Once Upon a Country

by Sari Nusseibeh

  Sharon’s plan did this through a very different approach to the national interests dealt with in the Destination Map. Whereas we sought to create dialogue between the two nations, Sharon’s unilateralism immortalized mistrust and suspicion, and so guaranteed the low level of violence needed to preclude negotiations. By clearing out settlers from Gaza—a classic red herring—he could divert international attention while he cut the West Bank to pieces.

  The “Palestinian State” left by his surgical operations would be so dysfunctional and violent that it would guarantee the need for a security wall, and would, even more important, put off negotiations more or less forever. The predictable clashes between Hamas and Fatah, not to mention the occasional Qassam rocket fired over the wall, would prove to the world what sort of unruly neighbors the democratic Israelis had to live around. Meanwhile, more Palestinian land in the West Bank would be massively populated with Israelis. The key to this plan, of course, was that there be no dialogue, no trust, and no negotiations between the two sides. In a word, that there be no significant grassroots movement for coexistence.

  Naturally, none of this was spelled out in Sharon’s lecture. Poking around the lobby afterward, lost in thought and trying to make sense of the prime minister’s speech, I found some materials from the two previous Herzliya conferences. I took the reading material home, and the more I investigated, the clearer the picture became. The good thing about Sharon was that at least he was very systematic, determined, and straightforward. He told you what he wanted and then did it.

  His shift in strategy had begun back at the 2002 Herzliya Conference. The conference devoted a key session to the demographic conundrums facing Israel, a theme that had always belonged to the Arab-Israeli conflict. From the early days of Zionist colonization, Jewish leaders were well aware that they were a small minority in a “vast Arab sea,” as they liked to call us. (I should add here that the idea of a wall goes all the way back to the spiritual founder of the Likud Party, Zev Jabotinsky, a man we’ve seen before in this story. Jabotinsky brought up the idea in his 1923 article “The Iron Wall: We and the Arabs.”) The star of the conference was Professor Arnon Sofer, an unassuming geographer at Haifa University who had made a reputation for himself as a prophet of the Arab demographic time bomb. In his address, he raised the hobgoblin of populations and land. How could the Israeli state keep much of the land in the West Bank, deny all rights to the people living there, and yet continue calling itself a democracy?

  The professor set forth his thesis that Israel needed to draw borders at once; otherwise it would be inundated by Arabs. An ideal map, he explained to the Israeli elite, would split up the West Bank into three isolated cantons thickly populated with Arabs: one from Jenin to Ramallah, another from Bethlehem to Hebron, and the last encircling the city of Jericho. Professor Sofer suggested that electric fences surround all three, preventing unwanted Arabs from spilling out into all the lands Israel would keep for itself, which amounted to over half of the West Bank.

  Sharon approached the professor after his lecture, shook his hand, and kindled what would become a very successful partnership.

  Sharon presented a broad outline of his disengagement plan a year later at the 2003 Herzliya gathering. By this time the notion of a God-given historical deed to “Judea and Samaria” had become such a fringe argument of the messianic loonies that Sharon chose not to use it. His only argument was security. If the Palestinians failed to stop terror, he warned, “Israel will initiate the unilateral security step of disengagement from the Palestinians … Israel will greatly accelerate the construction of the security fence. Today we can already see it taking shape.”

  The idea of a security wall had begun when Labor was a part of the government, and was seen, at least by Labor, as a stopgap measure to defend a society besieged by suicide bombers. Sharon’s innovation was to apply the fence to Professor Sofer’s map. The wall was a logical extension of the settlements, of the checkpoint system introduced during the Gulf War, and of much of the infrastructure built over the years, such as highways and water pumping stations. It was also the embodiment of Israel’s “eternal” claim to all of Jerusalem.

  If the vision was inspired by demographics and the desire to draw boundaries most favorable to Israel, the justification he gave was security. (The East German communists similarly dubbed the Berlin Wall the “anti-fascist protection barrier.”) The longer the armed conflict lasted, the more Palestinian territory he could colonize. Terrorism allowed Sharon to genuflect before Bush’s Road Map, even as it protected him from its consequences.

