Once Upon a Country

by Sari Nusseibeh

  “You weren’t angry?”

  “No. I was very surprised, maybe a little amused.”

  “Amused?”

  “Definitely.”

  The New Year 2002 ushered in new attacks. A scholar at the Hebrew University published an article with the title “Sari Nusseibeh—Arafat’s Mouth, but Saddam’s Eyes and Ears.”4 When I told fellow Palestinians, “We are at a crossroads today, and in my opinion, we must take what we can get,” a member of Israel’s cabinet called me a “Trojan Horse” inveigling my way through smooth talk into the credulous soft minds of Israeli leftists, whose critical senses were damaged by having too much conscience. My moderation was engineered to “infiltrate into the heart of Israel’s capital.”5 The Jerusalem Post managed to locate deviousness in a petition I circulated calling for a stop to the suicide bombers:

  Nusseibeh echoes the official PA condemnations of every attack. There is never a moral judgment made, only a cost-benefit analysis. That killing Jews is acceptable is quite simply taken for granted. Once we understand that this is the situation in Palestinian society, we reconcile ourselves with the fact that we are not in a struggle against a political movement for national sovereignty. We are being victimized by a genocidal campaign for our violent elimination supported by the overwhelming majority of Palestinians.

  I was getting used to being cast as a character worse than the Hamas leader Sheikh Yassin. Some of the attacks were amusing. The pro-Israel National Review labeled Father an “Arab nationalist ideologue” and claimed that Mother had carried on a passionate love affair with Evelyn Barker, the “British general responsible for the war against the Zionist underground.” Both Mother and I fell over laughing.

  My daughter Nuzha’s favorite example of character assassination came from a Web site (militantislammonitor.org) that described me in appearance as “Harry Potter as a grandfather” and in behavior more like the evil Lord Voldemort bent on seizing control of the magical world through the practice of the black arts. With my magic wand, I had turned Al-Quds University into a “well-known center of terror activity.”

  An unusual visitor came to my office one day. Ami Ayalon was a former commander in chief of the Israeli navy and until recently the head of the feared Shin Bet. I knew of him primarily through public statements he made as the Shin Bet chief warning of an explosion; and then once the explosion had occurred, of how the Palestinians still desired peace but wouldn’t buckle to military might. In the December 2001 issue of Le Monde Diplomatique he had been dismissive of the Camp David legend that “Israelis had been generous and [the Palestinians] refused,” and of the even bigger fable that the so-called second intifada had been planned.6 He knew that it had been a spontaneous revolt fed by hopelessness. “We [Israelis] say the Palestinians behave like ‘madmen,’ but it is not madness but a bottomless despair.” I admired him for his directness and mental precision.

  We had met once several months earlier in London, when he showed up with a well-known Likud member to a meeting at the London School of Economics. At that meeting Ami asked me if Palestinians were prepared to respond positively to an initiative.

  “Sure. Why not?”

  This time Ami wore the expression of a man with serious business on his mind. His smoothly shaved pate seemed to glow as if behind it was a brain spinning like a rotor. I asked him to take a seat. “What can I do for you?” This was the only thing I could think of to say to the former master of the Shin Bet.

  Wasting no time, he explained to me that after our chat in London he wrote up a proposal. He’d already discussed it with several Palestinians, who liked it, but everyone told him that for it to go farther, I was the one he needed to contact.

  Amazingly, as he would later explain, during his tenure in the navy he didn’t have the foggiest notion what was driving the Arab-Israeli conflict. No matter how many meetings he sat through with the general staff, he still didn’t know a thing. “It’s not that I’m dumb,” he said in an interview, “it’s something that you also find in other senior officers. When you’re in the military, you’re familiar only with the military angle.”

  It was only when he became head of the Shin Bet that this began to change. Ami made his way to the top of Israeli intelligence because of his keen intellect and his willingness to learn, even at the expense of cherished legends. He did what any good administrator does: he spent much of his time snooping around, educating himself, reading intelligence reports from interrogations, but also acquainting himself with our history, culture, and literature. He read poets like Mahmoud Darwish, the man who wrote our declaration of independence. Over time he formed a mental picture that sounded like a gloss on my message to the students at The Hebrew University: Palestinians and Israelis actually mirror one another. By a large majority both peoples want a peaceful solution and are willing to make big compromises to get it.

