Once Upon a Country

by Sari Nusseibeh

  Jibril’s staff at what was left of his Preventive Security Academy interrogated a number of people who had tried unsuccessfully to become human bombs. The staff determined that 80 percent were motivated not by religion à la Al Qaeda but by anger, depression, and a thirst for revenge.

  One woman was a thirty-five-year-old mother of five. She was arrested by one of Jibril’s men after she asked someone to give her a bomb. In the interrogation, she cited shame as her motivation. Soldiers had tried to strip her naked at a checkpoint and danced around with her as if she were an inflatable sex toy, and in front of a long line of cars and buses full of fellow Arabs. She preferred death, she explained, over having to face her own people after this, especially if she could take a few Israelis with her.

  Another was a twenty-four-year-old woman studying media and communications. She wasn’t religious and evidently harbored no hopes of Paradise as payback. She volunteered as a human kamikaze because Israeli soldiers had forced her at gunpoint to kiss a group of Arab men stopped at a checkpoint.

  Judging by the polls and anecdotal evidence on the streets and in the cafés, as 2002 began, a bizarre schizophrenia was at work among people. People wanted peace, but then there were the appalling scenes of the masses celebrating violence as if in some primal ritual, which didn’t break my belief in the basic decency of the Palestinian and Israeli peoples. They were just being temporarily misled by ideologues and fanatics, and I had no doubt that with a bit of time and some exposure to common sense, they would shake free of the political madness that had enveloped them.

  “The killing of civilians in any form,” I insisted to an Israeli journalist, “reflects a serious psychological state that needs attention and treatment.” Employing a metaphor Muslims could relate to, I told audiences that the best kind of jihad in Islam was that of self-control, or the control of one’s passions and rage. And to a rather astonished David Remnick for an article in The New Yorker, I switched metaphors again: “The Palestinians have to resurrect the spirit of Christ to absorb the sense of pain and insult they feel and control it, and not let it determine the way they act toward Israel. They have to realize that an act of violence does not serve their interest.”

  The image of Christ wasn’t all that far-fetched, as Mother would soon prove. One day, while reading about two extraordinary philosophers with Jewish Viennese backgrounds, I ran across passages about the anti-Semitic scourge of the 1930s. As I read on, I felt the men’s suffocating sense of doom and terror due to their problems with citizenship, residency papers, travel documents, venial bureaucracies, the threat of property confiscation, and other humiliations. All at once I was reminded of my own home and my own people’s fate since 1947.

  I’d always been quite aware of the hard facts concerning European anti-Semitism and how it had led to the barbarism of the Holocaust. But suddenly facts were coupled with emotions. The tale of these two Viennese philosophers gave me an empathic insight into their fate.

  That night, during a visit with Mother, I posed a question. Just suppose, I began, that in the early years of the century an elderly and learned Jewish gentleman from Europe had come to your father to consult with him on an urgent matter. And suppose this gentleman told Grandfather that a looming human catastrophe of unimaginable proportions was about to befall the Jews of Europe. And suppose this gentleman added that as an Abrahamic cousin with historic ties to Palestine, he would like to prevent the genocide to come by seeking permission for his people to return to the shared homeland, to provide them with safety and refuge. What do you think Grandfather would have said? I asked her.

  Her answer surprised me. I was prepared for a long conversation full of conditions and clauses and caveats, but instead she replied straightaway with a wave of her hand, “What do you think? How could anyone have refused?” It was amazing for me how easily compassion sliced through fifty years of pain.

  I quickly thought up another story to illustrate what historically in fact happened. I imagined a frightened Jewish refugee fleeing Europe and parachuting into the Ramle area in search of safety. Gun in hand, as he floats down to earth he suddenly spots my grandfather in Arab headdress standing in the middle of a field gripping a shovel, looking terrified himself. My grandfather, shocked by the sudden appearance of a gun-toting flying man heading down straight toward him, prepares to fend the man off with his shovel. Running scared from the hell of the concentration camps and the gas chambers, the terrorized European logically starts firing at the Arab with the raised shovel.

