Once Upon a Country

by Sari Nusseibeh

  Israel Radio broadcast the official findings of a special committee of experts hired by Uzi’s successor as minister of public security, Tzahi Hanegbi, which described me as a dangerous dissimulator working for the destruction of Israel. An Israeli journalist commented that it was “no problem” to find senior figures in the defense establishment who believed that “those like Nusseibeh are the most dangerous types of all,” more threatening to Israeli security than Hamas. Rubin Barkov continued seeing in me a Trojan horse or a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

  In all fairness to Rubin, Uzi Landau, and now Minister Tzahi Hanegbi, behind my philosophical pose did lurk a political option that profoundly threatened their version of the Jewish state, for turning the armed intifada into a nonviolent crusade of civil disobedience would place them in precisely the sort of battle they knew they could never win.

  In Rubin’s case, like many undergraduates in a logic course, he conflated tactic for strategy. Organizing thousands of people to form a symbolic border, as we and Peace Now had tried to do with the Human Chain, could also have shown the Israelis the numbers we could muster if we decided to pursue a one-state rather than a two-state solution. An inseparable part of my strategy with Ami went back to my words from 1987: “Annex us!” Either give us our state or give us the vote. One or the other.

  The entire logic of our joint project was to force the hands of politicians. The reasoning went something like this: if they could get away with it and it didn’t endanger the demographics of the Jewish state, the Israelis would take as much of our land as they could, because they thought they had a historical right to it. With almost mathematical predictability, Palestinian leaders let them off the hook by harping on absolute justice and their own historical rights. But our respective absolute rights—the historical right of the Jews to their ancestral homeland, and the Palestinian rights to the country robbed from them—were fundamentally in conflict, and were in fact mutually exclusive. Even worse, the more historical justice each side demanded, the less their real national interests got served. Justice and interests fell into conflict.

  One tack Ami and I chose made Rubin Barkov and his colleagues understandably nervous. The best way to convince the masses of an equitable two-state solution was to demonstrate how the status quo threatened their basic interests. And the best way of doing that was to play the demographic card.

  My message was this: if negotiations were not held soon, the Palestinian national project would have to enter a new era of struggle, this time to achieve a binational state in historic Palestine, in which Jews and Palestinians had equal rights and responsibilities, which meant the end of the Zionist dream of establishing a national home for the Jewish people in the land of Palestine.

  From an Israeli point of view, failing to reach a solution gradually placed Israel in danger. Sooner or later, Israel would find itself turning into a racist state unable to bring security or peace to its citizens, like the apartheid regime that existed in South Africa. Such an outcome represented a strategic problem for Israel and required a preemptive measure to prevent it. Thus, strategically, Israel was in need of a solution.

  Ami and I returned to this theme over and over to convince Israelis that full withdrawal from the territories was far more consistent with their own interests than Sharon’s dream of breaking up the West Bank into South African–style Bantustans. To one interviewer, Ami warned that within a decade Israelis were “heading toward a situation in which Israel will not be a democracy and home to the Jewish people,” because Palestinians will outnumber Israeli Jews between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River. I chimed in. “This may be the last opportunity to reach an agreement. Soon territorial solutions like a Palestinian state will no longer be on the agenda. The only alternative is then demographic, based on the struggle to attain equal rights between Arabs and Jews within a single state.”3

  Chapter Thirty-three

  The Perfect Crime

  Do we not all have one father?

  Has not one God created us?

  Why do we deal treacherously each against his brother

  so as to profane the covenant of our fathers?

  —MALACHI 2 : 10–11, GRAFFITI ON THE WALL IN ABU DIS

  IN A GOOD MURDER MYSTERY the perfect crime is when the villain gets off scot-free. Better still, it is when he turns justice on its head by getting the dead man fingered for his own murder. The victim was either suicidal or had it coming to him. I write this because, starting in 2004, I was witness to the perfect political crime, choking an ancient civilization of its last bit of air.

  In December 2003 we looked back on a year of hard work and great strides for HASHD. Despite the terrorist bombs exploding all around us, hundreds of thousands of average Palestinians and Israelis were signing off on a historic compromise, because they realized that their interests coincided. No matter how ghastly the violence, an irrepressible desire for normalcy was forging a broad coalition between our peoples. By standing back and looking at demographics, average people realized that our two peoples were heading either toward a one-state solution or toward two independent states divided more or less along the 1967 border, with Jerusalem under shared sovereignty. Opinion polls showed that big majorities on both sides preferred the latter. According to one, if the Palestinian leadership were to embrace such a two-state solution, Israelis by a lopsided margin (70 percent versus 16 percent) wanted their government to enter into serious negotiations to conclude a deal.1

  Sharon, seeing the trend better than most, decided to erect a wall between our peoples. Iron, concrete, and guns were his response to the natural instinct among average people to bury the hatchet and solve our conflict through dialogue and compromise.

  Sharon’s twenty-foot-high structure was the perfect crime, and not only because it carved up the West Bank and hermetically cut off East Jerusalem from the villages and cities that for millennia had been its natural hinterland. What really placed Sharon’s masonry job into this literary genre was that few people suspected that the prime minister’s real motive was not to stop terrorism. Qassam rockets can easily fly over a twenty-foot barrier. His real foe was human dialogue and the desire for normalcy.