  Ami came to the additional conclusion that Sharon’s tactics of bulldozing orchards and homes, seizing territory, and caging Palestinians into South African–style Bantustans—disconnected territories surrounded by fortified Israeli towns and military areas—would create a festering sore that would only encourage more fanaticism. Something had to be done.

  He came up with a plan but was uncertain if he could find prominent Palestinians to support it publicly. In his experience, Arabs would talk to an Israeli, agree with him, smoke a water pipe with him, call him a friend, and invite him over for dinner, they would just never put their name on a joint Israeli-Palestinian document. They wouldn’t come out in the open and say what they were perfectly willing to repeat over and over in private.

  Sitting in my office, Ami narrated how, following our conversation in London, he had approached various Palestinian political figures. They all liked his plan and assured him that in the future they would be willing to back it. They just couldn’t be the first. If he wanted to push ahead, they told him, talk to Sari. “They thought you might be crazy enough to do it.”

  “Do what?” I asked.

  Ami placed a single sheet of paper on my desk. I saw he was missing half a finger, the result of a childhood accident. He asked me to read it.

  “I don’t want to read it. I want to hear it from you.” It was important for me to watch him as he presented his ideas. If he had given me the impression of being just another game-playing political huckster, I would have responded with manipulation of my own, and the conversation would have ended there. But unlike most politicians on both sides of the conflict, he spoke viscerally and honestly.

  As taut as a spring, Ami snapped out the principles at the heart of the paper. His thinking went like this: with a piecemeal approach, the conflict would never get solved. As quickly as possible we must put all the most contentious issues on the table up front, and leave the details for a later stage. Ami’s approach was the exact opposite of Oslo.

  The positions he outlined were very close to those arrived at by the two negotiation teams at Taba: two states along the 1967 border; no mass return of refugees; a demilitarized Palestinian state; and Jerusalem as the capital of two peoples. What I found far more intriguing—these positions were commonplace by this point—was the plan’s more subversive aspect. “The only way to force the leaders to finally sign a deal,” he said glancing up from the page, “is by first winning over both peoples.” His was a bottom-up, grassroots approach. For once, the people should tell their leaders what to do. Ami threw out a million as a good figure. “Yes, I think a million signatures should do the trick.”

  I liked it. There was elegance in a million people forcing politicians to finally admit things they already knew but had been too afraid or too dishonest to say publicly. It’s like telling a con man you’re on to him so there’s no point in carrying on with the charade. Ami also struck me as an ideal partner. His keen mathematical and strategic mind was entirely free of sentimentality. I admired his wound-up, frenetic energy and boundless assertiveness and determination. He clearly was not a person dogged by the cosmic doubts I’d
wrangled with since childhood. His background in the navy and the Shin Bet also allowed him to cut through the propaganda of the right and the fool’s paradise of the left in order to address the basic interests of both peoples. With his security credentials, I thought there might be a chance to reach the mainstream Israeli public, maybe even Likud supporters.

  “Fine, I agree.” We shook hands.

  “Don’t you want to read the paper first?”

  “In due time.”

  I’d first met my new Inspector Javert a couple of years earlier, in what I thought at the time was pure coincidence, during a demonstration in the Old City against Jewish extremists stealing Arab property. All the Palestinian bigwigs were there. As usual, I trailed behind the procession chain-smoking and pondering some unanswerable riddle. At one point I asked a slightly bearded man walking next to me for a light. I assumed he was just another demonstrator. He gave me a light, and then took the opportunity to strike up a conversation with me in Arabic shot through with Hebrew inflections. Introducing himself as Rubin Barkov, he handed me his card. We shook hands.