  And so the two strangers are each driven by fear and terror, totally unaware of the condition of the other. The Jew seeks space to continue living, while the Arab defends his space to the death.

  • • •

  The one good thing that came out of my stint as Arafat’s Jerusalem man was the trouble I managed to stir up. This earned me plenty of criticism and threats, but at least people were talking—a major leap forward in a time of bullets and bombs.

  My position on the right of return kindled a nationwide debate. If it was salutary to get people examining words they’d been chanting for half a century, it wasn’t always safe. Following an acrimonious verbal tussle with the mufti of Jerusalem, I finally agreed to take on two bodyguards. I still have them.

  I got a taste of what the public thought of my views after Jawad Boulos, now the lawyer for the university, invited me to speak to a high school in his village in the Galilee. What was supposed to be a fund-raiser turned into a public trial. “Who put you in charge of annulling the right of return?” one man demanded. Another accused me of talking as though I weren’t part of the leadership but someone “observing events from the side and making proposals.” And a young boy chipped in: “At a time like this, when Israelis are bleeding the Palestinian people white, we need unity and not views that divide and weaken.”

  I was sitting on the stage flanked on one side by the head of the village local council and on the other by Jawad. As the criticism mounted, I quietly scribbled down some notes. A newspaper editor lashed out at me for my position on violence. “How can you compare the violence of the Israeli occupation against the Palestinian people with the intifada that was a response to that?”

  After taking a few more shots from the floor, I stood up to respond. I was actually pleasantly surprised with the climate in the hall. My critics spoke in maturely democratic fashion: open, direct, and without threats or ad hominems. The young boy’s comments especially had astonished me. I thanked them all from the bottom of my heart, reminding them that

  I am really not an expert on these matters—certainly no more than you—and it’s possible that I have been wrong right down the line. I’ve never claimed to have some privileged access to the truth. But I want to say what I think openly and to the end. If I try to cheat myself, I won’t be able to sleep at night. I must be honest with myself, but also with you, and whoever else asks me for my opinion. So, please accept my words as just one man’s honest opinion.1

  The most emotional meeting I had took me into one of the grimmest, most dust-bitten and gun-infested refugee camps in the archipelago: the Deheisheh camp, south of Bethlehem. The meeting place was full of militants from Deheisheh and three other camps in the area. As I was driving there, the voice of reason counseled me to turn around and go home. My heart was banging in my chest, for I had my doubts that I would return home safe and sound. I had decided to go to the camp after leaflets circulating around it accused me of betraying their right to their former homes and lands. A Fatah leader wrote that I had no right to hand over what didn’t belong to me to someone who didn’t deserve it. However foolhardy it may have been, I felt that my position on the right of return affected these people far more than anyone else, and they had a right to hear it from me directly, and to respond.

  Not only did I survive the evening without a scratch, but I even came out with a fresh dose of faith in the integrity of my people. The heated debate, devoid of diplomatic protocol and niceties, went on for three hou
rs. People stated exactly what was on their minds, and what came out was surprisingly civilized. At the end, many approached me and said that while they didn’t like what they had heard—in fact, they disagreed with it totally—they nonetheless respected me for saying it. At least I was speaking openly about existential matters that they knew other PLO leaders were discussing behind closed doors, just not in the open—and especially not in a camp where outraged citizens could string them up. “We respect you for your courage and honesty,” they told me. We all had tears in our eyes.

  Far less pleasant, though not nearly as potentially perilous and entirely without tears, was a quarrel that broke out between Abu Mazen and me in Arafat’s Muqata compound in Ramallah.

  The meeting was billed as just another discussion of various topics related to the PA. Once Arafat read out the agenda for the meeting, Abu Mazen raised his hand. He wished to add another item: my pronouncements on the refugee question. Arafat jotted the item down.

