Once Upon a Country

by Sari Nusseibeh

  We decided to stage the rally in the Qalqilya District, where the wall was having particularly painful consequences for the villagers in the area. In the village of Jayyus, for instance, the wall pared off nearly 70 percent of the villagers’ lands, uprooted more than four thousand trees, and cut off six underground water reservoirs. The wall had destroyed the livelihoods of more than half the inhabitants of the village.

  The military did its best to stop us. It declared Qalqilya a closed military zone, and soldiers set up eight checkpoints on roads leading to the area. At least fifteen buses and a large number of cars, all carrying protestors, were turned back. But hundreds of ever-resourceful Palestinian bus and taxi drivers managed to navigate their way through. The 1,500 Arabs who showed up made our protest the largest demonstration in Qalqilya since the collapse of the peace process. There were workers, farmers, shopkeepers, engineers, students, clerks, and a rowdy contingent of Fatah youth from Jerusalem. “This isn’t your run-of-the-mill academics and types that I’m usually associated with in the Israeli press,” I told an Israeli reporter for The Jerusalem Report.

  Demonstrators wearing Lucy’s T-shirts reading SMARTER WITHOUT VIOLENCE held signs calling for a peace agreement based on the Destination Map’s two-state solution, a halt to violence on both sides, and a call to build bridges of peace instead of walls of separation and expansion. Graffiti sprayed on the walls—over previous layers of paint put there by Hamas and the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a militant offshoot of Fatah—championed dialogue over confrontation. As a symbol of cooperation, some of the youth flew kites that penetrated deep into Israeli airspace.

  Ami, the mayor of the nearby Israeli town of Kfar Saba, and four hundred supporters were on the other side of the wall, standing on a former rubbish dump. When our two sides spoke to each other we used megaphones and telephones, and Ami released a massive helium balloon bearing the message THERE IS SOMEONE TO SPEAK WITH.

  Balloons did not stop the wall any more than our soccer games at Al-Quds did. Inexorably, like a scene in H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, a fleet of bulldozers, cement trucks, and cranes has changed the geography of the Holy Land more in two years than all the conquerors and their greedy violence had since my family arrived in Jerusalem 1,300 years ago. For Palestinians, Sharon’s actions in Jerusalem can best be compared with Robespierre’s beheading of King Louis XVI, or Lenin’s order to gun down the Romanovs. We Palestinians have never had a king or a royal family around which to form a national identity; Jerusalem has been the cultural, religious, and geographic center of our identity; now, for most Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza, to visit Jerusalem would require a magic steed like Mohammed’s. Any other method, such as climbing over the wall, would invite a hail of bullets.

  The Seam Zone Administration has seen to it that not an inch of the eighty miles of wall comprising the Jerusalem Security Envelope comes anywhere close to the pre-1967 dividing line. The wall meanders in and out of Arab neighborhoods, at points thrusting miles into the West Bank. While most Palestinians find themselves on the wrong side of the wall, Sharon and his planners have included distant Jewish settlements such as Maʾaleh Adumim and Gush Etzion inside the Envelope.

  The dispossession of Jerusalem continues in other ways, such as the shady sale of the Imperial Hotel to a settler group seeking to “liberate the lands of Jerusalem,” as the Israeli newspaper Maʾariv phrased it. The place in which the Human Chain and HASHD campaigns began may now become one of the largest settlements inside the Old City.

  Epilogue

  A Night Journey

  May we, beleaguered by negation and despair,

  show an affirming flame.

  —W. H. AUDEN

  AT HARVARD, I HAD LONG DEBATES with my daughter, Nuzha, about the characters in my fairy tale. She had generally good things to say about Louise and the flying donkey. Her favorite was the noble knight standing guard, asleep, with ramrod posture before the Holy Sepulcher. Less convincing, she told me, with her precocious tone of authority, was Mr. Seems. “Where does he fit in?” she demanded. “Who is he?” I tried to explain that the impossibility of coming up with a straight answer to her query went to the heart of his character. “I could only tell you precisely who he is if he is who he seems to be, which he isn’t nor can he be.” I’d lost her.

