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As I write, the two chief political factions in Palestine, Fatah and Hamas, are engaged in a civil war, as Israel ponders helping Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas restore order and the United States prepares to release previously impounded aid to Abbas' newly-formed government. One of those called upon to help Abbas should certainly be Sari Nusseibeh, the President of East Jersualem's Al-Quds University. He would seem to be the ideal negotiating partner both for Israel and the West. An Oxford- and Harvard-educated philosopher who cherishes the ideals of Jeffersonian democracy, Nusseibeh has already played a role in many peace efforts, both formal and informal, as well as being a clandestine leader of the first intifada or Palestinian uprising and head of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in Jerusalem. He recounts all this and more, with the help of co-writer Anthony David, in his fascinating memoir Once Upon A Country: A Palestinian Life.
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Nusseibeh's memoir allows the reader to experience the dislocations visited upon the Palestinian people by the creation of Israel, not as a loss abstractly registered but rather in a narrative that a novelist or filmmaker would envy. His family has lived in Jerusalem and elsewhere in Palestine since the Arab invasion of the 7th century, when Caliph Omar granted to the Nusseibehs the keeping of the key to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Nusseibehs have been opening its door each morning ever since, in a cooperative arrangement with the monks who live there. As landowners and proprietors of such businesses as the Gold Souk, the Nusseibehs were firmly established among the oligarchs of Jerusalem prior to the UN partition of 1948 that created Israel. After losing a leg in a skirmish with the Israelis, Sari Nusseibeh's father served as mayor of East Jerusalem and later as ambassador to England during the Jordanian protectorate before the Six Day War of 1967. Sari Nusseibeh grew up watching loss after loss: his mother's family's lands, and his father's olive grove, and more—all confiscated by the ever-victorious Israelis. He does not voice his outrage at these injustices so much as assume the reader will empathize and therefore find his efforts on behalf of his people right and natural.
Our identification with the Nusseibehs' plight opens the way for the author's retelling of contemporary Palestinian-Israeli history. Like all partisans, even the most generous, Nusseibeh tends to feature his enemy's misdeeds and excuse his own peoples' failings as dictated by circumstance or ignorance. He assumes that the Palestinians and their Arab allies simply could not have accepted the creation of Israel in 1948 and concentrates on the way the Israelis used their military advantages to empty their territory of its Palestinian population and consolidate their rule. He does recount some of his elders' second thoughts on this question, but the Israelis remain the true aggressor. As a young man, persuaded that the pan-Arabism of his father's generation was an illusion, Sari Nusseibeh gave his loyalty to Yasser Arafat and the PLO. While he recognizes Arafat's failings, particularly his reliance on payoffs as an organizing principle, and once fled a conference in the wee hours of the morning to avoid coming too directly under Arafat's control, Nusseibeh never questions the historical necessity of the PLO's longtime role as the Palestinians' sole political representative in peace negotiations. Yet unlike the leaders of Hamas, he believes firmly in a two-state solution and longs for the day when Palestinians and Israelis recognize what he sees as their fundamental alliance as stewards of the Holy Land. It's impossible not to want to join hands with Sari Nusseibeh and make peace.
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