In cities all over the West Bank, tanks and armored carriers spread out while snipers took positions on rooftops. The high civilian toll was driven higher due to assaults on ambulances and doctors trying to get to the wounded. The Israelis shot up the pacifist Quaker high school where I had sent my sons. It joined a list of ninety other schools shelled by the Israeli military.
For me, the clearest signal that the Palestinians were at their wits’ end was the way the invasion intensified the cult of the suicide bomber. Palestinian public opinion was whipped into a hysterical adulation of violence as if it were the sacred ground of being. A militia leader in Bethlehem spoke of “resistance in Israel’s cities and mayhem from the Galilee to Cairo.”1 It was worse among the youth, for whom the shahid batal, the “martyr hero,” became a kind of pop star. As a leader of the PFLP told an American journalist, “Thousands of young men and women are ready to be blown up. This is a new phenomenon. You have no idea how big it is.”2 All over, children were being taught to handle guns and jump through hoops of fire. So-called “collaborators” were strung up by hysterical mobs.
The incursion destroyed whatever was left of the PA’s administrative ability to govern. The Israeli political scientist Baruch Kimmerling coined the term politicide to describe his government’s plan. In the New Left Review, Kimmerling defines politicide as a “process whose ultimate aim is to destroy a certain people’s prospects—indeed, their very will—for legitimate self-determination and sovereignty over land they consider their homeland.”3 How else do you make sense of soldiers ransacking the PA’s Bureau of Statistics, or the Israeli police shutting down the Arab Chamber of Commerce offices? Troops also ransacked the Palestinian Ministry of Education, destroying computers and confiscating records.
Whatever remained of Jibril’s security apparatus couldn’t have put up a fight even if he had given the order, which he didn’t. This didn’t prevent Arafat from portraying Jibril—who had been warning Arafat against terrorism since the second intifada began—as a failure. In a tête-à-tête, hot-tempered Arafat pointed a gun at him and relieved him of his duties.
The Guardian ran a story: “Israeli intelligence officials began hunting members of Mr. Arafat’s administration, including Sari Nusseibeh.” A dragnet swept hundreds of activists into Israeli prisons. My old friend Sameer’s youngest son was sentenced to three years in prison for a trifle. (Another son was already serving life for murdering a settler.) Marwan was cornered in Ramallah. He was lucky to have escaped the Israeli assassination teams combing the territories. “I am not a terrorist,” he said after his arrest, his fists shackled together, “but neither am I a pacifist. I am simply a regular guy from the Palestinian street advocating only what every other oppressed person has advocated—the right to help myself in the absence of help from anywhere else.”4
The “checkmate” worked as planned, and the West Bank degenerated into warlordism. In many towns, vigilantes and hooligans took over, and boys with peach fuzz for whiskers lugged around machine guns. This made the job of Israeli propagandists easy. Which democratic, freedom-loving country could be expected to sit down and talk peace with such people?
Driving to Beit Hanina from my office in Jerusalem I often saw smoke coming up from Ramallah, as if from a monumental funeral pyre. My two edgy bodyguards would turn their eyes to the skies to look out for an Israeli hit squad flying low in an Apache helicopter. In the darkness we knew that all we would see would be a flash of light before the explosion.
I was at the Ambassador Hotel with the Italian ambassador watching the Israeli bulldozers raze large parts of the Muqata on television when a call came from someone inside Arafat’s office. We discussed trying to get some sort of international protection for those holed up in the compound, when the person on the line passed the phone over to the chairman. I promised Arafat I would do what I could to help.
“Are they going to kill Arafat?” asked one of my university staff members with me at the Ambassador. He was the Fatah student who had argued with the Hamas followers in my office for ten hours.
“I doubt it.” I knew they wouldn’t. Sharon needed Arafat to accompany his jingle “There is no one to talk to.”
As the PLO man in Jerusalem, I was on my own. It was of course absurd to expect a budget or any kind of help from a leadership caged in a bombed-out office complex in Ramallah. My role was reduced to making sure the Red Cross was responding to the various emergency calls for aid coming from different parts of the West Bank and Gaza, along with going to the occasional meeting with the diplomatic corps and doing the odd interview and public appearance.
I did what I could, and this was largely symbolic. With tanks surrounding the Muqata, I organized a peaceful daily vigil, the way South African protesters had while Mandela was in prison. Our daily protests consisted of a motley group of us trooping over to the Damascus Gate, sitting on the steps, and holding a couple of olive branches and some candles.
Expert at the siege posture, the chairman managed to get even people sick of his rule to line up behind him. “Arafat may be a catastrophic leader,” the saying went, “but we’ll stick by him as long as Sharon is strangling him.” The man on the street was a different matter. Arafat’s fate aroused little more than indifferent shrugs. Shopkeepers and taxi drivers, my usual sources for getting at the pulse of the street, had to be cajoled into joining me in the vigils.
