Once Upon a Country

by Sari Nusseibeh

  Jibril also smelled a rat, and promised the Israeli foreign minister, Shlomo Ben-Ami, a leftist, that there would be quiet so long as Sharon didn’t enter the mosques. Faisal, wanting to avoid trouble, ordered all the schools to remain open. He didn’t want hundreds of inflamed youths throwing rocks at soldiers. Even Fatah’s most militant factions weren’t prepared for a confrontation. The Tanzim stayed home.

  Not all Palestinian leaders were so prudent; some, their rational faculties already weakened by the general mood, tried to whip up the mass’s emotions. Marwan, Hanan Ashrawi, and Mustafa Barghouti (a physician who had been a delegate to the Madrid conference and was heavily involved in the technical committees) appeared on local TV stations pleading with viewers to prevent the visit by rushing up to the Noble Sanctuary. The sanctity of the holy place was about to be desecrated, they declared, and could be defended only by the people themselves.

  The visit went as planned. On a Thursday morning, Sharon lumbered up with 1,500 heavily armed and bellicose border police, and marched directly up to the Al-Aqsa mosque. Standing before the site of Mohammed’s miraculous ascension, Sharon declared Israeli sovereignty over the Temple Mount. “I come here with a message of peace,” he said, surrounded by his small army. “I believe that we can live together with the Palestinians,”1 under his terms, to be sure.

  Only a relative handful of Palestinians heeded the call to prevent Sharon’s visit. Faisal and a score of Muslim dignitaries were on hand to show their decorous objections. And the entire event probably would have ended with Sharon’s symbolic speech and Faisal’s symbolic opposition had it not been for something no one could have predicted.

  At the top of the stairs leading to the haram a skirmish broke out between the police and the dignitaries. The television images beamed by satellite to hundreds of millions of Arabs around the world showed Faisal getting pushed around, which was nothing new. But this time the highest-ranking sheikh in Al-Aqsa also got roughed up. As chance would have it, his turban, a symbol of his exalted spiritual status, got knocked off his head and tumbled into the dust. Viewers saw the highest Muslim cleric of this highly charged Muslim site standing bareheaded. He might as well have been naked. Shame and outrage can be intimately coupled in the Middle Eastern psyche.

  All through that day newscasters and reporters on Arab satellite stations relentlessly hammed up this affront to Islam. Arab Jerusalemites, probably feeling guilty for not having shown up in the first place to protect the dignity of their holy site, seethed with anger. They weren’t about to miss the Friday prayer on the Noble Sanctuary. Then they would show their mettle to Israeli soldiers. It was going to be a mythic showdown.

  The atmosphere in Jerusalem’s Old City that Friday morning was electrified. Armed and nervous border police marched into the Old City by the hundreds, while hundreds of thousands of Muslims poured through the gates from neighborhoods and villages. The Tanzim, sloughing off their role of “peace leagues,” crowded onto the plaza.

  The minute the Friday prayers were over, gangs of teenagers rushed out of Al-Aqsa mosque toward the Western Wall, hurling rocks down on the soldiers. The border police stormed into the compound from all sides, and their pincerlike attack spread panic among the sea of worshippers leaving the mosque. The soldiers, taking aim at the youths, fired with live ammunition. Within minutes, eight protesters were shot dead, and scores of others had fallen to the ground, wounded. The “Al-Aqsa intifada” had begun.

  Cascading events, one feeding off the next, engulfed the Occupied Territories in violence. The Israeli military’s response was brutal. Nine hundred thousand bullets were fired in the opening days of the fighting, with the overwhelming majority of casualties being Palestinian. Trouble even spread into Israel proper. In some of the worst rioting among Israeli Arabs, thirteen unarmed civilians were shot.

  A macabre cycle set in. Every funeral led to new clashes with soldiers, resulting in more deaths, more funerals, more clashes, more shooting—and on it went. Leaders marched with angry demonstrators to army roadblocks, checkpoints, bases, and settlements. Inevitably, the children rushing ahead of the crowd and throwing rocks took the first bullets. Within three weeks, more than fifty children were dead. Parents, leaders, and the man on the street grew increasingly antagonistic toward the PA and its armed security forces for not using their guns to protect their children.

