Once Upon a Country

by Sari Nusseibeh

  The final force that drew me back into politics was an intensifying vacuum that destroyed some of the few vestiges of sane Palestinian leadership. At the end of May, the Israelis tried to assassinate Jibril. The Christian Science Monitor got it right with its report:

  To some Israelis, a burly Palestinian police commander named Jibril Rajoub represents their best hope for a peaceful future. Long committed to peace negotiations, he has worked for years to prevent militant Palestinians from attacking Israel. Late Sunday afternoon, Israeli forces fired shells at his house from a tank and a helicopter. If Mr. Rajoub hadn’t been walking between rooms to get better reception on his cellphone, he later said, he might have been killed.

  Coming on top of other actions that Israeli leaders have come publicly to regret, Palestinians are wondering what is going on. Either the most sophisticated military in the Middle East is mistakenly striking at the very Palestinian leaders who have eschewed violence and maintained a willingness to negotiate with Israel—or there is no mistake at all.6

  Wisely, Jibril began to lay low.

  Ten days later, on May 31, moderates lost their leader. I was in my office at the university when Abdel Kader el-Husseini, Faisal’s son, phoned me at my office with the news of his father’s death in Kuwait.

  During the previous months, Faisal had been a ubiquitous presence bravely defending his city, his patrimony, though he never veered away from nonviolence. He was a master tightrope walker who knew how to point his finger at an oppressor without it being wrapped around a trigger.

  Faisal had been on one of his regular fund-raising tours on behalf of a desperate population in East Jerusalem. He had retired early that evening to his hotel bedroom to rest. Two hours later his bodyguard checked in on him and found him dead. He left Jerusalem a seemingly healthy man. Palestinian rumormongers whispered that Israel had had someone slip something into his coffee.

  News of Faisal’s death hit me much like the death of my own father. I sat in my office for a few minutes in stunned silence, doing my best to contain the tears. I thought back on the years in which our bond was like one between father and son. Since the Madrid talks, tensions and misunderstandings had grown up between us, and it took Marwan’s best efforts to patch things up. Shaking my head in disbelief, I recalled how Marwan, Faisal, and I had met nearly every evening at Mother’s house for a month until the air was cleared. “Faisal’s gone,” I repeated over and over, feeling orphaned. Even with the complications that had crept into our relationship, he was a man I had deeply loved.

  At the Orient House the dignitaries were already gathering. The major sheikhs and the mufti joined with the business elite and the Christian bishops to pay their respects, but equally to demonstrate their place in the social pecking order. When I arrived, officials at the Orient House saw me in the crowd and waved me to the front. Shaking my head, I made my way to the back, where the taxi drivers were congregated. There I sat on a tree stump, my face buried in my hands, and wept. At the most hopeful moment in the modern history of our people, the first intifada, the two of us had stood together; and now, with all our efforts in tatters, Faisal was gone. Was this the way Father felt when Faisal’s father, Abdel Kader, was killed? Anguish, but also fear, clawed away at me. What do we do now?

  On the following day I joined the crowds at the Muqata in Ramallah, waiting for the corpse to arrive in a special helicopter. I saw Marwan, who came to me and asked me to give Faisal’s eulogy on behalf of Fatah.

  Arrangements were made to bury him next to his father, at Al-Aqsa. Israeli authorities, in a rare moment of compassion, promised not to block the funeral procession to Jerusalem. Everyone wishing to walk in the procession from Ramallah could reach Al-Aqsa.

  I mingled with the crowds as the slow procession began. What came to mind was Father’s account of how he had walked in Abdel Kader’s funeral, the day following the battle at al-Castal. All along the route crowds joined in. Women wailed at the doorsteps of their homes as the corpse passed. Palestinian flags were hoisted everywhere. Entering East Jerusalem without army roadblocks felt as if Faisal’s death had liberated the city. In a way, I reflected sadly, it took death for Faisal’s dream to come true, if only briefly on the day of his burial.