  The wall is the perfect crime because it creates the violence it was ostensibly built to prevent. It’s like sticking someone in a cage and then when he starts screaming, as any normal person would, using his violent temper as justification for putting him in the cage in the first place.

  Public opinion is a fickle thing. When Ami and I started our project, we had thirty people in the Imperial Hotel lobby: thirty is a far cry from a million. A recurring remark many Israelis made quite reasonably to Ami was that our agreement meant nothing. “Yes, yes, Sari’s a nice enough fellow. If only there were a million like him over there! But, alas, we have to deal with the Palestinian rabble. We are not making peace with him but with them.” Ami and his team managed to get a flood of signatures, 250,000 in all. Likud voters signed their names with the same avidity as Labor. On the Palestinian side, HASHD likewise scored more successes than anyone could have predicted. At first people told me that the only signature would be my own. We now had more than 160,000 people signed up, often at the risk of becoming social pariahs among family or friends. Signs of the inroads we’d made: In the Arroub refugee camp, near Hebron, 1,100 of 9,000 residents joined HASHD. In Jenin, we had 3,000 supporters and 70 leaders. Fahed and his team of thirty collected tens of thousands of signatures in Gaza, the hotbed of Palestinian extremism.

  HASHD has set up a solid leadership. Working closely with a peace organization that Lucy runs, we’ve sent our “tigers” to a two-week training course in the fields of peace, democracy, equality, domestic relations, and nonviolence education; and they have taken part in a “Smarter Without Violence” summer camp near Hebron. The three-week camp for nine- to fourteen-year-olds teaches democracy and nonviolence through art, sports, and so on. The camp director, Jamil Rushdie, a member of our leadership group, is a nine-year veteran of the Is
raeli prison system.

  Furthermore, we’ve made inroads into local politics. In an election for the council of labor unions in the southern West Bank, nearly half the people elected were HASHD members. Camp director Rushdie was the head of the council.

  Our message of nonviolence was getting through. At Lucy’s suggestion, in 2004 we put out another ad calling for a nonviolent intifada. This time around, people were lining up to sign. The head of Fatah in Gaza contributed his name, as did the governor of Nablus, whose two sons were killed by the Israelis.

  Even Arafat eventually came around. From the beginning, I sensed he would settle for the Destination Map if he could get a symbolic number of refugees to return. As proof of my hunch, while Sharon contemptuously dismissed us—the Interior Ministry consistently refused granting visas to our foreign volunteers—Arafat agreed to bankroll us to the tune of ten thousand dollars a month, a substantial sum for his bankrupt Authority.

  The project was also garnering international attention. At the end of 2003, Ami and I took the show on the road, starting with Deputy U.S. Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. An intellectual who had once studied with Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago, Wolfowitz’s hawkish views on the Middle East are legendary. Intellectuals on the left like to cast him as the dark prince of a warmongering president.

  We had met a couple of years earlier, through a mutual friend, who also helped set up our meeting at the Pentagon. I went into Wolfowitz’s office hopeful, despite everything I had heard about the man. Perhaps it was wishful thinking, but I assumed that a pupil of Leo Strauss, the great commentator on al-Farabi, couldn’t be as bad as his reputation. Indeed, the legendary hawk turned out to be an immensely affable, charming, and intellectually pliable man eager to hear about our project.

  Weeks later, Wolfowitz gave a speech at Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in which he pushed President Bush’s vision of two states. To his audience he claimed that thousands of Israelis and Palestinians supported the president’s vision. “How do I know this?” he asked rhetorically. “Well, right now there is a significant grassroots movement … in support of principles that look very much like the road map favoring a two-state solution.” He mentioned our meeting and summarized our strategy of “mobilizing majorities on both sides who crave peace so that the extremists who oppose [peace] can be isolated.”

  Ami and I met next with Elliot Abrams in his National Security Council office next door to the White House. Like Wolfowitz, Abrams has a reputation as a neocon ideologue with a hard-line pro-Israel stance. In his role as the “White House special assistant to the president and senior director on the National Security Council for Near East and North African Affairs,” it was he who was tilting Bush and his team toward Sharon’s position. Even his personal life seemed a hurdle to surmount: by marriage he’s related to Commentary Magazine’s Norman Podhoretz. Ami didn’t think we had a chance with him. We went anyway.

  Abrams began our meeting with a predictable recap of all the obstacles to peace in the Middle East: that Arafat couldn’t be trusted and needed to be ousted; that Israel had a right to deal forcefully with terrorism and shouldn’t consider any concessions until the Palestinians forswore violence; that the Road Map couldn’t be implemented until every terrorist had been locked up; and so on. He also threw in a few lines about Palestinian corruption. Precisely what we had expected.

  Not wanting to get embroiled in an argument, we agreed with him. “Fine, fine, fine,” we said perfunctorily, “now let’s get down to business.” We gave him our stock speech: that the administration’s Road Map wouldn’t work unless two pages got attached to it. These pages, we noted, were in sync with President Bush’s vision.

