Arabs. Now we had to show a government-issued magnetic ID card before passing one of the nine checkpoints set up during the Gulf War on the eastern roads leading into Jerusalem. This was designed to prevent Arabs without the necessary documents from slipping back into their ancestral city.

  When the Camp David Summit opened in July 2000, my pessimism wasn’t shared by most of the friends and colleagues who dropped by my office. Faisal and Marwan were upbeat. Jibril and Sameer in particular were fully convinced that a deal was within reach. They were in close contact with various Israeli politicians and security experts, who had probably assured them that some sort of deal was in the bag.

  The iconic television image of Barak pushing Arafat through a doorway at Camp David speaks volumes. In the words of Susan Sontag in The New York Review of Books, the chairman felt he was being “dragged to the verdant hills of Maryland.”

  During the two-week summit, I often drove down to the quiet desert town of Jericho for a long walk and a swim. My main source of news on the summit’s progress was Jibril, who was also in Jericho and was confident that Arafat could be brought around to some reasonable compromise. At night the two of us took long walks through the open country outside town. Occasionally he got a call on his cell phone directly from a negotiator, who would give him a live report.

  For much of the time, Arafat and Barak had surprisingly little to do. Only toward the end did Barak finally cut to the chase. He offered hitherto-unheard-of Israeli concessions on land and Jerusalem in exchange for a legally binding “end of the conflict” agreement, according to which there would be no mass repatriation of refugees to Israel. Israel would keep its 1948 booty, and the Palestinians would get their state.

  Both sides still quarrel over how much land the Israelis offered at Camp David, because nothing was put down on paper, and all these discussions were considered “non-papers.”

  Barak—in Hebrew, the name means “lightning,” but to Arab ears it recalls the name of Mohammed’s magical steed—brought up the “Holy of Holies” by demanding partial sovereignty over the Noble Sanctuary, or Temple Mount. At one point he said that Jews should be allowed to pray on the Muslim part of the site. Saeb recounts that it was this issue, more than anything else, that made Arafat’s blood boil. “Arafat literally began to tremble,” Saeb said.

  Clinton spent hours trying to find a formula both leaders could live with, finally suggesting to split the sovereignty: the Arabs would have it on top, where the mosques were, and the Jews would have it below, where supposedly the Holy of Holies was buried.

  My Likud negotiating partner back in 1987, Moshe Amirav—who chided Barak for needlessly opening up this can of worms—writes that Arafat was boiling mad. “He really went nuts. He started to yell at Clinton, and asked him if he would ever agree for someone else to be sovereign over territory beneath the streets of Washington.”1 Trembling all over, Arafat refused to recognize that the Jews had any historical connection to the Noble Sanctuary.

  The negotiators packed their bags and returned to the Middle East, but not before President Clinton di
d what he had promised not to: he pinned the blame squarely on the chairman.

  The Arabs, after hearing accounts of the Israeli positions and postures, lost all faith in the negotiating process. Back in Palestine, Arafat stoked this with more myth-mongering. He used a verse from the Koran to prove a crazy theory that Solomon’s Temple had really been in Yemen. At some point during the forty years in the desert, the People of Israel took a wrong turn and ended up far, far from Jerusalem. “Do you know the story of the Queen of Sheba sending a bird to Solomon that arrived the same day. How could a bird fly there so fast? Because the temple was in nearby Yemen!” When I heard this I feared that the chairman was losing his grip on reality.

  The Israelis, after hearing about Barak’s readiness to make concessions on Jerusalem and Arafat’s total rejection of Israeli offers, lost all faith in the Palestinians. Few people seriously doubted Barak’s line that Arafat had shown his “true face” and was no partner in peace.

  The two sides, a whisker away from a historic agreement, now found themselves in a crisis. I heard from some of the people who had fervently believed in Oslo: “This means war.”

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  The Possessed

  It was a day of the unexpected; a day of the denouement of

  many plots and the beginning of many future intrigues; a

  day of sudden explanations and thickening mysteries.