  I’d heard the name before: he worked for the police as a security adviser, a specialist on the Arabs. “I know Faisal very well,” he told me. “We’re close friends.” He told me that Faisal’s picture was hanging on the wall of his office. Barkov said all this with friendly exuberance. “If you ever have any problems, I can help you. I’ve got connections.”

  I put the card in my blazer pocket and forgot all about it. Now, in March 2002, Jawad Boulos told me Barkov had asked him to arrange a meeting. He wanted to get to know me better.

  I received Barkov with all the hospitality I could muster. My hospitality lasted long enough for him to take a seat and open his mouth. He began issuing threats about the university, which was, according to him, entirely illegal and should be shut down. His tone was pompous, not that of a guest but that of a threatening occupier. Rubin had a triumphant smirk on his face.

  “You’re the most dangerous Palestinian we have,” he stated, as if he were a zookeeper speaking about his animals. “You’re a wolf in sheep’s clothing.” He told me to watch out, as my political activities at the Imperial Hotel and the university might lead to “undesirable consequences.”

  I could have taken his rudeness if it had been in an interrogation room at the Russian compound, but not in my own office. “I am a man being attacked by my own people,” I snapped, “and now you say I am worse than bus bombers who kill children.” I told him he could do whatever he wanted, even tear down the Noble Sanctuary if he liked, but I refused to put up with his offensiveness here. “Get the hell out of my office!” I pointed to the door. Visibly shaken, Barkov scuttled out.

  My lawyer, Jawad Boulos, who was there watching the scene, ran after him. “You must be mad!” he said in the stairwell. “How can you accuse Dr. Nusseibeh of being a wolf?”

  “You know how much I like Sari personally,” Rubin went on, full of emotion, “but I know what I know. Sari is the most dangerous Palestinian enemy we have.”

  Jawad assured him I was a man of peace.

  “No, no, no. He can’t fool me. I know him.”

  Jawad ended their brief conversation with a hypothesis that still rings true today: “You’re afraid of Sari and people like him because you don’t like seeing moderates bravely speaking out against the right of return and violence. You’d rather deal with Arafat or Sheikh Yassin because they give you the excuse to do whatever you want.”

  At about this time Jane’s Foreign Report published details on the army’s plans to retake the West Bank and smash the PA. The Israeli attack would be launched immediately after a major suicide bomb blast. “The ‘revenge’ factor is crucial. It would motivate Israeli soldiers to demolish the Palestinians … It would also enable Israeli ambassadors and other officials to claim in talks with foreigners that the military action was a justified retaliation.”7

  The various verbal and police attacks on me, especially Inspector Javert’s, got me thinking about Sharon’s strategy. He knew how to elicit the kind of reaction from us that would then be a justification for going one step further. Each terrorist attack allowed the Israelis to expand their grip on the Occupied Territories by building more settlements. In the wake of one attack, Housing Minister Natan Sharansky—a man of sterling inconsistency who writes in his bestselling book on democracy, “Rights are secured by dissent and the free participation of the governed”—issued tenders for seven hundred new housing units in the West Bank. A few months later, following the bombing of a pizzeria in Jerusalem, Sharon and his security chieftains shuttered up several more Palestinian administration offices in and around Jerusalem.

  In my calculation, Sharon’s plan sought to render impossible another Camp David by destroying the PA, and then to implement a Sharonian settlement, which was to give the Palestinians scattered bits of territory in the West Bank and Gaza, all under hermetic security scrutiny by Israel. In Jerusalem, Israel would employ its vast military superiority to cement its rule over hundreds of thousands of unwilling civilians. All Sharon needed was for a few more Palestinian kamikazes to blow themselves up, thus allowing him to place the blame for his actions squarely on us. If an animal bites, you have to put it on a chain.

  I went to Arafat’s Muqata compound in Ramallah to warn him of the coming apocalypse. He didn’t dispatch the bombers any more than he personally pocketed bribes. But he didn’t do all he could to root out the problem, because he didn’t recognize the evil the bombers were causing. It is a certain kind of craziness not to recognize a pattern, especially a debilitating one like repeatedly shooting yourself in your own foot.

