Once Upon a Country: A Palestinian Life
By Sary Nusseibeh with Anthony David
Farrar, Strauss and Giroux
$34.50 pp543 |
Sari Nusseibeh is the kind of Palestinian that we Canadians love to embrace. An Oxford educated, philosophy professor who is president of al-Quds University in Jerusalem, Nusseibeh has been a steadfast moderate within the Palestinian national movement for decades.
He was an underground activist in the first Intifada that led to the Oslo peace accords in the early 1990’s. In the past six years he has vocally opposed the al-Aqsa Intifada and advocated non-violent resistance. A tireless, even quixotic campaigner for civil society among Palestinians, Nusseibeh is even more: he is a mensch.
The scholar’s memoir is a major contribution to the Middle East canon, which includes few works of this heft and honesty by Palestinians who have been players in the late Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement.
Nusseibeh, now 58, chose to write his life story after reading Amos Oz’s childhood memoir A Tale of Love and Darkness. Oz, the celebrated Israeli novelist and peacenik, grew up just a hundred feet from Nusseibeh’s boyhood home, but on the Jewish side of the “no man’s land” that split Jerusalem in the 1950’s.
“There were hardly any Arabs in his story, and not a hint of the world I knew as a child… I had to think of my upbringing. What did my parents know of his world?” Nusseibeh writes. “Isn’t this inability to imagine the lives of the ‘other’ at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?”
Once Upon a Country is Nusseibeh’s answer to Oz, and to a foreign public anxious for Palestinians to step forward with a commitment to co-existence. His personal narrative weaves through his people’s story and so doubles as a primer on Palestinian history.
The author presents himself as reluctant activist, an ivory tower type who was repeatedly enlisted by the PLO, most recently as its representative in Jerusalem in 2001-2002. He writes in an elevated, non-polemical style, which makes the book’s very strength also its flaw; Nusseibeh’s version of the conflict seems to reside in the rarefied world of an idealistic philosopher.
Nusseibeh keeps his eye on the high road – even if nobody around him can see it. For that he has over the years been characterized as both a prophet and a fool. He is currently a marginal figure in Palestinian (and Israeli) public life. That doesn’t stop Nusseibeh from trying to open minds even now, when despair prevails on both sides.
“Israelis may think that America is their real ally and Palestinians think Arabs or Muslims are theirs,” writes Nusseibeh. “In truth, the only two parties who are objectively allied with each other are Israelis and Palestinians because, like it or not, we have a shared future. Our mutual interest that the future be better than the present creates an objective alliance between us.”
Nusseibeh’s starts the memoir with his family history. Part of Arab Jerusalem’s privileged elite, the first Nusseibeh arrived in the city with Caliph Omar in the 7th century. Since then a Nusseibeh has always held the key to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, opening the sacred site each morning.
Nusseibeh’s account of the 1948 war – the War of Independence to Israelis, the ‘Catastrophe’ to Palestinians — bucks convention by portraying the Jewish side as better armed, and with a “disciplined” plan to take as much territory as possible beyond what was promised by the 1947 UN Partition plan.
Fighting forced Nusseibeh’s mother and her relatives out of his grandfather’s home in Ramle. The group went by foot to Jerusalem. Nusseibeh’s father, a combatant, got shot in the thigh and had to have his leg amputated, “abruptly cutting off his pursuit of tennis, his favorite sport.”
Nusseibeh’s father served as Jordan’s defense minister, Jordan’s ambassador to London, and Jordanian-appointed governor of Jerusalem prior to 1967 when the Hashemite kingdom lost control of the city and the West Bank. The son was inspired by his father’s pragmatism– right after the Six Day War he advised the PLO to negotiate a two-state solution– and by his optimism. “Rubble”, he would tell son Sari, “often makes the best building material.”
Nusseibeh attended the posh Rugby school in England and then Oxford, where he met his wife Lucy, daughter of the British philosopher John Austin. They have four children and, apart from the odd sojourn at an American university, they have lived in Jerusalem since 1978.