  Sharon could comfortably count on Arafat providing the necessary cover for what has turned into Israel’s biggest land grab since 1948. The old revolutionary, harmlessly holed up in a half-bombed compound mumbling to himself, was the ideal straw man. Pilloried by the Israeli and U.S. administrations as the fountainhead of terror, he was to blame for all the Palestinians’ woes. It was because of him that the Israelis were being forced to build their Security Fence.

  The wall around Jerusalem was given the name the “Jerusalem Security Envelope,” and the governmental body charged with building it was named the “Seam Zone Administration.”

  The wall went up with lightning speed. It now towers two feet from our old house in Abu Dis. Instead of glorious views of the Dome of the Rock, the balcony now faces a twenty-foot-high concrete slab. Just as we had suspected after our return from Washington in 1995, had we stayed in the house, we most likely would have lost our residency rights in Jerusalem. To visit Mother would have required a lethally hazardous scaling of the wall or special permission from a bureaucracy institutionally disinclined to issue it.

  Soon enough I began to feel the pinch of Sharon’s version of the “two-state” solution. At the university, the wall did more than just block the view. An interviewer for The New Statesman captured what was happening on campus, and inside my head, when he wrote, “Nusseibeh harbors no illusions. We have been talking at Al-Quds, the Arab university in Jerusalem where the Israeli ‘security fence’ cuts right through the campus, cutting hundreds of Palestinians off from their only source of higher education.”

  The main university campus straddles the imaginary municipal line dividing Jerusalem from the West Bank. One morning some people from the Seam Zone Administration showed up with rolls of blueprints under their arms. Behind them was Israeli army machinery. The plan was for the wall to ribbon its way down the middle of the university, leaving a third of the campus on the Israeli side, while all the buildings were to be severed from Jerusalem. Students living on the Israeli side, a third of the entire student body, would have to pass through Israeli gates in the fence, which from our experience of the checkpoints would more often than not be closed.

  The planners in the Seam Zone Administration must have expected the same protests they had invited all over the West Bank. Typically, the Israelis showed up to do another section, and bands of Arabs started throwing rocks to defend their fields against expropriation. The rock throwers made easy targets for rubber bullets, and their violence reinforced the wall’s raison d’être.

  We surprised them. Or perhaps a fairer way of putting it is that the planners made a major blunder we then exploited to the hilt. The wall’s original trajectory wasn’t through a parking lot or an empty field, real estate with no emotional value, but through the university’s soccer field, basketball courts, and land slated for a new sports complex and botanical garden. Exquisite PR.

  I huddled together with advisers from Al-Quds and HASHD—who were in fact the same people—to think up a way to fight the wall. The plan we came up with was ideally sculpted to engage the dialogue Sharon was so eager to circumvent. What he thought would stop Israelis and Palestinians from talking ended up promoting intense engagement, and in ways not seen since he ambled his way up to the Noble Sanctuary. We turned the soccer field into a laboratory of nonviolent protest that taught students how to beat the Israelis with ideas and persuasion rather than rocks or
Molotov cocktails. The protest lasted for thirty-four days, and we won.

  The precondition for success was clarity. We set forth defined, limited objectives, and steered away from general criticisms of the wall as such. We didn’t deny the government’s need to defend its citizens against suicide bombers; we affirmed it. “Okay, if you want separation until there’s peace, be our guest. Make your wall a hundred miles high, if you want,” was the line we took. “Just build it along the 1967 border, not in the middle of Jerusalem, and not through our soccer field.”

  The grotesqueness of this twenty-foot barrier made keeping a lid on violence, an absolute prerequisite to fighting it, an arduous task. The situation was so tense that I feared that any organized protest, however carefully planned, would only degenerate into mayhem. To make matters worse, many students pointed to the wall as proof that dialogue with the Israelis didn’t work. “You tell us about bridges and they come back with walls,” the critics shouted, holding up their plastic water pistols to signify their proposed solution to the problem.