  If the Israelis had wanted to draw the Palestinian security forces into the fighting they couldn’t have picked a better way to do it. Unable to withstand the mounting pressure, one after another, members of the PA security forces shot back. Even Jibril couldn’t stop them—and had it been possible, he would have. He was dead set against the intifada. Soon armed Palestinian activists started targeting soldiers, settlers, and anything “Jewish” that moved.

  Arab satellite stations were guaranteed to be on hand to broadcast the latest scene of bloodshed and demagoguery. With a mounting sense of alarm and distaste, I watched as television newscasters and journalists were swept up with activists and street actors, victims, and violent thugs in a death dance. Spurred on by what they saw every day on television, hundreds of thousands of protesters took to the streets in various Arab capitals.

  Palestinians and Israelis soon had their icons to prop up the barbaric image each had of the other. We got ours when a French cameraman captured on film the shooting death of Mohammed al-Durrah. In a matter of minutes the boy, who had been huddled behind his helpless father for protection, was slumped over dead. Viewers watched the father leaning over the body of his son in anguish, while the soldiers continued to shoot, as if one dead Palestinian boy wasn’t enough. The searing images were aired, day after day. The Palestinians called the boy a shaheed, a “martyr.”

  A short time later—on October 12—it was the Palestinians’ turn to prove their savagery. Two Israelis took a wrong turn into Ramallah on their way to an army base and were dragged from their cars, taken to a local police station, and lynched by a wild mob that dipped their hands in the blood of the victims as if in some frenzied pagan dance. This time it was the Italians who brought the repugnant scene to the world’s television screens.

  There is a way,” writes the Viennese playwright Franz Grillparzer, “from humanity through nationality to bestiality.” I felt I had to do something.

  Twenty years earlier, I had entered into public life after a delegation of fellow professors showed up at my office at Birzeit. My recent “disappearance” from politics had taken me back to my basic nature, which was to be an observer and educator, not an activist. However hesitantly, I was now heading back into the fray, this time without a leadership structure to fit into.

  Needless to say, delegations of professors were not knocking on doors looking for new recruits for one faction or the other. In trying to find a political foothold, I felt like a character in a Beckett play, looking for something that didn’t exist. There was no leadership. The “street” had taken charge.

  I didn’t venture far from Jerusalem and my office during those days. Two decades of occupation in the West Bank and East Jerusalem had transformed the political geography to the point of obliteration. Checkpoints and roadblocks made travel nearly impossible. The degree of violence was vastly greater than in 1980, as were the chances of getting hit by a stray bullet, or a perfectly aimed one.

  I continued running the university as best I could and spent a lot of time brooding over a new puzzle: How could one explain such madness breaking out just as peace was within reach? I knew that a mass psychosis had overtaken Palestinians when my dean of the graduate program, otherwise a perfectly rational woman, was as swallowed up by the war euphoria as any fourteen-year-old on the street. What had triggered this insanity? Was it just Sharon’s visit? Was it Islamic militant groups fanning anger into a new Lebanon? Or was it years of frustration at Arafat and the PA? Was Robert Fisk of The Independent right in tracing it back to an entire society being “pressure-cooked to the point of explosion”?2 Was it the pace of settlement co
nstruction that had picked up under Barak? (The Labor government had earmarked three hundred million dollars for it in the 2001 budget.)

  It was clear to me that the increasing spiral of violence served no one’s real interests. Naturally, those on both sides who believed in brute force thought they were making headway in the maddening bloodbath, but the nagging question on my mind was, What’s going to happen after the terrorist bombings and assassinations stop?

  In looking for answers, I watched a lot of television, including our university station, which was an indispensable window into the craziness that was unfolding like a bad B movie.