  After he was laid to rest in the Al-Aqsa grounds, I gave the eulogy. Faisal was not just one man, I declared before the crowd. Jerusalem, its walls, which Faisal loved, and every stone and alley he walked and touched resonate with his memory. And everyone he ran out to help in the middle of the night and whose lives he touched—all will continue to bear testimony of him through their compassion, integrity, and dedication to restore life and honor to our besieged people and our beloved city.

  Forty days later, at the Orient House, I gave a more prepared speech, though this time a hundred heavily armed soldiers patrolling the streets outside tried to prevent dignitaries and guests from attending. I got into the Orient House only by crawling over a back wall. In the speech I recalled my first encounter with Faisal, as he was taking a beating from Israeli soldiers on the day the Al-Aqsa was torched by the Australian religious nut. I also recounted how in 1967 Arafat had waded across the Jordan River, and while trying to build up a local military cadre, he often hid out in Faisal’s house. Through the window I could see soldiers, heavily armed and speaking into crackling walkie-talkies. A helicopter, invisible but loud enough to waken the dead, hovered overhead.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Allies

  ARAFAT WASTED NO TIME in sending out feelers to see if he could recruit me to take over Faisal’s job as the PLO man in Jerusalem and the head of the Orient House, the de facto Palestinian center of government in East Jerusalem. Perhaps Arafat felt he needed somebody from a Jerusalem dynasty to meet visiting dignitaries, and from time to time to shake a fist at the Israelis. What was about to ensue was the story of PECDAR all over again. This time around, however, I got outfoxed.

  I had always been in awe of Faisal’s indefatigable energies at countering Israeli attempts to take over East Jerusalem. At the same time I dreaded the prospect of such a thankless task of stamping out the flames in one corner as the entire field was ablaze. What could one person do to help a city beleaguered by a powerful occupier willing to spend billions to take it over, while Palestinians, backed in theory by the entire Arab and Muslim worlds, were laying out pennies to preserve the city’s Arab identity? The PA had flouted the Oslo Agreement in the number of guns it had bought, but it strangely went along with Oslo when it came to Jerusalem. Villages in the West Bank got more of its investment and attention than East Jerusalem, the heart and soul of Palestinian identity.

  It wasn’t just the certainty that being Arafat’s man in Jerusalem would be a losing proposition that put me off, or my conviction that the only hope for the city was a political deal with the Israelis, nor was it just that the bloodbath was making a bad situation impossibly worse. Another reason I had no interest in the job was because I couldn’t picture myself in a suit and tie welcoming diplomats and playing the role of Jerusalem aristocrat at the Orient House. That was my father and Faisal. I still felt more comfortable with the taxi drivers than with bishops and sheikhs.

  I employed all my prevaricating skills. One way to deflect the pressure on me was to circulate a working paper suggesting that public leaders in East Jerusalem form an informal congress of representatives from the various sectors—religious, educational, business, and professional. Collectively, this body would appoint a secretariat to run the affairs of the Orient House. The idea floated around for a couple of months before petering out. Arafat didn’t push it, no doubt because such a body could have developed too independently for his liking.

  Another tack was something I was busy doing anyway: to speak out against the fantasies of an entire society, which is never an easy proposition, and in our society was potentially deadly. I decided to put my thoughts together in a short newspaper article. What I was aiming at was a variation on what Edward Said, borrowing from the Quakers, cal
led, “speaking truth to power,” though, unlike Said, the power in question wasn’t our leadership, which was well aware of what I thought. The power in need of addressing was the man on the street, both the Arab and the Jew. With all the havoc and devastation, Manichean dualities of “us” and “them,” Arab and Jewish, Palestinian and Israeli, had ceased being useful. Both societies were sinking together. Either we team up as allies to end the mad tango, or we all lose. Simple.

