Once Upon a Country

by Sari Nusseibeh

  • There will be two states for two nations.

  • The permanent borders will be drawn on the basis of June 4, 1967, with the possibility of exchanging tracts of land, on a one-to-one basis.

  • Jerusalem will be the capital of both states (the Arab neighborhoods under Palestinian sovereignty and the Jewish neighborhoods under Israeli sovereignty).

  • Arab refugees will be able to return only to Palestinian territory and Jews only to Israeli territory.

  • In cognizance of the suffering of Palestinian refugees, an international fund will be established with the participation of Israel for compensating and rehabilitating Palestinian refugees.

  • The Palestinian state will be demilitarized.

  • Both sides will renounce all claims after a political agreement is signed.

  We skirted the sovereignty issue on the Noble Sanctuary/Temple Mount area by stressing that its significance rests in its holiness rather than in some nationalistic and bourgeois slogan of “ownership.” By designating each side as “guardian” we underlined the site’s divine status, a status that defies claims of human control. The arrangement we envisioned was that Palestine “will be designated Guardian of the Noble Sanctuary for the benefit of Muslims. Israel will be the Guardian of the Western Wall for the benefit of the Jewish people.”

  The personal attacks, which had died down slightly during the invasion, revved up again after the signing ceremony. My two bodyguards were constant reminders of how unpopular my opinions were. Mother thought I had finally lost my mind. “The Israelis aren’t serious,” she reasoned, “so why risk getting sliced up by extremists?”

  Many people blasted me for appearing on the same stage with the man who had “attacked us, tortured us, and assassinated our leaders,” as they referred to Ami.

  “You don’t make peace with peaceniks,” I told them.

  “But he symbolizes the system,” they countered.

  “That’s exactly the point. Ami is the embodiment of the enemy. But he’s an enemy we can work with because he knows what’s best for Israel, which happens to be in our own self-interest. Our mutual interest is our bond. Not love.”

  Israeli right-wingers came out with the same hobgoblins I’d heard for years. The most charitable claim was that I was an intellectual living in ether. Israeli army radio quoted environment minister Tzahi Hanegbi, who had wanted me put on trial during the intifada, dubbing me an “esoteric character” with no following among the Arabs. Mostly, I appeared as a tweed-wearing, professorial villain. The title of one article in the country’s largest mass circulation daily was “Dr. Sari Nusseibeh: Be Wary of Deadly Coral Snakes Posing as Harmless Skipjack Snakes.”6

  In June, Ami and I went to a Greek island to cut the ribbon on the peace movement. We were with former President Clinton in the shadow of the Acropolis. Meanwhile, back at home, Barkov’s dossier was on Uzi Landau’s desk, and the minister now felt he had proof that I was using the university as a “long arm of the Palestinian Authority.” Landau, a gaunt, spindly man who looked more like a retired high school science teacher than a political demagogue, explained to the press, “Here in the heart of Jerusalem there is a governmental, civilian branch of the Palestinian Authority aiming to undermine our sovereignty in Jerusalem. Let Nusseibeh’s gentleness deceive no one.” To those who called me a moderate, he countered, “Compared to Arafat, he is a moderate exactly like Arafat is moderate compared to Sheikh Yassin.” In other words, we were all the same.

  Minister Landau sent the Shin Bet, accompanied by sixty members of the notoriously aggressive border police, to my Al-Quds administration building, across the street from the Rockefeller Museum. The main Shin Bet man approached my office manager, Dimitri, and pointed an Uzi at his head. The safety latch was up. “Dimitri, I suggest you show us some ID,” said the Shin Bet man in Arabic. He identified himself as Captain James, an unusually non-Israeli name. In Dimitri’s account, Captain James was short, thin, and badly dressed in green jeans and a plaid shirt. Like Landau, he didn’t look the role: more of a computer geek than a secret service agent.

  “If you know my name already, why do you need my ID?” Dimitri wanted to know in a disarming tone, or so he told me.

  “Just give me the goddamned ID, Dimitri!” the captain snapped.