  When we reached that item on the agenda, Abu Mazen began to speak in a low and calm voice. On the whole, I quite admire Abu Mazen for his realism and political courage. Born in the Galilee but expelled with his family in 1948, he grew up in Damascus. He was one of the founders of Fatah and one of the first PLO people to have dialogue with Israelis. He is a decent man free of the opportunism tainting so many of his colleagues. He is repelled by demagoguery or grandstanding. He also knows the Israelis far better than some of his colleagues do, having written his dissertation at the Moscow Oriental College on the history of Zionism.

  In a brief statement, Abu Mazen set forth his objections to my public position on the right of return. It wasn’t, he said, turning to me and staring me in the eyes, that he was an extremist or a demagogue. “You know how pragmatic I am.” But this particular matter was related to the process of negotiations. “You just don’t declare your fallback position free of charge.” For him, giving up on the right of return was a question of tactics. He knew that the specter of millions of Arabs swarming back over the Green Line terrified Israelis. This turned the issue into our trump card. In the Machiavellian logic of modern politics—a game the Israelis played with great flair—how could we afford to give up our strongest hand with nothing in return? Abu Mazen was our chief negotiator at the time. By taking away this negotiating chip, he felt I was torpedoing his strategy.

  There was complete silence in the room, and all eyes were on the two of us.

  My initial response was as calm as his. I told him that I disagreed with his negotiation strategy. In the past, it might have worked, but not now. It was an open secret to our Israeli interlocutors that we weren’t going to insist on the wholesale return of refugees. The only people who weren’t privy to this secret were our refugees and the Israeli people. The people in the camps, I continued, had a right to know what our position was, and that our national interest required that they accept less than full historical justice. The Israeli people also needed to know that we were not planning to swamp their country with refugees. If they knew this, it would strengthen our hand in negotiation, and put the Sharon government on the defensive.

  In essence, I was saying that the right of return had ceased being a trump card, and the time for a step-by-step negotiating procedure should be replaced by “a package deal” approach. It was already clear to Israelis in power what we would be willing to give up under certain conditions. Sharon, the Shin Bet, the army, and other top policy makers all knew what our position was. So why pretend? And by telling the Israelis that we would insist on this right, we would be doing Sharon’s work for him. He didn’t want Israelis to trust us. And if we kept repeating our old slogans, they wouldn’t. Why should they?

  Abu Mazen didn’t like what he was hearing. He raised the pitch of his voice, and I raised mine. “You have to level with us,” I demanded. “What is it you want, a state or the right of return?”

  Now he began to lose his self-composure. “Why do you say that? What do you mean by ‘either/or’?”

  “Because that’s what it boils down to. Either you want an independent state or a policy aimed at returning all the refugees to Israel. You can’t have it both ways.”

  At this stage Abu Mazen resorted to his seniority. “You must stop making those declarations. That’s an order.”

  “I don’t take orders from you,” I snapped back, surprising even myself. “I take them from Yasir Arafat. If he wants me to stop, he can tell me. I’ll let the chairman decide what I should do.”

  No one in the room made a peep.

  I turned and looked at Arafat, who had been watching the two of us like a Ping-Pong match. Softly and kindly, like a gentle grandfather, he began to speak. “Sari, we have to have sympathy for the feelings of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and Chile.” That was all he said. It sounded gnomic, and at first no one seemed to know what he was saying. On hard issues we often joked that he had a La aʾam policy, in Arabic a combination of “yes” and “no.” Pure ambiguity was his gift.

  After the meeting, the consensus was that Arafat had backed my position, but at the price of Abu Mazen’s estrangement from me.

  It was a strangely topsy-turvy time. I was coming out with treasonous statements in newspaper articles, television interviews, and public addresses; people had been murdered for far less. I told people in gun-ridden refugee camps that they had to give up their dream of historical justice, not an easy thing to do among people who still keep the keys to front doors of homes that were dynamited half a century ago. Arafat’s backing was equivocal at best, and there was no guarantee he wouldn’t turn on me without warning.

