Once Upon a Country

by Sari Nusseibeh

  Now it was my turn. I didn’t have any graphs or numbers, no empirical case studies to prove anything. First I stated something no one in the audience needed reminding of: that the Palestinian uprising was hopelessly mired in bloodshed. Next I came out with an idea supported by common sense, and it was a measure of the mood that summer that my piece of common sense was the most startling announcement my audience could have imagined—because in our era of suicide bombings it had become unthinkable: “Israelis and Palestinians,” I told them, “are not enemies at all.” A disbelieving hush spread over my listeners. “If anything, we are strategic allies.”

  The only sound I heard from the audience was coughing and some sniffles. Israelis may think that America is their real ally, I continued, and Palestinians think that Arabs or Muslims are theirs; in truth, the only two parties who are objectively allied with each other are the Israelis and Palestinians, because, like it or not, we have a shared future. Our mutual interest that the future be better than the present creates an objective alliance between us.

  I went on to show that violence and force were self-defeating. “Israel cannot break the Palestinian will to be free by force, just as Palestinians cannot use force to push Israel back behind the ‘67 borders. Not only is the use of force inhumane, it is also politically useless. Only reason, as a guideline for negotiations, can dictate the terms of a deal that serves the interests of both peoples.

  “Our shared future has to provide Israel with a secure guarantee for its existence as a Jewish state, but it also has to provide Palestinians with a secure guarantee for their freedom and independence in their own state.”

  What I had written in “What Next?” underlay my lecture. Negotiations could lead to frustration and extremism unless they isolated and addressed the source of our respective national diseases. Palestinians must give up the dream of return, Israelis the idea of settling Greater Israel, and both sides the prospect for unilateral sovereignty over all of Jerusalem.

  My role as Arafat’s Jerusalem man guaranteed that talk of Palestinians and Israelis actually being allies generated outrage back in my side of the city. But one thing I said to the students at the Hebrew University that didn’t draw much attention at the time went back to my reading of Avicenna:

  Long ago, the prophets that wandered this land taught humanity a belief in God and in life after death. Today, we sadly have to make do without such miraculous messengers sent by God. We’re still in need of a miracle, and it’s up to us to perform it. Just as our forefathers were won over to the belief in life after death, we must develop faith in life after the bloody conflict, after the horror. Our peoples together can bring about such life. They can perform the miracle.

  Many Israelis responded to my line about our being allies as merely the private sentiment of a moonstruck dreamer like the errant knight of La Mancha. As I would soon learn, there were people in the Shin Bet and the government who deciphered my peaceful words as perfidious coded messages preaching a murderous incitement. Such talk was, according to their convoluted logic, a very clever way of undermining the Jewish state. It was a dirty PLO trick to dupe the credulous Israelis into thinking we extraterrestrials were humans after all.

  Palestinians at least knew I was speaking openly, and as I had anticipated, my talk aroused shock and disbelief. “What sort of sophistry is this? How could our enemies be our allies? How can we have common interests with snipers shooting down children in the morning and hanging out in Tel Aviv bars in the evening?”

  No sooner did my words hit the press than irate fellow Palestinians began demanding I be relieved of my new position. I had made plenty of unpopular comments before, but as I was now Faisal’s successor, those words carried more weight. Threats and warnings came in from all sides. An organization of Palestinians living in the diaspora began circulating a petition to get me fired. “We urge you to write immediately to PLO Chairman Yasir Arafat,” went the group’s chain letter, “to demand that Dr. Sari Nusseibeh be dismissed forthwith from his appointment as political representative in East Jerusalem.” “Watch out!” others warned me. “Don’t cross the chairman’s red lines. Remember what happened to Faisal!” Others cautioned me about “the Palestinian street”—assassination in short. Mother let me know in her wise but weary voice that I was wasting my time. “It’s all for nothing. It’s all lost. The Israelis will never agree to a thing.” She was also afraid I’d become a target for fanatics.