  I managed to calm the students only by explaining how violence only helped Sharon. If rocks got thrown, students would be killed. The next day at their funerals we’d add a few more noble martyrs to our growing list, but the university would probably be ordered shut down, and no one would be left to stop the bulldozers.

  My logic was supplemented by the strong-armed persuasion exercised by Naser Al-Afandi, the head of campus security and maintenance. A Fatah leader, ex-prisoner, and HASHD activist, Naser had worked for Jibril until the incursion, at which point the Israelis forbade him to leave Abu Dis. With an eye on the Israeli assassination teams, he prudently obeyed. Naser kept protests peaceful by importing three hundred Fatah people, all HASHD “tigers.” Every day at the protest field they sang their songs and danced traditional jigs from seven in the morning till midnight. And it worked, though once a few students wearing masks started throwing rocks and petrol bombs at an Israeli bulldozer near the sports ground. Troops guarding the site fired warning shots to disperse them. No one was hurt.

  Another thing we did every day to keep tensions down was to have the soccer team dress up and practice on the field. The first time we did it soldiers standing off to the side went from being nervous recruits with their fingers on the trigger to passionate partisans of one team or the other. The tension was gone, and the soldiers walked away smiling. For over a month the soccer teams played match after match. Every night we staged a party, and young people from Abu Dis and nearby villages came to socialize on the field. The concerts, food, bonfires, and a festive atmosphere were a throwback to the spirit of 1968.

  Our “protest camp” was a large tent, under which we held meetings and examinations. It doubled as an information center for the international and Israeli media. With PowerPoint presentations, slide shows, and printed materials, we explained how detrimental the wall’s course would be for the university.

  The journalists who streamed into Abu Dis to cover the protest gave us overwhelmingly positive coverage. An article in The Guardian featured a soccer player named Samer: “‘There are no more playgrounds in this part of our country, nothing left to play on,’ says Samer, 25, who is studying for a masters in sports science at Al-Quds. ‘And this is a place for people to meet as well. So we hope every day that our match won’t be the last game here.’”

  I put out a press release in Arabic, Hebrew, and English titled “Does the Wall Also Need to Cut Our Campus into Two?”

  The University, home to almost 6000 students, has been for the past few years in the forefront of the campaign to encourage Israeli-Palestinian academic cooperation. The University campus has for the most part during the past three years of bloody violence and confrontation been fairly quiet, with students intent whenever allowed to reach the campus on pursuing their research and studies.

  The ravaging of the campus grounds, and the erection of a high cement wall in its midst blocking the natural view across the valley, cannot but be an indelible statement of enmity, aggression, and political as well as human failure. This negative statement, written in concrete blocks in the face of university students, stands in direct opposition to the positive educational values we try to propagate at the University, such as the necessity of breaking down the barriers of enmity, and the building of bridges of understanding in order to enhance the prospects for peace.

  On the same day I put out the press release—it was September 3—we invited various consuls general and diplomatic representatives to our protest camp. Among others, the American political consul showed up accompanied by representatives of Ambassador John Wolf, U.S. coordinator for implementation of Bush’s Road Map. Italian consul general Gianni Ghisi, whose country presided over the European Union, spoke on behalf of the visiting diplomats. “Al-Quds University is a partner with us; any damage to its interests is considered damage to our interests. We will work together with Al-Quds University to get through this period.” The consul general called on Israeli universities to show their support for Al-Quds University, adding, “Not only is Al-Quds University an intellectual laboratory, it is a laboratory of nonviolence and passive resistance.”

  It took thirty-four days of protest, but finally I got a phone call from the office of the Israeli army chief of staff. The message was that the Israeli government had agreed to move the wall away from our fields. The shift in their plans came about because our protests had reached the ear of U.S. national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, who subsequently raised the issue with Israeli officials in Washington.

