Once Upon a Country: A Palestinian Life (review)

This is the autobiography of one of the foremost Palestinian intellectual and political leaders. The scion of an elite family that traces its roots in Jerusalem back 1300 years, Nusseibeh has distinguished himself by vigorously abjuring resort to violence in the struggle against Israel. This has earned him the admiration of the Israeli peace camp. It did not, however, protect him from vitriolic attacks by the Israeli right wing, nor from radical Palestinian elements, who thought him too conciliatory. Nor did it keep him out of Israeli prisons. Although assuming the form of an autobiography, with appropriate emphasis on personal experience, the book also provides running commentaries on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as well as including numerous references to the works of medieval Arab philosophers (with whom he is thoroughly familiar), their ancient Greek predecessors, and their modern European successors. As a graduate of Oxford and armed with a Harvard Ph.D., Nusseibeh carved out a career in Palestinian higher education, culminating in the position he still holds today: President of al-Quds University, the only Arab institution of higher learning in Jerusalem.

Nusseibeh’s life brackets the conflict by which it has been dominated. He was born in 1949, the year after the formation of the State of Israel. As a child, he lived in a family home which bordered on the so-called Green Line in Jerusalem. From his bedroom window he was able to observe at fairly close range the comings and goings of the ultra-Orthodox denizens of Mea Shearim, the famous shtetl-like district of West Jerusalem. Not until 1967, when he was in his late teens, did the elimination of the Green Line enable him to enter Israel proper and see that it consisted of a lot more than just the ultra-Orthodox. He was exposed to political ideas and concerns by his father, a politically active lawyer who held several important positions in the Jordanian government, and who maintained a tolerant, cosmopolitan, and open atmosphere in the home. At age 19, Nusseibeh moved to Oxford and later Harvard, where he studied philosophy. Already at this stage, he developed a strong belief in the unity of civilizations, as opposed to the so-called clash of civilizations set forth by such neo-conservatives as Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington. He also abandoned his youthful infatuation with the ideal of a single secular democratic state with equal rights for Jews and Arabs, and instead came to advocate the concept of a two-state solution with a separate independent Palestinian state alongside the State of Israel. This is the position he continues to maintain, arguing that Israelis and Palestinians are (or should be) natural allies rather than mortal enemies.

In addition to his impeccable academic credentials, and the fact that he pursued a career in higher education, Nusseibeh was also politically active. Yasir Arafat actively sought his support, but Nusseibeh successfully resisted most of the time. He devoted considerable energy to building al-Quds as a genuine and respected academic institution. Arrayed against him was a series of formidable obstacles, beginning with the Palestinian Ministry of Higher Education, which sought to impose its authority on the essentially autonomous university, and including the Israeli government which was bent on limiting if not eliminating all Palestinian institutions within the city of Jerusalem, to Fatah and Hamas, whose members among the students got into open and violent conflicts which led to the expulsion of the Hamas faction from the university. Meanwhile, Nusseibeh was active in helping direct the youthful leaders of the first intifada by drafting many of their public declarations, although he carefully kept his participation from the public eye in an ultimately vain effort to keep Israeli security officers at bay.

In 2001, after the failure of the second Camp David, Nusseibeh spoke out more forcefully in public in an effort to salvage something from the deal that was almost consummated there. This was a time of sheer hopelessness: Faisal...