  —DOSTOYEVSKY, THE POSSESSED

  DOSTOYEVSKY, MY NAMESAKE for a few brief snowy days in Damascus, directed his novel The Possessed against the so-called “nihilists,” those who wanted to destroy the old social order, lock, stock, and barrel. “We shall proclaim destruction,” one character exclaims, “because—because … the idea is so attractive for some reason!” The novel often came to mind after Ariel Sharon’s jaunt up to the Noble Sanctuary/Temple Mount in September 2000 set off a pandemic of killing that stripped away both peoples’ basic sense of decency. It was as if everyone had lost their minds: Palestinians, the Israelis, the international press, everyone.

  There had always been an unwritten set of rules that regulated the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and which prevented it from degenerating into unbridled killing. Religious sites were rarely attacked, assassinations were kept to a minimum, and civilians were seldom targeted. Now all bets were off. I saw it up close on campus—the enflamed students, returning from the funerals of friends shot down in cold blood, waving water pistols and cardboard AK-47s and demanding a tooth for a tooth. The Islamists celebrated suicide bombers as heroes; once the number of Palestinian victims rose into the dozens, then the hundreds, even Fatah people were doing so. It was as if, like a repressed memory, the respective political legacies of the Stern Gang and militant Sheikh Qassam had won out at last. For the Palestinians at least, the “second intifada” was a catastrophic slapdash brawl without leadership, strategy, or ideas; it was a ruinous and sanguinary fit of madness.

  In dark times the wisest course of action is surely to tend to your own garden. But this was a luxury I didn’t have, and my five-year break from politics came to an end at the very moment any sensible person would have disappeared for good. It wasn’t nobility that threw me back into the fray, or a love for action, or even a princely sense of responsibility. I had no choice. The cycle of bloodletting, like the ancient sacrificial cult of Moloch, forced me back into the public eye, for if the so-called “intellectual” of a society refuses to oppose misguided public opinion, either because he fears for his life or hopes for personal gain or popularity, then that “intellectual” has lost his role in society, and his society will end up as lost as he is. Based on what I was seeing, intellectuals playing to the crowds in front of Aljazeera’s cameras were more ruinous than the obsequious court philosophers who once kneeled low to kiss the ring of a king.

  Once I took to the stage and started spouting my views—that Palestinians and Israelis share common interests in a two-state solution and as such are more allies than enemies—the predictable death threats, variations on old themes, began arriving back in the mail. Jacob stopped pestering me, though his successor, my personal Inspector Javert, began tracking my every move. But here I’m getting ahead of myself.

  Dennis Ross opens his book at Camp David in the summer of 2000. In his mise-en-scène, President Clinton sits pleading with Chairman Arafat, who willfully rejects the best offer he could ever hope to get. Ross’s account lends weight to the stock Israeli line that Arafat responded to Prime Minister Barak’s generosity by unleashing a murderous new intifada.

  But for all his failings—and he clearly blew it by not closing some sort of deal at Camp David—Arafat was neither sufficiently in control nor sufficiently villainous to devise such a conspiracy. Ross’s view purposefully simplifies and obfuscates the various forces that conspired to trigger the so-called “second intifada.”

  Everyone shares some blame in the summit’s failure. Barak can be faulted for bullying, with his either/or approach, and for trying to deal in nonnegotiable myth. Arafat’s chronic indecision and never-ending suspicion prevented him from coming up with a reasonable counteroffer. After all the years of fighting, he had a chance to get most of what we needed; the rest he could have achieved by building a modern state under the rule of law. But he didn’t do it.

  In one respect, Arafat and Barak were equally at fault for allowing their frustration and anger to spill out for the entire world to see. Camps formed around the competing narratives of what went wrong. Clinton has to accept some responsibility for coming down so hard on the chairman.

