Once Upon a Country: A Palestinian Life By Sari Nusseibeh with Anthony David Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2007, $27.50, pp. 542

The Don from Al Quds

Steven Erlanger

Sari Nusseibeh seems an awfully nice man—a bit feckless, slightly absent-minded, prone, as he tells us repeatedly, to wearing mismatched socks. He affects the air of an Oxford don lost in the maelstrom of the modern world, let alone in Palestinian politics.

Don he is, a philosophy professor, complete with slightly unkempt hair and a tendency to veer into disquisitions about Islamic writers that can seem a little self-indulgent.

Nusseibeh, who heads East Jerusalem’s Al Quds University, comes from one of the city’s oldest, grandest and wealthiest Palestinian families. He has been forthright, consistent and brave in opposing violence and terrorism, supporting tolerance and advocating a democratic, law-based Palestinian state alongside Israel, views not always welcomed by Palestinian leaders or some Israeli governments.

But Nusseibeh, in his often charming memoir, Once Upon a Country: A Palestinian Life, is also a little disingenuous. He seems naïve about how much he is protected by the stature of his family and his own prominence in Israel and the West. His role in the first Palestinian intifada and his close ties to the Fatah government he denounces in the book make him a more conflicted figure than his own account suggests.

This graduate of Oxford and Harvard smuggled documents and money in and out of Israel to support the first intifada. He was as close as he cared to be to Yasir Arafat and enjoys ready access to other Fatah leaders, including the two former heads of security in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Jibril Rajoub, whom Nusseibeh considers a close friend, and Muhammad Dahlan.

These are all complicated, charismatic figures committed to a two-state solution. But these men also created the corrupt semi-state of the Palestinian Authority and were key figures in what was really another Mukharabat satrapy—another Arab administration run by favoritism and the police with only the slightest veneer of democracy. Nusseibeh describes the result in broad terms without taking very much responsibility for any role any person except Arafat played in it, including himself.

Nusseibeh recalls his sometimes clever efforts to keep his distance from Arafat’s court, and he is again charming when explaining how the politically astute Arafat maneuvered him into accepting the position of the PLO’s representative in Jerusalem in 2001—a classic case, in a sense, of a leader touching on a wellspring of Nusseibeh’s usually well-hidden pride.

Nusseibeh seems fundamentally an honest man, with a welcome degree of insouciance, and his criticism of Fatah is direct. He cites with approval President George W. Bush’s 2002 speech calling on the Palestinians “to elect new leaders, leaders not compromised by terror,” and to build a democracy based on law and tolerance. “Stop the shooting, end the corruption, and build a democratic state,” Nusseibeh comments. “Who in their right mind could disagree?”

In areas of the West Bank and Gaza that they controlled, he says, Fatah and the Palestinian Authority “had failed, and the time had come to say so openly.” He blames Arafat for failing to close “some sort of deal at Camp David,” and for allowing the catastrophic and violent second intifada to swell and get out of hand. And he describes a meeting in which he told Mahmoud Abbas, then the chief Palestinian negotiator and now Palestinian president: “Either you want an independent state or a policy aimed at returning all the refugees to Israel. You can’t have it both ways.”

Hearing the bitter exchange, Arafat said gnomically: “Sari, we have to have sympathy for the feelings of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and Chile.” As Nusseibeh notes, Arafat used such tactical ambivalence and indecisiveness to great political effect. “On hard issues we often joked that he had a ‘La a’am’ policy, in Arabic a combination of ‘yes’ and ‘no.’ Pure ambiguity was his gift.” But it was also costly.

When Palestinians did finally vote for a new legislative council in January 2006 (the election was supposed to have taken place in 2000), they did not heed Bush, cheerfully tossing Fatah out on its ear and electing Hamas. The Islamic militant group, considered terrorists by Israel, the United States and Europe, still refuses to recognize Israel’s right to exist.

About Hamas, Nusseibeh, for all his winsomeness and wisdom, has little to say. He openly despises the closed-minded youths from Hamas who dominated Al Quds University. “The pious students, clustered in the back row, their lips pursed in tight circles,” didn’t much care for his lectures on more free-thinking Islamic philosophers, he writes. “Few of them knew the slightest thing about Islamic civilization, beyond what they had picked up from their village imam.”

No one has ever accused Nusseibeh of failing to speak his mind. This is a man who has been jailed by the Israeli government on absurd charges of being an Iraqi spy and beaten by Palestinian thugs for meeting with Israeli officials. Still, Nusseibeh’s analysis of Hamas is disappointing.

“How could Koran-thumping zealots win out over reason?” he asks. “What went wrong?” He doesn’t really answer his own question. Instead, he sees Hamas as “a product of a very modern European obsession with purity,” reflecting a kind of “revolutionary European nihilism.” An interesting thought, to be sure, but one likely to surprise and amuse the Muslim Brotherhood to which Hamas belongs.

Nusseibeh’s solution is patience. He simply believes that “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.”

His thoughtful criticisms of Israel and its policies, but also its attitudes, alone would make this book worth reading, even for those most resistant to any criticism of Israel. “Often it seemed that the Israeli military occupation fought terror only to promote it, because their real enemies were moderates,” he writes. “There arose a strategy of blaming moderates for the acts of extremists, crushing the moderates, and leaving the extremists intact—just in case they needed them as an excuse to smash the next crop of moderates in the future.”

One need not accept this description as a “strategy,” but it is an acute criticism of the Israeli habit of seeking security in the short-term, since both security officials and governments are judged that way, without thinking hard enough about the long-run consequences.

Nusseibeh maintains that the essence of the conflict is about two tribes fighting over land. “It was the simple fact that Palestinians wanted control over the territory conquered by Israel in 1967, and that Israelis didn’t want to give the territory up. Few people wanted to state this openly, because it involved too much cognitive dissonance, for both sides.” But in the world of Hamas, this point is less obvious. He has a better aphorism later: “The Jew seeks space to continue living, while the Arab defends his space to the death.”

Nusseibeh, with his love for Jerusalem and the land and for all decent individuals within it, whatever their politics or confession, is a model interlocutor. But it is hard to read this engaging, stimulating and rational memoir without a wistful sense that there are fewer like him with every passing day.

Steven Erlanger is the Jerusalem bureau chief for The New York Times.