  As we explained, the president’s Road Map, while noble in inspiration, didn’t describe with sufficient clarity where we were heading. It was silent on the borders of the two states and what would happen to the Jewish settlements and the refugees. Our plan gave the map a destination. Just as important, it created the necessary mass support for it by placing, as it were, the people in the driver’s seat, thus diminishing the role of extremists on both sides whose agendas and concerns were entirely different from those of the ordinary human beings.

  This last point caught Abrams’s attention, and the mood in the office changed. He perked up and asked to see our paper. He read it, raised an index finger, and leveled with us. “Look,” he explained, “what is sacrosanct for us is not the Road Map, it is the vision behind it. That is what we are committed to.”

  In other visits with officials, we got a similar response. Through his spokesman, Colin Powell read out a statement: “The secretary once again expressed his welcome of the efforts that are undertaken by people [such as us] to try to encourage … a vision of peace.” Warren Christopher, Robert McNamara, and five former U.S. Cabinet members issued an open letter backing the Destination Map. They, too, came up with a statement of support:

  We believe that the best way to move forward is to address at the outset, not at the end of an incremental process, all the basic principles of a fair and lasting solution. Postponing the final outcome makes any progress hostage to extremists on both sides.

  In Israel, the Destination Map won a beauty contest of sorts. We were invited to present the plan at the 2004 Herzliya Conference, an annual gathering of the Israeli and Jewish world’s financial, political, and academic elite. The conference, which tends to be on the conservative side of the political divide in Israel, has evolved into a forum for introducing new thinking on strategic issues facing Israel. The prime minister typically delivers his yearly message to the nation, an Israeli version of the State of the Union address.

  At the conference, we presented our ideas in a panel discussion on various strategies to end the conflict. Besides ours, Yossi Beilin and Yasser Abed Rabbo discussed their Geneva Accord, and Avigdor Lieberman, an ex-Russian nightclub bouncer and founder of the right-wing Israel Beiteinu Party, talked about his.

  The Geneva Accord was in substance similar to the Destination Map, the main difference being our focus on bypassing the political establishment by going directly to the grass roots. Lieberman’s solution was a different matter altogether, which was what you’d expect from a man who while minister of transport in Sharon’s first government suggested drowning all the Palestinian prisoners in the Dead Sea. Lieberman proposed to the people at the conference that Israel annex all the empty land in the West Bank while amputating outlying areas of East Jerusalem heavily populated by Arabs along with the Wadi ʿAra area alongside the Green Line, with its three hundred thousand Arab residents. Arabs remaining in Israel who refused to take a loyalty oath to the “Jewish-Zionist country” would be expelled. Nightclub bouncers tend to like simple solutions.

  At the end of the session, the organizers put the three plans to a vote. Ours got the most thumbs-ups: 65 percent, against Belin’s 25 percent and Lieberman’s 10 percent.

  I had never imagined that I would get such a powerful confirmation of my hunch about Palestinians and Israelis being allies. At a time of horror, bombing, demagoguery, and fire-breathing clerics, even this conservative audience opted for reason over rhetoric.

  But it was hard to savor the victory because we were just the warm-up act for Sharon, who spoke later in the afternoon about his “disengagement plan” from Gaza. The organizers of the conference didn’t put his presentation up to a vote, though they should have. It was as much an end-game plan as ours, and given the audience, it would have won hands down. Maybe Yossi Beilin, Yasser Abed Rabbo, and Ami and I got the red carpet treatment from the Israeli elite only because the real game in town was Sharon’s plan, not ours.

  At the conference, Sharon, a master tactician, turned a fire hose on his opponents by transmogrifying himself into a leader of the realistic moderates. Strategically, his move was on a par with his counterattack during the 1973 war, when he crossed the Suez and trapped the Egyptian Third Army.

  By the time the prime minister took to the stag
e, he had come to the conclusion that his old autonomy schemes were unworkable. It was pointless to try to crush Palestinian nationalism or to prevent a Palestinian state by peppering the territories with Jewish settlements. Years of endless conflict, combined with the future demographic threat posed by millions of disgruntled Palestinians, had convinced him of this.

  So, without a tear shed, he threw the dream of Greater Israel in the dustbin; he decided to yank settlers out of Gaza, and announced a unilateralism aimed at preserving a strong Jewish majority within Israel, while locking up strategic assets in the West Bank and East Jerusalem—settlements, lots of empty real estate, and water resources—behind a wall. What sounded to most ears like a bolt out of the blue was in fact a repackaged version of plans Sharon had been mulling over for at least a decade. You could say that the concrete mixers followed the direction of the prime minister’s ravenous appetite.

  It was a clever stratagem that directly, one might say intentionally, threatened the Destination Map. Sharon even confessed to Ami that a major factor behind “disengagement” was our grassroots initiative. Sharon’s “settler evacuations,” Ami commented to The Jerusalem Post, were designed specifically to “prevent coexistence campaigns.”2 (Sharon’s chief adviser Dov Weisglass put it this way: disengagement “supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.”)