  With the peace process in crisis, and in an atmosphere of mounting pessimism, I did what little I could to bring people back to their senses. Asked by a German magazine about the Jewish claim to the Temple Mount, I shot down Arafat’s “Yemen” theory by making it perfectly clear that Jewish roots in Jerusalem were existential and umbilical, as testified by the greatest Islamic tale of all, the Night Journey. Once word of the interview reached the mufti of Jerusalem, he spewed out his bile at me in the local press. His dislike of me was slowly turning into intense loathing.

  In other interviews, I disagreed that the summit had ended in calamity. Since I hadn’t expected too much in the first place, I didn’t interpret its breakup in end-of-the-world terms. In fact, I thought it was extraordinary how far direct talks had drawn the two sides together. There was no reason, I averred to people who wanted to know what I thought, that the two sides couldn’t get back to the negotiating table. In discussing the summit, I told Lee Hockstader of The Washington Post, “Maybe we weren’t exactly seeing eye to eye, but we were roaming around in the same thicket of woods together.” All that was needed was calm, reasoned deliberation, and a dispassionate reflection on our own self-interests. The tempest would pass, I had no doubt, and the two sides would return to negotiations.

  To bolster my case that our two peoples, and the Americans, were joined by common interests, I pointed to a flourishing cooperation between Al-Quds University and Bar-Illan University, where Rabin’s assassin had studied and which had the reputation as the most right-wing campus in the country. Crisis or no crisis, Al-Quds had also opened an American Studies Center with the financial backing of the U.S. embassy.

  Indeed, at first there was no shooting, and the Middle East didn’t grind to a halt. There was still security cooperation between Jibril’s forces and the Israelis. Business was blossoming, the casino parking lot was always full, tourists continued to stream into the country, and corrupt officials of the two security services were happily making money hand over fist. Arafat was even in good spirits, having shown the Arab world and his own people that he wouldn’t kowtow to the Americans and Israelis. His popularity ratings shot up. At our new American Studies program I had the pleasure of watching our students struggle through The Federalist Papers.

  Sure enough, it seemed as if Camp David was going into extra innings, when the two sides began to regroup for new negotiations. Saeb Erekat and Barak’s negotiator, the lawyer Gilʾad Sh
er, held more than thirty meetings trying to bridge the gaps. Some of my despondent friends, such as Marwan and Jibril, were beginning to regain some optimism.

  Enter Sharon. One of Father’s favorite English adages, “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread,” applies here, because a four-year slugfest that has caused torrents of blood—as well as ink and videotape—began with Sharon’s visit to the Noble Sanctuary on September 28, 2000, triggering what the euphoric crowds and journalists dubiously dubbed the “second intifada,” which it was only in the sense that sequels are often bad copies of the original.

  Barak was in trouble, as the concessions his political opponents accused him of contemplating lost him a parliamentary majority. Natan Sharansky, refusenik turned hardline expansionist, bolted from the coalition. Elections were imminent, and Barak’s new foe was the formidable Sharon, appointed leader of the Likud in 1999. Sharon was out of the country drumming up support when he announced that he would visit the Temple Mount. Barak had wrecked Camp David by bringing up the Holy of Holies, so this was exactly where Sharon chose to go.

  Sharon has always been a wily and often reckless visionary, with a record of deceiving prime ministers and defying the world in order to execute a plan. When I saw him on television strutting like a flatulent Rambo up on the Noble Sanctuary, I knew we were in trouble. The visit was transparently designed as a trap, but for whom?

  The easy answer was first Barak, then us. Sharon plainly wanted to push the prime minister into a tight corner. If he blocked the visit, Sharon would hurl three thousand years of Jewish history at him. It would be obvious, the argument would go, that Barak intended on giving up sovereignty over the site to the Palestinians. Conversely, if Barak allowed the visit, the ensuing stone throwing and rioting that was guaranteed to break out would show the world the “true face” of Palestinian terror. The peace process would be over and Arab violence would be the cause. Either way, Barak would lose the election, and Sharon, his successor, wouldn’t have to go back to the negotiating table, which he knew would require him to pull out of the territories.