  Though I have supreme admiration and trust in Nuzha’s discriminating literary tastes, I stubbornly held my ground: Mr. Seems really needs to stay in the story, I explained. I felt I had to keep him in because, for me, there is a dimension of mystery to the conflict in the Middle East that cannot be easily overcome. In a city as ancient and hallowed as Jerusalem, things are often not what they seem to be. More often than not, newspaper headlines and history books miss the essential, because at the heart of our conflict lies something difficult to put your finger on. As I know from experience, what everyone expects to be momentous historic breakthroughs—secret talks or daring diplomatic moves—often lead to yet another dead end.

  Since returning to Jerusalem after my year at the Radcliffe Institute—I got back in July 2005—one political earthquake after the next has rumbled through the Holy Land. Some things naturally haven’t changed: the weather, the relentlessly expanding settlements in the West Bank, and Russian-born eighteen-year-olds barking out orders to old women at checkpoints. But Prime Minister Sharon’s decision to clear out a few thousand Jewish settlers from Gaza, hailed as a world-historical event on par with General De Gaulle’s decision to leave Algeria, was no doubt a revolution in terms of Israeli politics. None of the previous Israeli leaders, not even peace-making Rabin and Peres, had ever dared clear out a single settlement, and here was Sharon, father of the settlement movement, evacuating the entire Gaza Strip.

  But for all its precedent-setting bravery, Sharon’s unilateralism has only made things worse. The comatose prime minister was not conscious to experience it, but Hamas’s blowout victory in the Palestinian parliamentary elections was one intended or unintended consequence of his actions. As a kind of distorted mirror image, his unilateralism gave impetus to a political movement dead set against dialogue. My old friend Jibril Rajoub, who has never wavered an inch from his belief in a negotiated two-state solution with Israel, ran for a seat in the new parliament and lost to a long-bearded Hamas man who believes that Jews are infidels.

  Such a colossal victory by an organization that denies the moral legitimacy of Israel, that calls for the ultimate destruction of the Jewish state, and that refuses to renounce violence as a means toward accomplishing this goal, was disastrous for HASHD and other organizations set up to promote coexistence. Hamas and the wall are two sides of the same coin. Both slam the door shut on dialogue.

  The electoral triumph of dogmatism and militancy left a lot of people scratching their heads. In Israel those on the right were euphoric: it was the final proof they needed that the Palestinian people were incapable of peace. Only cement, checkpoints, drone spy planes, and the occasional “targeted killing” could keep us in line.

  I had some hard questions to ask myself. Was the symbolic formula I had thought up while reading A Tale of Love and Darkness in the plane after Arafat’s funeral—that Louise, Abdul, and Amos, a Christian, a Muslim, and a Jew, join hands in planting a peace-bringing honeysuckle bush—just another case of wishful thinking? Have hatred and vengeance won out in the end? Were all the ideas I’ve tried my hardest to inculcate in students over the years—reason over fists, freedom over the dull habits of authority—no more than childish fantasies? How could religious zealots win out over reason? What went wrong?

  This was yet another riddle for me, but figuring it out was a bit like following Tom Thumb’s pebbles out of the dark forest. You must be careful lest you end up following the wrong leads—by blaming Islam, for instance. The truth really isn’t what it seems to be, for despite Hamas, Islam may well be part of the solution to healing our terribly violated land. The fanatics like to hold up the Koran, they just don’t like to read what i
t says about the Jews and Jerusalem. Israelis would similarly be wise to read what their own prophets have to say about oppression.

  One day, to clear my mind, I took a stroll with Naser, the head of Al-Quds University security, over to the part of campus he had helped save from Sharon’s bulldozers. After the Israeli army agreed to move the wall over to the edge of campus, Naser turned the rocky plot of land, once slated to form the concrete border severing Jerusalem from the West Bank, into a flowering garden with a fountain in the middle. Here the local people of the village, cut off from Jerusalem by the wall, can sit and stare off at the Mount of Olives. In their imaginations they can stroll through the city of the ancestors.