  My reply to all my nervous friends and family was that I was not a threat to anyone, because I had no personal political ambitions. “I’m not a political leader,” I explained to an interviewer for an Israeli newspaper. “I am here only because I have to be.”

  To the fellow academics trying to get me fired, I sent my own reply:

  Dear Sirs,

  I read your appeal to ask Chairman Arafat to dismiss me from my new post. I would like you to add my name to the list of those signing the appeal since, amongst other reasons, this assignment seems to undermine my ability to express myself freely.

  I spent the next two months sorting through files and materials on the administration of East Jerusalem. It was like digging into a bankrupt company. There was no master plan for running the city, and no budget. Arafat’s habit of doling out money according to whim rather than policy bred corruption. To an Israeli interviewer I explained how people were “living in substandard conditions, leading miserable, depressing lives. People barely have enough to eat. They can hardly remember what it means to lead a normal life.” Thirty-five years of occupation had destroyed a common sense of citizenship. People had become passive and myopically focused on their private concerns. I wanted to snap them out of their collective torpor through a “new dream of a different life. It is our task to implant that dream in the minds of people and to bring about its realization.”1

  The first thing I did was to ask my university team for help in putting together a comprehensive financial plan for East Jerusalem. Within weeks the budget was on Arafat’s desk. Just as I had feared would happen, the request was archived.

  The second thing I did was establish a local political committee made up of important civic and religious figures, businessmen, politicians, and some of the remaining patricians in the city. The working assumption behind the scheme was that by banding together we could achieve more, and resist Israeli colonization more effectively, than in our otherwise anarchistic ways. After two months of work and meetings, I gave up, and for two reasons: Arafat wasn’t keen to see it succeed, and Israeli authorities had stepped in to outlaw it.

  The most productive use of my time in the post wasn’t with the PLO but with Peace Now, which had become nearly as marginalized in Israeli society as the peace camp had in my own. We were all scattered individuals whistling in the wind.

  Some of the leaders of Peace Now and I met on various occasions and at various venues—my office, restaurants, hotel lobbies, and so on—to hammer out a short statement we called the Time for Peace document, which outlined a common vision. Violence of course had to stop, and talks had to resume on the basis of three principles: two states along the 1967 lines, Jerusalem as a shared capital, and a just and practical solution to the refugee problem. We added the word just in order to get Palestinians to support the initiative.

  Our plan was to mobilize public support for an end to the conflict. We wanted to launch the campaign with a signature ceremony in which public figures from both sides would sign off on the Time for Peace document. Following the ceremony—went the plan—we would stage a series of joint peaceful protests to get the word out to both populations that there was still hope, still a solution, still a chance for a miracle. I was in touch with Antonio Bassolino, the governor of the region around Naples, who promised international backing for the launch. He promised to be at the Imperial Hotel for the signing ceremony on December 28, 2001.

  On that day the hotel was bursting with people and activity. A peaceful march organized by Peace Now and Women in Black (a brave Is
raeli antiwar group) brought a large group of Israelis together with Palestinians and foreign supporters. The march snaked its way through Jerusalem, and ended at the entrance to the hotel inside Jaffa Gate. Attending our signing ceremony were Knesset members from the Labor and Meretz parties, along with Peace Now activists. Hundreds of Palestinian activists and public leaders attended. Close to three thousand people added their signatures to a book attached to the Time for Peace document.

  Our spirits were high. So were our hopes. Governor Bassolino, Yossi Sarid, Yossi Beilin, and Lucy and I walked out onto the balcony overlooking the square where the peace marchers were assembled, and released a flock of white doves into the sky above the marchers.

  The following day we began a public campaign. We set up our headquarters in the Imperial Hotel, and with support from the European Union, we began planning for a series of major events. One was the Human Chain initiative, slated to take place the next June. Our plan was to bring out hundreds of thousands of Israelis and Palestinians to form a human link all the way from the northern tip of the West Bank to the southern tip of Gaza. We wanted to demarcate our future border physically.