Post-1967 Nusseibeh decided to get to know Israelis by working in an archeological dig, visiting the Knesset, and even spending a month on a kibbutz. He admired what he saw in Israel, and was also struck by the absence of any recognition of what his people had suffered — a fact he attributed more to ignorance than malevolence.
“Physically, we simply weren’t part of their world, with most Arabs having been cleared out 20 years earlier,” writes Nusseibeh. “Morally speaking it was a case of out of sight out of mind. Their humanism never had to face us.”
Nusseibeh’s efforts to shape his nascent society by building western style universities in Palestine, at Bir Zeit in Ramallah between 1978 and 1990 and at al-Quds since 1995, will touch the hearts of secular humanists everywhere.
But in a place like Jerusalem it is hard for a leading intellectual to stay out of the fray, and Nusseibeh began to speak and write his mind, drawing the ire of both Palestinians and Israelis. He took part in secret talks with Israel’s rightist Likud politicians in 1986, which led to a beating by Palestinian students who considered him a traitor. And Israel’s secret service has monitored Nusseibeh’s activities for two decades.
Israeli authorities jailed Nusseibeh in the 1991, not for disseminating leaflets during the first Intifada, but for allegedly spying on behalf of Saddam Hussein. As is the norm among Palestinians, his prison time added to the professor’s political credibility.
Some of Nusseibeh’s initiatives have moved popular opinion. His demand in the 1980’s that Israel annex the West Bank so Palestinians could enjoy full rights pushed Israelis to confront their demographic dilemma, ultimately leading to a mainstream acceptance that the country must relinquish the territory or cease to be a democratic, Jewish state.
More recently, after the collapse of the Oslo process, Nusseibeh provoked shock in his own community for urging Palestinians to trade their “right of return” to their ancestral homes, for their right to freedom in a mini-state alongside Israel. Nusseibeh describes a PLO cabinet meeting in 2002 when Abu Mazen (currently President of the Palestinian Authority) berated him for going public with what PLO leadership had accepted but considered a fall-back position for future negotiations. Nusseibeh insisted that the Palestinian and Israeli publics needed to know what might be on the table, in order to get them back to the table at all.
“After the meeting the consensus was that Arafat had backed my position but at the price of Abu Mazen’s estrangement from me.”
Nusseibeh’s accounts of his ambivalent relationship with Arafat over a 25 year period are among the book’s most interesting. He believes Arafat’s corrupt leadership was just as responsible as Israeli settlement activity for undermining the peace process in the mid 1990’s. Without abandoning all reverence for the “Old Man,” he paints a portrait of an Arafat increasingly out of touch with reality in the years leading up to his death in November, 2004.
Nusseibeh’s latest project has been a joint effort with former Israeli intelligence chief Ami Ayalon to create parallel grass roots pressure on both Palestinian and Israeli leaders for a negotiated two state solution. By late 2003, with suicide bombs still going off, Ayalon had 250,000 Israeli signatures and Nusseibeh 160,000 Palestinian names.
Since then, Hamas has come to power and Israel has erected a separation barrier which put an ugly concrete wall through much of East Jerusalem. “Hamas and the wall are two sides of the same coin,” writes Nusseibeh. “Both slam the door shut on dialogue.”
He, however, hasn’t lost faith. The rise of Muslim extremists hasn’t led Nusseibeh to abandon his belief in Islam as a flexible, potentially tolerant religion. Nor does he view current Middle Eastern wars as part of a clash of civilizations. He expresses frustration but never descends into self-pity nor de-humanizes his enemy. The memoir is also an elegant homage to Jerusalem, cradle of the three monotheistic religions, by one of the city’s most adoring sons.
hReading Nusseibeh restores hope — until you close the book and open a newspaper. The professor is sure to continue preaching from the sidelines, almost Sisyphean in his resolve. He may be our Palestinian. But, sadly, he is not a typical Palestinian. At least, not yet.
Nomi Morris was Jerusalem Bureau Chief for Knight Ridder Newspapers (now McClatchy) from 1998-2001).