Whenever I could, I brought guests and friends to a vigil, if only to keep my staff and me company. One day a journalist for BusinessWeek showed up at the university office, and I talked him into coming along. In his article he called me a “lonely Cassandra” with a “Kennedy-like coif” warning fellow Palestinians clearly with little effect that the “dirty war they are waging against Israelis would lead to disaster, not the end of occupation: “To set a nonviolent example, Nusseibeh leads the mildest of demonstrations each afternoon at the Damascus Gate, the medieval entrance to Jerusalem’s old city. ‘We have, how do you say it, been shooting ourselves in the foot,’ he tells me.”5
The most affected institute at Al-Quds University was Kuttab’s Center for Modern Media, in Ramallah. Control over the media being a prime target, when the army invaded Ramallah the soldiers headed straight for the radio and television stations. Some took along their insalubrious home entertainment. The soldiers, once they took over, arrested the staff and broadcast porno.
Al-Quds’s educational television station had a couple of days’ reprieve because our media building was on the outskirts of town. During the invasion we supplemented our normal programming with a documentary we produced with UNICEF to help parents and children deal with the trauma of violence. We also broadcast medical service information, addresses and telephone numbers of hospitals and ambulance services, and films on first aid.
The tanks finally rolled up in the middle of cartoon hour. Soldiers broke into the offices and led the staff at gunpoint into the basement, where they were held for several hours. In the meantime, the entire building was occupied. The media center was turned into an improvised prison for people arrested in town.
At first the soldiers slipped in porn to replace the cartoons. Officers put a quick stop to this, instructing the soldiers to pitch all the transmission equipment, television cameras, and the entire video archives out the fourth-floor window. Our press release described the way a Hamas bombing had ended up destroying an institution producing an Israeli-Palestinian Sesame Street:
Al-Quds University Educational Television … has also been completely damaged. After airing pornographic material on the children’s program, the Israeli army destroyed the facility, smashing broadcast equipment with sledgehammers and throwing computers and other studio facilities out of windows.
For some reason I’ve always operated best when people are terrified and normal life threatens to spin off into chaos. Perhaps I got this talent from Father, who was always ready to put his best foot—which was of course his only foot—forward. He never gave up, even after losing mos
t of his country. Because of his strength of will, he was always prepared to see a situation objectively for what it was, and then make the most of it. Nor did he ever shy away from painful self-scrutiny, the sine qua non for self-emancipation. This was his formula for discovering strength where others see only humiliation and defeat.
For a lecture I gave during the worst of the fighting I came up with a childlike parable to illustrate the curious strength of the weak: Suppose two people suddenly find themselves in a brawl. Neither is sure how it started, but each suspects the other of having maliciously provoked it. One manages to throw the other to the ground, and at once sits on top of him, holding him down by the arms. The one underneath kicks back, biting where he can, and whenever he manages to get one of his hands loose, he claws at his foe with all his might.
It seems like a stalemate. The one on top is afraid, yes, afraid, of loosening his grip or letting go of the man underneath him. The one wriggling underneath cannot for the life of him allow this bully to have the slightest chance of rest. Clearly, a gentlemanly exchange of ideas is out of the question.
A third man comes along, pleading with the man on top to let go and the man underneath to lie quiet. Each of them now is in a quandary. The man underneath is afraid that if he were to lie quiet then the man on top would not have any incentive to let go, while the man on top is worried that if he were to let go then the man underneath would quickly move to strangle him. Existentially locked into stalemate, each begins to suspect that the other is looking for salvation through his total elimination.
I made this scenario even worse by imagining that the two men are not on solid ground but in a pool of quicksand, and that with each blow or bite or bash on the head they sink deeper into the mud. Theirs is no zero-sum game: it is a lose-lose situation.
The reason I came up with the yarn was to show the respective strengths of the two fighters. In terms of raw physical power, the one on top obviously has the leg up. But psychologically it is actually more difficult for him to let go than for the man underneath to lie quiet. Paradoxically, being on top he has more to lose by deciding to act differently. He has a lesser margin of choice, or less power.
The man underneath, on the other hand, has less to lose, and less to fear by restraining his opposition. He has, therefore, more power, for he can afford to change his act. If he were to let go, the man on top might lose his advantage altogether. By stopping his physical resistance, the man underneath can always revert to wriggling and biting. He has no advantage to lose.
The upshot is that the man underneath holds the key to unlocking the puzzle, even without the intervention of a third man. Of course, it is not enough for him to stop wriggling. He has to consciously reach out to the other man’s mind. He can’t defeat him, but with some intelligence he may be able to win him over.
• • •
When I think back on it now, I see that this parable may have been indirectly inspired by something the Israeli philosopher and theologian David Hartman once told me:
Remember, Israel wasn’t created by people who came out of Princeton or Yale and 300 years of American experience; it was created by people who came out of Eastern European and Islamic ghettos, by people with deep bruises on their psyches. The national psyche of the Jewish soul can’t be healed by a Jewish psychiatrist; it needs a Palestinian analyst. So help me heal my traumas.
It was admittedly an unlikely time to harbor any such hopes of winning over the man on top, who weighed in at over three hundred pounds and was named Sharon. The West Bank was under Israeli boots, my bodyguards were still nervously looking up at the sky, and my university’s media center—in my estimation the strongest voice in the Arab world for peaceful coexistence and partnership with Israelis—had been wrecked, Sesame Street interrupted by smut. And yet it was in the midst of the incursion that Ami and I were discussing ways of launching our peace project.