  It was at this point that my Inspector Javert began to watch my every move.

  Chapter Thirty

  Checkmate

  IN MY LECTURE at the Hebrew University I returned to a theme I had explored in my dissertation on Avicenna: miracles. How is it possible, I asked, that an act of the will can turn one thing into its opposite? Standing on the stage before a crowd of Israeli students and faculty, I said we needed to develop the miraculous knack of turning hatred into understanding.

  Their response taught me that we didn’t have to wait for an act of divine intervention, however appreciated it would have been. The empathy those in the audience showed, their lack of public hostility, revived in me the belief I had the first time I set eyes on the badly dressed Israelis cutting in line at Ben Gurion Airport in 1967: that some mysterious bond connects our two peoples. We are allies.

  My talk at the university was also a good reminder of how insanely duplicitous Middle Eastern politics can be. Things are never what they seem to be. How do you make sense of Barak, a thoroughly secular man, torpedoing the Camp David talks over the Holy of Holies; or Marwan, in tears after the summit failed, planning ambushes months later; or Sharon and his ilk telling the world that they were strategic partners in President Bush’s war on terror while they were attacking Palestinian moderates, destroying the PA’s ability to govern, and leaving the field wide open to Hamas? In my case, just as I was sticking my neck out farther than ever, my Inspector Javert and the Israeli right labeled me the smiling face of Palestinian terror, indeed the “most dangerous Palestinian alive.”

  Israelis went back to the old strategy of hitting the moderates while leaving the fanatics alone. They did this not because our feuding tribes were so far from peace, but because peace was so near, like a ripe plum ready for the picking. Polls on both sides showed that the desire for peace was far stronger than the thirst for blood. This scared Sharon as much as it did Sheikh Yassin. If the Israeli and Palestinian people were allies in peace, some of our leaders were allies in stoking the conflict.

  In 2001 we needed all the miracles we could get, but they were in short supply. Classes at Al-Quds were often cancelled because of the fighting. The closures made movement from the West Bank to Jerusalem impossible, forcing us to move the humanities program from Beit Hanina to a high school in the West Bank.

  The campaign to get me ousted from the Jerusalem job picked up steam. It was easy to ignore—because I, too, wanted Arafat to get rid of me. I already had my hands full keeping the university hotheads from drawing the Israeli soldiers into a pitched battle on campus.

  My first attempt to resign as Arafat’s Jerusalem man took place a couple of months after I assumed the post. The strategies, initiatives, and proposed reforms in Jerusalem city management were totally ignored. I felt that a PLO presence in Jerusalem was simply a fig leaf placed over a systematic Israeli colonization we were powerless to stop. (A daily reminder of this was a new highway, appropriately named after Menachem Begin, which cut my neighborhood of Beit Hanina in half, and connected the booming settlements of Neve Yaʾakov, Ramot, and Pisgat Zeʾev with West Jerusalem.) Feeling that my own family’s 1,300 years of history was on the line, I kept pounding away on the idea of returning to Camp David–style talks, and fast. Only in serious final status negotiations could we prevent Jerusalem from becoming totally lost to us.

  With calls to get rid of me growing louder by the hour, I finally wrote up a letter of resignation and went to see Arafat. The letter stated that though I valued serving in the PLO, I cherished my freedom to speak my mind even more. If the chairman didn’t like what I was doing, I would gladly spare him the trouble of firing me. I’d quit.

  I handed him the resignation.

  “What’s this?” He quickly read it and handed it back to me.

  “As you can see, it’s undated.” I motioned to the top corner of the page and put it on his desk. “You can fill in any date you want. Whenever you need to, just date and sign it, and fax it to my office.”

  As was his custom, he took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes, which looked bloodshot from too little sleep, too many worries. “But why are you doing this? Is anyone putting pressure on you?”

  “No. I actually thought you might be under pressure on my account.”