  “One more question,” continued Dimitri, handing over his ID. “Where do you shop for your clothes?”

  Captain James looked puzzled and asked why he wanted to know. “Green jeans and that plaid shirt! What a combination! I’ll have to make sure never to go there.”

  “Smart ass,” the captain muttered under his breath in flawless American English.

  Russian-speaking men took the hard drives from the computers and put all my papers into boxes—entire filing cabinets containing student and personnel records and research—for transport back to headquarters, but not before sealing off the offices, changing the locks, and installing heavy steel shutters to prevent anyone from sneaking back in. The building was declared a closed military zone, with nobody allowed in or out. Five of my employees were taken in for questioning. All the other university employees were turned out of the building at gunpoint.

  It was certainly an annoyance to have an entire administrative apparatus shut down, and its lifeblood—databases, files, and correspondence—confiscated. But in a sense, the timing couldn’t have been better. The entire logic of my work with Ami was that intelligent nonviolence was more effective than weapons. Now I had a chance to prove it.

  Even without their offices, my team had years of contacts with Israelis, Americans, and Europeans. They went to work calling journalists, embassy employees, public figures, lawyers, and politicians. Appeals went out for public support from Israelis as well as from leaders around the world, including the White House.

  Already on the first day of the closure a few dozen Israeli peace activists held a vigil outside the school’s offices. Yossi Sarid, the head of the leftist faction of the Knesset, lashed out at the government: “This is the stupidity of our government. The government of Israel is talking quite often about the need to find moderate Palestinian leaders instead of Yasir Arafat, and then they do their utmost to insult them, to embarrass them, to weaken them.”7

  The government could easily swat away domestic critics, just not the American ones. The Boston Globe pointed to the closing of my offices as the final “proof that Israel’s Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s real intentions are not just the suppression of terrorism but the relentless termination of Palestinian national aspirations.”8 The New York Times’s Anthony Lewis wrote more or less the same:

  [Nusseibeh] is the perfect example of the new kind of leadership, peaceful and pragmatic, that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel and President Bush have said the Palestinians must have before there can be political negotiations on an end to the conflict. Why target him?

  The answer is that important elements in the Israeli government do not want a real two-state solution and do not want political negotiations with a reformed Palestinian leadership. They prefer the present situation: the West Bank occupied or tightly controlled by Israel, with an increasing number of Jewish settlers. The last thing they want is a respected Palestinian interlocutor.9

  Minister Landau hit back by releasing two documents his men fished out from my papers. One showed correspondence from Jibril requesting that we conduct some training courses at the university, primarily in law, for some of the people in his security force. Another letter was a general memo sent to Palestinian universities discussing the possibility of sending students to a summer course at Tehran University. All the letters were strictly related to the university, including letters sent out to all Arab leaders however unsavory their regimes—one letter was addressed to Saddam Hussein—asking for financial assistance.

  On receiving news of the police raid in my office I left Ami in Greece and hurried back to Jerusalem. When, upon my return, journalists asked if the raid had been designed to discredit the agreement Am
i and I had signed in Athens, I replied frankly, “In this part of the world nothing happens by coincidence.”

  Through Jawad Boulos I inquired into the legal basis for the closure, and contested it. It took a few days, including consultations with Landau’s admirably reasonable legal adviser, to figure out that Landau’s main claim was that my office belonged to the Palestinian Authority. I told the legal adviser it didn’t. It was that simple.

  “Would you be prepared to sign a document saying so? And also, that it will not be used as a PA office?” she asked.

  “With pleasure.” I assured her that my office had nothing to do with the PA, nor would it in the future. It was a university office and would remain so.

  Both she and Jawad Boulos reacted with surprise to my attitude. Perhaps they thought I would squabble over symbols, or dig in my heels out of misplaced loyalty to Arafat. What they didn’t realize was that even if the PA had asked me to run operations out of the office, I would have refused, preferring to maintain the independence of the university.