  Saving the soccer field was important for Al-Quds University, but it did nothing to stop the relentless building of the wall. The major settlements fell into Sharon’s concrete lasso, but so did the key water sources and much of the best land. All over the West Bank, thousands of acres were being expropriated; villagers were separated from agricultural fields on which their livelihoods depended; hundreds of buildings and tens of thousands of fruit and olive trees had to make way for this jagged concrete barrier. In some areas, the wall penetrated deep into the West Bank, cutting villages off from one another, creating isolated enclaves, and destroying any hope of a contiguous Palestinian state.

  If you set a thief loose in a department store for a night he’ll go for the highest-quality stuff. Sharon’s wall took in the biggest prize of all: East Jerusalem, where vast tracts of land came under Israeli control. With one hatchet blow, thousands of years of sacred geography changed. The wall cut off Lazarus’s town of Ayzariyah, close to Abu Dis, from the other Christian sites in Jerusalem. For a pilgrim to go from the Church of the Holy Sepulcher to the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem suddenly required a long wait before a scene reminiscent of the Berlin Wall—the same concrete, rolls of razor wire, watchtowers, and edgy soldiers clutching weapons. Two million Muslim worshippers in the West Bank were unable to pray at the Dome of the Rock, a source of our collective identity as a people.

  With one victory in our pockets, the time had come to expand HASHD’s operations beyond collecting signatures. The only way to stop Sharon and his wall was by reviving the political process, and the only way to do this was to counteract Sharon’s attempt to eliminate all dialogue and talk of coexistence through a hermetic separation. This in turn required convincing Israelis that it was in their interest to return to the negotiating table. We had to show them that Sharon’s policy of caging Palestinians in enclaves would eventually lead to a South African situation (in an act of thoughtless indiscretion Sharon even called the enclaves Bantustans).

  The central flaw in his admittedly clever scheme is that Palestinians will never stop fighting it, and by means both foul and fair. One day the Israelis may realize that the reason for the never-ending turmoil disrupting their lives has nothing to do with our opposition to the Jewish state but is rooted in the more mundane fact that human beings are not constituted to accept injustice. But by that time it is quite possible that the reality on the ground will make impossible a solution based on part
ition between the two sides. And so, out of the ruins of the Greater Israel ideology may well emerge extremist solutions such as Lieberman’s “ethnic cleansing,” a procedure that, if implemented, will make the conflict even more vicious, and impossible to solve peacefully. Meanwhile, those who will pay the price in terms of continued pain and suffering will be ordinary Israelis and Palestinians who seek to live normal lives within their respective societies.

  Our new approach was either dialogue leading to a two-state solution, or a nonviolent campaign demanding full citizenship in Israel. If Israel continued its occupation, we would respond with an antiapartheidstyle campaign of “one man, one vote” in a unified Arab-Israeli state. At HASHD, we began calling the Security Fence the “Apartheid Wall.”

  Ami issued an identical statement: “Unfortunately, the fence that Israel is building will make many people stop believing in peace. If Israel creates a situation similar to that seen in apartheid-era South Africa, there will be neither a Palestinian state nor a safe home for the Jewish people. Although Israel does have the right to defend itself, the way in which it is building the Wall will harm the prospects for a favorable future.”

  HASHD took on the wall in a variety of ways. In support of the Palestinian delegation, we sent representatives to the International Court of Justice in The Hague that was hearing the case entitled “The Legal Consequences of the Construction of a wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.” We also redoubled our efforts to push for nonviolence within Palestinian society. With the slogan “Build Bridges of Understanding Not Walls of Separation,” we made the point that the adoption of the Destination Map peace initiative would eliminate the pretense for the construction of the Security Fence and provide security and prosperity for both Palestinians and Israelis. Perhaps the most significant evolution of HASHD took place in July 2004, when we staged Palestine’s first national demonstration modeled after Peace Now. Like a Peace Now gathering, we brought in people from all over the country.