  “Bullshit” is a good translation of what he snapped out. The chairman handed me back the paper. “You think I’d bow to pressure to stop you from speaking your own mind?”

  This was another example of Arafat playing the trapeze act, carefully balancing himself between moderates and militants, unwilling and perhaps unable to come down firmly on either side.

  In January 2002, the day we launched the People’s Peace Campaign with fanfare at the Imperial Hotel inside Jaffa Gate, the Israelis intercepted a four-thousand-ton ship loaded with Iranian-made Katyusha rockets, mortars, mines, and advanced explosives plying its way around the Arabian Peninsula en route to Gaza. It was perfect propaganda for the Israeli right. For just as the PLO man in Jerusalem was holding hands with Israelis, other PLO types were arming themselves to the teeth.

  A mass demonstration we planned with Peace Now on the spot in Tel Aviv where Rabin had been gunned down foundered on terror. The crowd of thirty thousand we had expected never materialized because an hour before the demonstration there was another terrorist bombing. The Israelis understandably preferred to sit home and follow the grisly news reports.

  The Human Chain project we organized with Peace Now also failed, in spite of months of hard work. To strangle our efforts at forming a human chain along the length of the Green Line, the Israeli authorities simply tightened the screws, closing off some areas, imposing curfews in others, and turning back international supporters at Ben Gurion Airport.

  All the while, violence on the Palestinian street was getting out of hand. Whatever the cause or causes, the bloodletting exposed a basic difference between our feuding tribes. On the whole, the Palestinian reaction to Israeli heavy-handedness was haphazard, emotional, and driven by blind rage. The so-called “uprising” continued as it had begun: a long series of improvised blunders. As soon as it was hijacked by infantile militarism, 99 percent of the Palestinian population was defenseless against the draconian Israeli counteroffensive. Israel’s response was very determined and cold-blooded, and whether intentional or not, it was perfectly suited to destroying our governmental ability to calm people down.

  When Arafat finally called for a stop to the violence (it took a lot of prodding), we seemed at last to have turned a corner. Enter Sharon again. Just as word of the cease-fire came, the Israeli prime minister ordered the assassination in broad daylight of a highly revered and popular militant activist in Tulkarem. The order was carried out, and Palestinian violence flared up again in response. And so it was, each time there seemed to be a lull, Sharon stoked the fires like
a witch her brew.

  Then of course there was the attitude among a frighteningly high number of Palestinians: “The Israelis have their Phantoms; we have our moving bombs.” At first suicide bombings were almost entirely the work of Hamas or Islamic Jihad, and those groups’ popularity soared. “There are a hundred thousand Palestinians willing to become kamikazes,” Abu Ala told Joshua Hammer of Newsweek, reflecting on the public mood. Not to be outdone by Hamas, some people in Fatah decided that to compete with Hamas they might have to adopt its methods. The grim mood among Palestinians guaranteed a steady supply of willing suicide bombers.

  Humiliation has always been Israel’s most powerful weapon against us. From the Palestinian perspective, this can either lead to a stronger will and greater sense of autonomy, or destroy a person’s self-worth, tilling the soil for the nihilism of terrorists.

  When a suicide bomber struck in 1996, there had been near-universal condemnation and abhorrence, because people still held out hope in the peace process. Now, five years later, it had become the order of the day, with hardly a peep of protest. When I condemned the insanity of these suicide bombers, few dared join me.

  One day Lucy rushed to bring Nuzha home from school. A suicide bomber, passing in front of the school on his way to his target, feared a nearby policeman was on to him, and detonated his explosive belt. His severed head flew into the schoolyard where the children were playing.

  Jibril loathed the attacks as much as I. “I spent 18 years in Israeli jail for fighting the Israeli occupation,” he told one reporter, “but never would I have aimed purposefully an attack against civilians … Resistance against the occupation is one thing, and using pernicious means to kill people just because they are people is something else.”