  I signed the pledge, and within ten days of the closure Landau had no legal recourse but to reopen the school. Putting a good face on it, he said he was “ecstatic” that a senior Palestinian figure had recognized Israeli sovereignty over East Jerusalem, which of course I hadn’t.

  “Weeks went by and the authorities still hadn’t returned the papers from my office. They needed time to sift through every page. They must have thought they’d find the blueprints to the Al-Aqsa intifada or plans for a guerrilla campaign.

  Now I got a telephone call from Rubin Barkov, my Inspector Javert. He wanted to know if we could meet for coffee. We fixed a time.

  We were chatting for a few minutes when he started poking fun at Yossi Beilin and other Israeli left-wing leaders, calling them “pussies” and “freyers,” Hebrew slang for naïve suckers. “They don’t really get you Arabs, I mean the Arab mentality.”

  I let him ramble on like this for an hour. His soliloquy ranged from leftist “pussies” to his conversations with Sheikh Yassin. He bragged about his own knowledge of Islam, early Arabic poetry, and of course the “Arab mind.” (I’m certain he cribbed much of what he said from Raphael Patai.) On he went, until enough time had passed that I thought it appropriate to change the subject. I asked him about the materials and computers confiscated from my office. “Are you guys finished reading through everything? I really need that stuff back.”

  Barkov’s expression changed. Now in a serious tone, he repeated his bon mot from our previous conversation: that I was the “most dangerous Palestinian enemy” out there. He leaned back in his chair and gave me a knowing look, as if I were trapped and the game were over. “I have been developing a picture of you,” he explained with flaring nostrils and his index finger lightly tapping the table. With the confident movement of someone holding all the cards, he suddenly brought out a few pieces of paper he had in his pocket. “We found this in your computer.”

  After the closure of my offices at Al-Quds, he and his men systematically sifted through my papers. Like someone scouring for a verse in the holy writ to prove a hunch, they looked and looked until they located what they considered to be irrefutable evidence that I was a dangerous man.

  Out of hundreds of thousands of pages, they dredged up a letter asking Saddam Hussein for contributions to the university. I suppose because in Barkov’s eyes I had once upon a time been an Iraqi agent directing Scud attacks, this constituted solid evidence. Barkov and his people also discovered on a hard disc demo video clips. One was an animated thirty-second spot of a girl being gunned down by a soldier; someone else is throwing a Molotov cocktail. Another cartoon showed a map of the region bisected by a line of Arabs and Jews holding hands, while an animated hand grenade erupts in the distance.

  Looking at it, I recognized it as a printout of a proposed advertisement a PR company in Ramallah had done for me at the time of the Human Chain event with Peace Now, and which I had viewed on my computer but then rejected.

  “So what?” I really didn’t know why he was showing them to me.

  “So what? These drawings depict a child, rising up from a pool of blood, throwing stones and what looks like a Molotov cocktail at Israeli soldiers. Now I know that your civilian disobedience is a cover for violent rebellion.” He thought I intended to morph the Human Chain into an uprising. (The word chain was, according to his X-ray vision, a secret code word for armed revolt.) Rubin said this with a confident smile, as if the jig was up.

  I was getting angry. “Did I ever use these things?” I asked sharply. “Did we put them on television? No!”

  He waved his hand with aplomb as if to say it didn’t matter.

  “Just think about what you’re saying. A company did the animation for me. I saw it, and decided not to use it precisely because of what you’re saying. It doesn’t fit with my philosophy.”

  He didn’t like my answer. The gist of his message was that I might be able to fool credulous Israeli “pussies” and “freyers,” but he knew my secret agenda. Putting all his experience and professional training to work, he determined that something very dangerous was afoot, and it was his professional and patriotic duty to nip it in the bud. I might be more intelligent than the leftists I’d been seducing with my words of peace, but I wasn’t smarter than he. Not by a long shot. And it was his job to protect Israelis from my wily intelligence.

  I listened to his presentation with growing amazement at a man who suddenly seemed more like Inspector Clouseau than Javert. I asked him by what logic could anyone conclude that PR material I had rejected be evidence against me. “I know you didn’t publicize this,” he said with a conspiratorial smirk, “but you brought together all your friends to your office and showed it to them to get them behind you.”