  “What Next?” appeared simultaneously in Arabic and Hebrew newspapers in September 2001. Its message was straightforward: the minute we returned our pistols to their holsters, we’d have to sit down again and talk. And once we did, the taboos we’d been avoiding—Jerusalem, settlements, and refugees—would be on the table. But before tackling these seemingly insurmountable obstacles, it was imperative to remind people of the basic interests both sides shared. The average Israeli sought security and a Jewish state, and the average Palestinian sought freedom from occupation. There was an astoundingly simple formula for both sides to secure their basic interests: two states more or less divided along the 1967 border.

  Israelis needed to know that for them to keep their Jewish state required a free Palestinian state along the 1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital. Palestinians needed to know that to get their state required acknowledging the moral right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state. There could be no blanket right of return into Israel for the refugees:

  We have two rights. We have the right of return, in my opinion. But we also have the right to live in freedom and independence. And very often in life one has to forgo the implementation of one right in order to implement other rights.

  If both sides failed in this out of expediency or weakness, we’d find ourselves one day in a hybrid state that fulfilled neither the Israeli quest for a Jewish state, nor the national Palestinian quest for an Arab state.

  What Next?” took aim at nationalistic delusions. At first the article seemed drowned out by the din of war cries. Those who agreed with me, and some did, didn’t say so too loudly; prudence required their keeping their distance and remaining silent. My detractors fired off articles, claiming, quite rightly, that I was disconnected from the public mood. Continuing with the violence, for them the true path to salvation, was for me a collective suicide mission.

  I quipped to Lucy at the time that I felt like someone seeing a tourist bus heading for an abyss. He stands on the side of the road waving frantically at the speeding bus to warn it to stop, but the vacationers caught in the merriment of the trip—singing songs, eating their lunch, looking out at the passing landscape and at the crazy gesticulations of the pedestrian outside the window—ignore him.

  The one person whose opinion of “What Next?” I still didn’t know was Arafat. When I finally found out what he thought of it, the crafty chairman simultaneously patted me on the back and then strong-armed me into accepting Faisal’s old post.

  For five months I had been studiously avoiding the Old Man and his headquarters, out of fear of being pressured into taking up the PLO Jerusalem post. Soon after “What Next?” appeared, I finally visited him to ask for help in paying salaries at the university. I thought it was safe to show my face because so much time had gone by, and in any case my heretical views disqualified me as Arafat’s “man” in Jerusalem.

  Walking into Arafat’s office I found him in his familiar pose, hunched over papers at his desk. Akram Haniyyah, his adviser, was sitting across from him. The second I saw Akram’s grinning face I should have waved hello to both men, turned on my heel, and walked straight out. Akram always has something brewing inside his head. I should have been on my guard.

  I sat down and fidgeted a bit in my chair because of the awkward silence in the office. Without uttering a word, Akram jotted down some notes on a scrap of paper and handed the paper over to Arafat, who read it and finally lifted his head to look at me. Still in total silence, he passed the scrap of paper to me. On it was written that Faisal’s job was still vacant. I was sure they had practiced the routine before I arrived.

  “Well?” Arafat finally said, leaning back in his chair. Taking off his oversize glasses, he looked straight at me. “Well?”

  I hadn’t expected the topic to come up, so I stuttered out a response. “Well, you see …” I explained some of the details of my plan to set up a collective of leaders, and told him the reasons why I thought no single person could fill Faisal’s shoes. “It’s like this …” But Arafat wasn’t listening. “As I see it …” He looked impatient. I cleared my throat.

  “Someone must represent the chairman before the diplomatic missions in Jerusalem,” Akram cut in. I sat there, rubbing my blue worry beads.

  “Hear that?” Arafat said, staring at me with big watery eyes. “Sari, you can be my point man. This is very important to me.” From this I knew that he had approved of “What Next?”

  The stall tactic I used only sealed my fate. “Everyone already knows I represent you. That’s how diplomats and others view me anyway.”

  “If that’s true, what’s wrong with making it official?” Arafat gently insisted, implying that if I still refused there must be some other reason.