  The Muqata had a phantasmagorical quality to it that day. It was business as usual, and no one seemed aware of the abyss we straddled. In one office after the next Arafat’s top aides were still vying for positions and new cars; and while the Israelis were finishing off the final preparations for reconquest, Arafat and his aides continued in their delusion that they were the masters of their own fate.

  I managed to get a private meeting with the chairman. He was unfocused, his lips quivered, he seemed confused. The last time Sharon and Arafat went at it during the siege of Beirut, he was younger, more confident, a real leader. Now, he was uncertain of himself. For the first time in my life, I pitied him.

  I tried to get my point across by using an example. “Do you play chess?” I asked him. He looked at me quizzically without answering. “Well,” I barreled on, “I think the game Sharon is playing is like chess.”

  “How so?” asked Arafat, his large lips white and bloodless.

  “In chess, as you know,” I said, explaining the obvious, “a clever opponent will seduce you into thinking a certain move is safe and can help you win, when in fact it’s a trap. What you don’t realize is that your opponent is thinking ahead several steps with a much bigger target in mind.” He remained silent. His gaze drilled into me. “Chairman Arafat,” I went on, “the Israelis are out for checkmate.”

  “What is this?” he wanted to know. “What do you mean? Who’s being put into checkmate?”

  “You, of course!” I replied. “You are!”

  Now his lower lip protruded out like that of a pouting child. He didn’t say a word. Arafat couldn’t shake off the old logic of anticolonial wars: of him, embodying the Palestinian cause, against the oppressor. It went against the grain for him to give up violence unequivocally and publicly as a strategic option.

  Two weeks later the Israeli army attacked Arafat’s headquarters, cutting him off from the rest of the world.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  The Iron Fist

  The Bible says, “I have set before you life and death;

  therefore, choose life.” The time has arrived for everyone

  in this conflict to choose peace, and hope, and life.

  —PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH ON JUNE 24, 2002

  I HADN’T VISITED THE GRAVE SITE in a couple of years, so one day I took a walk to a park in W
est Jerusalem. My destination was an old Muslim cemetery squeezed between Wolfson Park and Jerusalem’s premier bar scene. I could hear the sounds of raucous young crowds when I found my way to a mausoleum housing an ancestor from the fourteenth century. The thick-walled tomb was padlocked, but through small grilled windows a generation of bar-goers had filled it with beer bottles, half-eaten candy bars, condom wrappers, cigarette butts, and other debris. There was no name on the tomb, no sign of my family’s long heritage in Jerusalem. Two years before, I had tried to affix a small plaque to the mausoleum, identifying its inhabitant. The next day the Jerusalem municipality took it down. I hadn’t had a license. The melancholy sight of a forgotten grave got me thinking about three generations of Nusseibehs: this fourteenth-century ancestor, Father, and me. Curious thoughts about time and change came to mind. Here I was, standing next to a family monument while watching overhead the Apache helicopters and F16s screaming off to West Bank cities in Israel’s first full-scale invasion of Palestinian territories since the Six-Day War.

  The invasion had begun. The trigger referred to in Jane’s Report came to be known as the Park Hotel Passover Massacre, a Hamas suicide bombing in March 2002 that killed 30 hotel guests and wounded 140 during the Passover meal. It was a ghastly crime no government could have ignored. Sharon surely had to do something. But he and his Israeli planners weren’t interested in punishing the guilty; their massive retribution wasn’t even directed against Hamas in Gaza. The blind Sheikh Yassin continued his daily rounds without a care in the world. Sharon’s invasion, following the plan Jane’s Report had talked about, was a studied and logical hammer blow designed to destroy the remnants of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.

  The incursion, dubbed the Iron Fist, began with the bombardment of Arafat’s Muqata compound, leaving Arafat and his aides without food or utilities. On Abu Dhabi television Arafat, the shivering old revolutionary with Parkinson’s, asserted his defiance amid the rubble. “God is great,” he muttered. “Don’t you know me by now? I am a martyr in the making.” He said three times, “May Allah honor me with martyrdom.”