  I felt angry but also strangely sympathetic, as if I was dealing with a man rapidly losing his marbles. As such, I probably should have pitied him—because all his prodigious efforts had led him nowhere. Like his boss, Uzi Landau, he was fully convinced of my true nature, but the raids on my office had turned up only unused cartoons from the overheated imagination of a twenty-year-old graphic designer in Ramallah.

  “Sari, you can’t fool me.” This time his voice took on an aggressive, threatening pitch.

  I’d had enough.

  “My friend,” I said softly, standing up from the chair and preparing to leave, “I think you’ve been working too hard. Maybe what you really need is a holiday. Obviously you’re under too much stress.”

  As I turned on my heel and headed out the door I heard him say, “Sari, I know you.”

  A year or so later Barkov called in one of my close associates from the Jerusalem Fatah organization. Upon entering Barkov’s office, my friend couldn’t help but notice a big file on the desk with “Sari Nusseibeh” written in fat letters on the outside. Rubin told my friend that if he couldn’t get me put away for the rest of my life in an Israeli prison, he was going to publish a book on me based on all the “dirt” he had ferreted out. “Your Dr. Nusseibeh is the single most dangerous enemy of Israel.”

  Afterward my friend came directly to my office to recount what he had seen and heard. “The guy’s really nuts,” he said between guffaws.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  “The Tigers”

  We must accept the challenge, seek no shortcut,

  and get used to the idea of using a spade.

  —FATHER

  BY THE END OF 2002 my brief tenure as the PLO’s man in Jerusalem was nearing its end. The first clear hint came when Arafat told an interviewer on Lebanese television that he had created another one of his “Jerusalem Committees” and appointed one of the leaders of a PLO faction to head it up. He was obviously trying to fend off critics who had accused me of stepping out of line. I took the chance to make myself scarce and began missing more meetings than I attended.

  I was finally convinced I was wasting my time just before the Israeli general election in January 2003. Sharon’s Nationa
l Unity government was falling apart, with Labor preparing to pull out in preparation for new elections. Efraim Sneh, a Labor Party boss I’d known for years, asked to meet me at the American Colony Hotel. He brought with him a draft proposal for what he called the Labor Party’s “peace platform,” reduced to a few salient points on a single sheet of paper. He said the Labor Party chairman, Ben-Eliezer, would be presenting it to the Egyptians within days. Labor was seeking prior endorsement of their plan from the Egyptians, and, more important, from Arafat. After pulling out of Sharon’s government, he explained, they wanted to use the platform along with the Egyptian and PLO endorsement as a return ticket to power.

  The platform seemed like just one more vague formula for peace that had never gotten us anywhere. But Sneh was sincere, and I promised to talk it over with Arafat.

  I made my way to the Muqata in Ramallah. After maneuvering around heaps of rubble and tanks, like something out of World War II Berlin, I went up to Arafat’s office. There I explained to the chairman that rumors about a Labor pullout were serious, and that it was in our national interest to help Labor win the next election. Arafat, with a look of ambivalence on his face, took the proposal and told an aide to pass it on to his minister for liaison affairs. What I got out of the brief encounter was that he didn’t want me in the picture. Neither Sneh nor anyone else in the Labor Party heard a word from him.

  A few weeks later, Sneh came calling again. This time he wanted me to know that his party planned to announce its pullout from the coalition within the next two weeks. Not having heard a positive word about the “peace platform” from the Palestinians or Egyptians, he asked me if I thought my paper with Ami would get a response out of Arafat. “Do you have a copy?” he asked, as he pulled one out from his briefcase. Looking over it, he told me in a hushed voice, “We’re ready to push for your program within our party. But for us to get any traction with Israeli voters we’ll need your help.” He wanted Arafat’s explicit endorsement of the Destination Map, and thought that with it, Labor could show the Israeli public that there was a partner on the other side, and that only Labor could strike a final peace deal.