  I had no fallback strategy. Over the years I had always tried to walk the fine line of maintaining my freedom from Arafat’s officialdom without arousing his mistrust, altogether a bad idea. I had managed this friendly balance by never telling him no clearly to his face. There had always been a way to weasel my way out, such as skipping out from the royal palace in Oslo.

  Seeing that I was a defeated man, Akram took a soft-sell approach. “Listen, Sari, you go to those diplomatic cocktail parties in Jerusalem anyway. What we’re asking for is what you’re already doing. It’ll just be official, that’s all. This’ll be a piece of cake for you.” Akram is a wily politician.

  “Well,” I began with a smile of defeat, “if that’s how you want it …”

  “We’ll consider it a done deal,” Akram said, finishing my sentence for me.

  “Great,” Arafat chimed in, and at once agreed to provide emergency assistance to pay my employees’ salaries at the university.

  The next morning, headlines in Arabic and Hebrew papers announced the appointment. The articles went into amazing detail, each with a slightly different version to suit their readers’ particular slant. The Israeli left was eager to ham up the appointment of an Oxford man to counter something the Israeli president Moshe Katzav had told a group of bar mitzvah boys in May after two Israeli boys were found stoned and stabbed to death in a cave near a West Bank settlement: that we Palestinians “don’t belong to our continent, to our world, but actually belong to a different galaxy.” I was Exhibit A that this may not necessarily be true.

  Taking over the PLO Jerusalem job brought back old memories of Father as governor of the city, or of my lavatory office and the stir and exhilaration of the technical and political committees at the Orient House. But Sharon, not Rabin, was prime minister now, and we were not in a peace process but a war. By the time I took up the post, the Orient House was off limits. In August 2001, the Israelis had made sweeping closures of Palestinian national institutions including the Orient House. They padlocked the gate and forbade entry. I set up an office on the second floor of the Imperial Hotel just inside Jaffa Gate. The shabby but charming hotel, redolent of Ottoman days, was a cheap favorite for backpackers.

  On October 15, just three days into the job, I decided to present to the public, in as clear and as forceful terms as I could muster, what I considered my top priority. There were a dozen home demolitions I could have protested, or settlement expansions that were proceeding apace from a dozen different directions. I could have pointed fingers at the post-9/11 President Bush, who had bigger things on his mind than us, while his allies, the American Christian fundamentalists, were trooping through settlements by the thousands, Bibles in hand, to show their support for the Israeli takeover. But I knew, especially after the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington,
D.C., that a different approach was needed to counter an Israeli strategy several layers deep. (One day I figured out, for instance, that the takeover of the Goldsmith’s Souk was part of a plan to link up the Jewish Quarter with isolated Jewish settlements by way of our property.) Reconstituting the Camp David alliance, namely with the United States working with both sides to force a deal, was the only hope of saving Jerusalem. And the only way to get back to the table was for the Palestinian leadership to declare forcibly its rejection of violence and its desire to live in peace side by side with the Jewish state.

  To get this message out, I joined a panel with the Palestinian political scientist and pollster Khalil Shikaki at the Hebrew University.

  On the way to the meeting venue, I ran into the mayor of Jerusalem’s adviser on Arab affairs, Shalom Goldstein, along with my old family friend Nabil Jaʾbari, son of the famous Sheikh Jaʾbari of Hebron.

  Nearing the lecture hall, I was astonished to see a massive crowd near the entrance. My first thought was that a local rock band was playing or maybe a movie was being shown in an adjoining hall. “Perhaps we should stand in line and see what’s going on,” I said, nudging Shalom.

  “Sari, I think they’re here for you,” he said, chuckling.

  “Maybe they want to see what someone from a different galaxy looks like,” I suggested, putting my arm around Shalom’s shoulder.

  Sure enough, the hall was packed. Khalil took the floor first. Using data he had been working on for a decade, he showed how public support for Hamas and violence were inversely proportional to progress in the peace process. The figures from opinion polls and graphs spoke for themselves. The more hope there was, the less violence. Palestinians weren’t genetically crazy or suicidal. Their increasing extremism was a function of despair.