  To figure out what the man on the street was thinking, I returned to one of my favorite haunts in the Old City, a hummus restaurant just around the corner from the Cotton Merchants’ Market, where renovations of the Khan Tankiz were still under way for our Center for Jerusalem Studies. The opinion on the street was that we were justified in fighting back, even if nothing good was likely to come of it. People cheered on the violence knowing that the Israelis would dish it back at us tenfold. This was one of the occasions when Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed came to mind.

  Jibril and I spoke often, sometimes daily. As always, our assessments were identical. Jibril knew how catastrophic the violence was, and did what little he could to put an end to the rioting—until the Israeli military began employing Phantom jets and Apache helicopters. Bombing raids carried out in Ramallah and Gaza inexplicably targeted Jibril’s security buildings, which only crippled his ability to rein in Palestinian violence. Intentionally?

  For me what was most extraordinary was that there was no one to talk to among our leadership, which made a complete mockery of the Israeli presumption that a small cabal of evil conspirators was behind the violence. I tried to contact some top leaders, but they were nowhere to be found. It wasn’t as if they had gone into hiding, as revolutionaries often do. Most were probably in bed with a bottle of antidepressants.

  Indeed, the only similarity I saw between the intifada of the late eighties and its ostensible redux was that at the start of both, Arafat and his top people were caught by surprise. The chairman—for the Israelis, the evil mastermind responsible for the mess—panicked. At first he and his aids thought the fighting was directed more against them than the Israelis. They were so scared that they ducked out of public view for two months. The rogue’s gallery of corrupt officials who had invested heavily in the Jericho casino or car dealerships now feared they would lose their millions. They, too, took cover.

  It was a double disappearance because even our leaders’ images vanished from the television screens. Whereas previously all you saw on television were Arafat, Abu Mazen, and Saeb Erekat, now other faces crowded the screen: Marwan, Mustafa Barghouti, and others who euphorically predicted justice for the Palestinians and an end to a peace process that had only brought more domination and more misery. Mustafa Barghouti, with an eye on political power, promised that the “Al-Aqsa intifada” would sweep away our old negotiation team and its terms of reference. “Real” negotiators and “genuine” terms were on their way.

  Nonstop television interviews with both established and new “leaders,” “analysts,” and “spokesmen” provided more details than I could stomach. The more I listened, the more the talk reminded me of the hallucinatory rhetoric I once heard sitting in the Egyptian Information Office cafeteria on the eve of the Six-Day War. Our demagogues were telling Palestinians that they had drawn Israel into a final, existential battle.

  At this point, some hitherto-unfamiliar faces made a cameo appearance. Armed militants from the younger generation with roots in the refugee camps appeared from nowhere, telling the nation that an armed struggle was needed to replace the Oslo-style peace process. Their repertoire of “strategies” included whipping up a million Israeli Arabs against their Jewish countrymen. Their fight was not for a democratic state alongside Israel; with the example of Hezbollah having wormed its way into their imagination, their fight was for Islam. The pacifistic Islamic students I had taught in the early eighties were now a very distant memory. Their Islam was just as armed as the Israeli border police, and even more trigger happy.

  A group of such leaders from various factions formed themselves into “a unified command” or leadership of the Al-Aqsa intifada, ruinously believing that demagoguery and leaflets alone could bring back the glory of the intifada of ten years earlier. The more extremism they spouted, the more popularity they enjoyed, and with popularity came a leading role on the reality show taped live by Aljazeera, which in turn became a production center for a fresh crop of “martyrs” and “heroes.”

  Marwan was the one leader I did manage to track down. He was a man I had always admired, a scrappy fighter with a keen mind. But in those days he had lost it. In the most shortsighted and morally questionable act of his life, he reached for a gun.

  Emboldened by the specter of Arab crowds marching from Cairo to Algiers and Baghdad, Marwan began talking about an “intercontinental intifada.” He, who weeks before had been convinced that final peace was within our grasp, quickly reverted to underground guerilla leader, plotting attacks. He came out in public support of a military crusade aimed at the “forces of occupation,” by which he meant soldiers and settlers.3

  He was uneasy that his former teacher wasn’t among those converted to the bellicose spirit he was busy projecting. He had been keeping up with my views through the news and our mutual friends. One day he wanted to talk. He must have felt he could win me over if we sat down face to face.