  I sat in the garden and was at once lost in thought. My mind went back over the last twenty years. Back in my days at the union no one could have imagined Sheikh Yassin’s obscure charity in Gaza, given a kick-start by Sharon, someday controlling the fate of our people. Now, in my post-election funk, the appalling mental image came to mind of the new Ministry of Education’s schoolbooks infesting young minds with the fable that the Jews are Crusaders and must be chased away by a modern-day Saladin. A whole host of Islamic characters flitted past my mind’s eye: I saw how Hamas would put a sword in Mohammed’s hand. Omar would no doubt have one, too.

  Sitting in the garden listening to the bubbling sound of the fountain, my mind raced. The Hamas victory, for many final proof of an epochal clash of civilizations between Islam and the West, wasn’t what it seemed to be. In fact, the more I thought about it the more I realized that the best witness against their perversion of Islam was the very tradition they claimed to defend, and used to justify their rejection of Israel. Our religious militants have imbibed a lot more revolutionary European nihilism than they are aware of. However much they dress up the ideology in a traditional garb, it remains a product of a very modern European obsession with purity. The cosmopolitan decency and tolerance of Islam, and the ability of Muslims to come to terms peacefully with erstwhile foes, will win out in the end, I concluded, because it is based on ancient traditions and texts. It is more deeply rooted than the slogans of contemporary extremists.

  Whenever I think of how Islam has been twisted by fundamentalists my mind tends to drift back to Mother and Father, and the tales I heard as a child. The Jerusalem I was raised to love was not a geographic dot on a map, and was certainly not a purely Muslim city; despite No Man’s Land, it was the terrestrial gateway to the divine world, where Jewish, Christian, and Muslim prophets—men of vision and a sense of humanity—met, if only in the imagination. This is worth mentioning, because the political divisions scarring the Holy Land begin in the religious imagination, and it is there they must be combated and overcome.

  The tale that always comes back to me, and which over time has grown only more poignant, is Mohammed’s Night Journey. It is a tale that seeped deeply into my mind as a child, and over the years has gone into the formation of my identity as a Muslim Jerusalemite.

  Most Muslims will tell you that Jerusalem is sacred because Mohammed ascended from the Holy Rock during this nocturnal flight—a journey that brought Mohammed to God’s presence, where he received instructions on how Muslims should pray and worship. Returning from God’s presence, the tradition relates, Mohammed led all the prophets in prayer. But a question that is not asked is: Why was Mohammed’s journey made through Jerusalem? Why was that Rock chosen as the place from which Mohammed ascended to God’s presence? Didn’t that affirm Islam’s recognition of the Rock’s prior Jewish (and Christian) holiness?

  Travel books printed in Syria a hundred years ago had no problem calling the Noble Sanctuary the Jewish Temple Mount, just as the Islam that I was raised with left me no doubt that Jesus, the son of Mary, was a prophet of God.

  As a child, and now in adulthood, the tale of the Night Journey has always been inextricably joined with the story of Caliph Omar, Islam’s second caliph. In the story I was taught, already in his journey from the north, Omar prepared himself to enter the Divine City. He didn’t arrive as a Roman emperor riding golden chariots and surrounded by soldiers, or as pharaoh carried on the shoulders of slaves. He and his manservant took turns riding a camel, as if Omar wanted to teach us that before God even the loftiest political office doesn’t entitle one man to lord over another.

  When he arrived in the Golden City, he slipped his sword back in its sheath. Jerusalem mustn’t be conquered with sheer force or desecrated by blood and plunder. Omar received the keys of the city and of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher from Bishop Sephronius. He then entered the city peacefully on foot. The caliph continued to the Holy Sepulcher. Next, a Jew helped Omar locate the place of the Rock over which the temple once stood. We are also told that, having determined its location, he cleaned the Rock with his own robe, as if to say that it was an honor for any man to serve this holy site, but by no means to dare pose as its master.

  • • •

  The Hamas legislators now running my country no doubt would bristle at the thought of the “enemy” being at the source of our identity as Muslims. But the religious fundamentalist can eradicate the Jews from Jerusalem only by first doing violence to Islam. At the deepest metaphysical levels, Jews and Arabs are “allies,” and any attempt to separate them is a product of the modern European myth of a “pure” nation, purged of outsiders, as with Sharon’s wall.