  With all the trouble I was getting from my own people, out of whatever calculation, the Israeli government chose to begin its own campaign against me. I didn’t know it at the time, but a security expert employed by the police was carefully watching my every step. The file he had on me was getting fatter by the day.

  The Israeli harassment had started already at the end of 2001, when Public Security Minister Uzi Landau labeled me “the pretty face of terrorism.” My statements against suicide bombers, he averred, were nothing more than a conniving “trick” to seduce Israelis into complacence.2

  In December, the Israeli government went beyond verbal assault. Like his namesake the famed submachine gun, the Israeli minister of public security began to take aim.

  Yossi Beilin invited me to a Labor Party discussion group in Tel Aviv. The reception reminded me of the reception at the Hebrew University: awaiting me was a throng of well-wishers eager to listen to my point of view. In the words of one journalist, “The local and foreign media pounced” on me “as though I had been sent by Arafat to do nothing less than co-sign a Palestinian-Israeli peace agreement with Beilin.”3

  A couple of days later, Minister Landau made his first move. I planned a reception for foreign diplomats at the Imperial Hotel to celebrate the Eid ul-Fitr holiday marking the end of Ramadan. The idea was to invite dignitaries for a glass of orange juice and some cookies.

  Landau’s diktat forbidding the event came an hour before the reception was to begin. I was shaving when the telephone rang. Jawad Boulos was on the other line. “Listen, Sari. The Israeli police are waiting for you at the front of the hotel. They’ve declared the reception an illegal security threat.” I finished shaving, put my toothbrush in my bag just in case I would end up spending the night in jail, and drove my car to Jaffa Gate.

  But instead of pasting a note on the front door of the hotel, I waited until the guests had arrived to explain in person that the event could not continue. Landau considered this brazen defiance of his order, and had me and five of my co-workers hauled in. Police surrounded us and marched us off to the Russian compound. Back in jail, I found fond memories flooding back of my arrest during the Gulf War and the motley inmates at the same jail jeering at the absurd radio reports of my being an Iraqi agent. This time there was no such solidarity with the prisoners, though the police, not knowing what to do with us, supplied us with cigarett
es as they listened to a soccer game on the radio. We were released two hours later.

  Landau explained his actions as necessary to save the soul of the Jewish state. Such a reception would have, “heaven forbid, contributed to the loss of sovereignty in Jerusalem.” Sharon backed him up. “This government has made a clear decision not to permit the PA to operate in Jerusalem, the capital of Israel,” he told the Likud Knesset faction. “We were also criticized when we closed Orient House, but this is the policy and this is what it will have to be.”

  Yossi Sarid published an Op-Ed in Haʾaretz accusing Sharon of being “petrified” of me, because I “symbolize a more sober-minded, thoughtful approach that is also nonviolent.”

  What the government was up to seemed obvious. They wanted to provoke an anti-Israeli diatribe—and if they were really lucky, I’d come out with an anti-Semitic slur. With this in mind I had my office put out a press release: “It’s too bad that instead of sending representatives with holiday greetings, the government chose to use an iron fist.” When I was interviewed in an Israeli paper, I tried my best to play up the difference between a quite traditional gathering for cookies and the Israeli bludgeon:

  “Professor Nusseibeh, what did you feel on December 17, when the police banned your event at the Imperial Hotel in East Jerusalem and detained you for questioning?”

  “I was mainly surprised. When the telephone call came, I was standing in front of the mirror in my bathroom, shaving. I didn’t exactly understand what the story was. I didn’t imagine there could be a problem with an event to mark Eid ul-Fitr.”

  “What was this, on your part—naïveté or feigned naïveté?”

  “Naïveté, I suppose. I hope. I am a naïve person. Most of my friends say that about me.”