  We met for lunch in a restaurant in Ramallah. I came with Imad, and accompanying Marwan was a friend from the Fatah Higher Committee days.

  “What, for God’s sake, is going on?” I asked him a few moments after we sat down. “Where do you think all this lunacy is taking us?”

  Marwan laid out his thinking. He began by assuring me that he hadn’t lost his political bearings. A peaceful two-state solution was still very much his political vision, “now more than ever.” What came next sounded dangerously reminiscent of the old Israeli mantra: “Palestinians understand only the language of force.” (In Hegel’s dialectic, slaves end up adopting the thinking of the master.) In his reading of the Israeli political map, he explained, Israel wasn’t yet ready to make the requisite compromises for a just two-state compromise. The Israeli political elite had to be shocked out of its political complacency through pain. Blood had to be drawn.

  “But this ‘intifada’ of yours has absolutely no political message.” My gaze locked onto him. “If your intention is to make Israelis recognize your genuine commitment to peace, this is certainly not what is coming across. All that’s coming across is the cry for blood.”

  “When the right time comes, this message will come out loud and clear. But things aren’t yet ripe.”4 I only watched him without replying. I signaled for the check, pulled out some shekels, and paid.

  “You’re not convinced,” Marwan said as we stood up to leave. I didn’t know what to tell him. “It’ll turn out alright, you’ll see,” he assured me. Marwan is now serving a life sentence in an Israeli prison.

  • • •

  In early 2001 the only meaningful role I thought I could play was precisely the opposite of my clandestine activities during the first intifada. I took to the public stage. I wrote articles, gave lectures, and did what I could to preach some reason. There was still a glimmer of hope, I thought. Clinton was still in office, Barak’s government had fallen, but he, too, was still in office until elections in May.

  At the end of January 2001, with Clinton about to leave office, Barak and Arafat made one last-ditch attempt at peace. Israeli and Palestinian teams went to Taba to try to work out an agreement. The negotiation teams couldn’t have been better. On the Israeli side sat Yossi Beilin, Yossi Sarid, and others with similar political leanings; and on our side were Abu Ala, Nabil Shaʾath, Saeb, and Mohammed Dahlan, the head of security in Gaza. As individuals, the Israeli and Palestinian negotiators brought
with them a great store of energy, goodwill, and creative ideas. They closed important gaps, and this time neither Yahweh nor Allah were spoilers.

  The problem was the changed political map back home. Taba came too late. Arafat was ambivalent because he calculated that it made no tactical sense to conclude an agreement with an Israeli government headed for defeat. Barak vacillated because he wasn’t sure an agreement would win him the upcoming elections. And it probably wouldn’t have given the justified anger in the Israeli street. For Israelis, it was hard to contemplate peace when gunmen in Tulkarem had taken two owners of a sushi bar in the hip Shenkin district of Tel Aviv, led them out to a field, and executed them. The two had come to the West Bank to buy flowerpots for their restaurant.

  Smirking like a satyr, Sharon prepared for elections whose results everyone knew in advance. “The idea of making peace with the Palestinians is absurd,”5 he stated on the campaign stump. The Israeli public supported him to the same degree that they vilified Arafat as the evil spook behind the uprising. It was the stock opinion that the PA’s illegal stockpiling of weapons, far in excess of objective needs, was evidence that the Palestinians weren’t serious about a conclusive peace deal.

  Palestinians practiced their own myth-making after Sharon handily routed Barak in February. Putting on a brave face, our spokesmen pretended to believe that it was better to have an overtly belligerent hawk than an equally belligerent ex-commando camouflaged as a dove. The Palestinians were once again falling into that perennial trap Father knew so well: they thought somehow that the “world” would step in like a deus ex machina and set things right. And a Sharon-led government would only speed up the process: with more disaster and more blood, the international hand of Justice was bound to intervene. Except it never has and never will.