  One of the best representatives of the Muslim spirit I can think of in these dark days of fanaticism is, oddly enough, Lucy, called Louise in my fairy tale, one of the three characters who was symbolically given the role to bring peace to a war-torn land. Lucy was one of the few people among the Palestinian peace camp able to resist the pall of gloom that fell after the Hamas triumph.

  After the elections a reporter from Haʾaretz asked to interview her, doubtlessly expecting lamentation. Sitting with the journalist at the American Colony Hotel, across the street from Mother’s house, Lucy mentioned her philosopher parents, and her decision to move to Jerusalem. “I came here because I fell in love with Sari.” Mostly she talked about the organization she had founded, MEND (Middle East Nonviolence and Democracy); her “Smarter Without Violence” campaign; and her work with the Al-Qud University’s Sesame Street, which is now back on the air beaming out the message of mutual respect and tolerance. She also mentioned two films she helped produce to illustrate her work in education and media: Death of a Dream tells the story of Fatma Moussa, who has a miscarriage while waiting in line at an army checkpoint. A Woman’s Determination is the story of a woman eager to study law, despite her family’s objections.

  I say that Lucy embodies Islam infinitely better than the religious fanatics because, in her interview, she expressed a hope and openness to the future, and a belief in the miracles we as humans can perform using logic and will, which to my thinking comes straight out of the religion of the Prophet. “The future is still open,” she declared. The Palestinian people didn’t vote for Hamas because they wanted a religious dictatorship or endless war with Israel. They voted in Hamas because they were sick of Fatah. “The Palestinian public is fed up with violence. More than anything else it aspires to live a normal life.”

  To explain what she meant Lucy gave the example of one of her MEND activists in Tulkarem, who got a phone call from Hamas members interested in working together. “You see,” she told the journalist, “it isn’t all black.” Even Hamas can come around to a belief in dialogue and peace.

  “Neither is it all white,” her Israeli interviewer replied.

  “Do you know anything that is all white?” Lucy countered with her beguiling smile.

  Lucy’s wise words may be a good way to wrap up a chronicle of a life lived in a broken and violated land. Dualities of good and evil, black and white, right and wrong, “us” and “them,” our “rights” and their “usurpation” have cut the Holy Land into ribbons. The only hope comes when we listen to the wisdom of tradition, and acknowledge that Jerusalem cannot be conquered or kept through violence. It is a city
of three faiths and it is open to the world. Even after the erection of Sharon’s wall and the ensuing Hamas victory, the way my fairy tale ends still seems right to me: three characters, each from a sister religion, join hands to plant a honeysuckle bush. Meanwhile, Mr. Seems stands off in the distance as a reminder that things are never what they seem to be. In Jerusalem’s tangled, ancient alleys, wonder and surprise are always lurking around the corner ready to remind you that this is not an ordinary place you can map out with a surveyor’s rod. It is sacred.

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Chapter Two: The Pan-Arab Nation

  1. David Hirst, The Gun and the Olive Branch (New York: Nation Books, 2003), p. 135.

  Chapter Three: Promises, Promises

  1. Hirst, The Gun and the Olive Branch, p. 209.

  2. Ibid., p. 163.

  3. Ibid., p. 177.

  4. Vincent Sheehan, personal history, quoted in Hirst, The Gun and the Olive Branch, p. 189.

  5. Ibid., p. 161.

  6. Shabtai Teveth, Ben Gurion and the Palestinians (New York: Doubleday Books, 1981), p. 189. See also Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 25.

  7. Peel-Bericht (Berlin: Schoeken, 1938), p. 114.

  Chapter Four: The Herod’s Gate Committee

  1. Walter Laqueur, A History of Zionism (New York: Schocken Books, 1976), p. 266.

  2. In a speech at the House of Lords on April 23, 1947, Sir Herbert Samuel, the former governor of Palestine, said, “I do not support partition, because knowing the country as I do, it seems to be geographically impossible. It would create as many problems as it would solve.”