A big reason for my auspicious mood came from a very unlikely source: President George W. Bush, among Palestinians a close second to Sharon in their pantheon of political villains. He was a man who had given the green light for the invasion and had sat on his hands while the Israelis laid siege to the Church of the Nativity. A stone statue of the Virgin was destroyed in the shooting. The Crimean War had been sparked by far less. Yet Bush Junior was also a man who had delivered an unprecedented message of hope.
In June 2002, Bush gave a policy speech in the White House Rose Garden with Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, and Donald Rumsfeld at his side. A group of Americans came to my office afterward, including an officer from the American consulate. I knew that my guests had been appalled by the speech, either by the way they now squirmed in their chairs or by their apologies afterward. The Palestinian reaction was even more scathing. The speech was one-sided, everyone said. Bush had endorsed the Israeli canard that there was no partner for peace, and had tacitly given another nod to his Middle Eastern clients to continue their aggression.
To my guests’ astonishment, I was enthusiastic about Bush’s speech, because I essentially agreed with him. “For too long,” the president said, “the citizens of the Middle East have lived in the midst of death and fear. The hatred of a few holds the hopes of many hostage.” Who could argue with this? And who could dispute the fact that “the forces of extremism and terror are attempting to kill progress and peace by killing the innocent. And this casts a dark shadow over an entire region. For the sake of all humanity, things must change in the Middle East.”
Bravo! What I liked most was the way Bush related the Israelis’ basic interests to ours. He laid out the Camp David trade-off of Israeli security for a Palestinian state. But this was no “non-paper.” It was official American policy announced in the Rose Garden.
It is untenable for Israeli citizens to live in terror. It is untenable for Palestinians to live in squalor and occupation. And the current situation offers no prospect that life will improve. Israeli citizens will continue to be victimized by terrorists, and so Israel will continue to defend herself … My vision is two states, living side by side in peace and security … The Israeli occupation that began in 1967 will be ended through a settlement negotiated between the parties, based on U.N. Resolutions 242 and 338, with Israeli withdrawal to secure and recognized borders.
A very fine point was introduced in these lines, never before a part of U.S. policy. The terror and absence of security Israel had to contend itself with were directly tied to occupation, and ending the one was inextricably joined to ending the other. Until then Israel’s “security” had been a good in and of itself, entirely divorced from the Palestinian problem.
In addition, I heard a language never before used in American diplomacy. The president made it clear that the whole situation that arose as a consequence of the Six-Day War must come to an end. Another strong point was his call on the Palestinian people “to elect new leaders, leaders not compromised by terror. I call upon them to build a practicing democracy based on tolerance and liberty.” Stop the shooting, end the corruption, and build a democratic state. Again, who in his right mind could disagree?
I felt the speech actually put us in a stronger position than the Israelis, much like the parable of the two wrestlers. Invasion or no invasion, we had to put our own house in order. It didn’t help to blame Israel for our incompetence in areas where we had full control, such as the courts, planning, and education in the West Bank. We had failed, and the time had come to say so openly.
More important, by freeing us from the illusion that we had a military option, the Iron Fist multiplied the potency of our real strength, which is an existential swap with the Israelis. If we would stop squirming and biting, and extend our hands to the bully pounding on us from above, we could exercise the freedom of our will.
The time had come to spin some gold out of dross. I was having frequent meetings with Ami Ayalon. Once I went to his house in a moshav called Kerem Maharal not far from Mount Carmel. His house reminded me of the bizarre—and for me risky—b
usiness we were launching. Before 1948 the town was the village of Ijzim. Its entire population of three thousand was exiled and ended up in refugee camps near Jenin. Part of Ami’s house was built by one of those Arab families.
I rarely allowed my political associations with Israelis to be complicated by a personal friendship. This was not hard to do with Ami. He was as businesslike as a Swiss engineer building a bridge, and the absence of feigned intimacy made our jobs easier. We were dealing with common interests, not with sentiment. As Ami explained it to an interviewer, “From the outset I wasn’t looking for new friends. Anyhow, it takes me a long time to connect to people.” Referring to the stub on one of his hands he added, “I can count my close friends on four and a half fingers.”
Months had passed since our first talk in my office. I had since gone over his paper, introducing a couple of changes after talking matters over with some friends. Lucy, cognizant of the emotional component of the refugee dimension, suggested a few changes in that clause. I phoned Ami with Lucy’s comments. He agreed with the changes.
We were finally ready to sign a joint document. We decided the formal launch would be in Athens, in the presence of Bill Clinton. For the time being, we met at the Christmas Hotel in East Jerusalem to initialize it.
We called our document the Destination Map, because we wanted it to complement Bush’s Road Map. A map does you no good if you don’t know where you want to go. Our paper laid out the destination. No sugarcoating, no La aʾam, and no legal hairsplitting or word parsing, but straight, the way a good surgeon lops off a cancerous growth, the cancer in our case being years of lies and half-truths. In a conflict that has generated millions of pages of studies and countless “non-papers” and “talking points,” we kept our solution to a page.
Once Upon a Country Page 52