The Palestinian
philosopher Sari Nusseibeh tells Ian Black that despite widespread
pessimism surrounding talks in Annapolis a change of focus could go on to
yield spectacular results.
Like
so many Palestinians of his generation, Sari Nusseibeh looks back at years
of struggle that have achieved precious little. His entire adult life has
been spent in the shadow of conflict with Israel and it is difficult to
find even a glimmer of optimism that it is going to be resolved any time
soon.
Yet Nusseibeh, a prominent intellectual and philosopher, believes it could
be. Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, and Ehud Olmert, Israel's
prime minister, should, he argues, launch a new peace process at the
forthcoming Annapolis conference - and then campaign among their
respective electorates for a mandate to negotiate a final peace
settlement.
An appropriate response to this might be "bukra fil mish-mish" -
a colloquial Arabic phrase that roughly translates as "pigs might
fly".
It is easy to demolish his rosy scenario: each leader may fail to deliver;
each risks being hobbled by opponents on his own side. Olmert has to win
over hawks opposed to evacuating settlements and dividing Jerusalem.
Abbas's enemies in the Islamist movement Hamas, now running Gaza, accuse
him of selling out to the Zionists. And any progress could be nipped in
the bud by a Palestinian suicide bombing or Israeli air strike.
All true, Nusseibeh agrees mildly. But, he insists in an interview,
success is still possible.
"If you think about it, when we talk about politics and history and
how events unfold, sometimes we talk as if it's all about metaphysical
forces. We assume, like in this case, that there are objective
impossibilities. I am a pragmatic philosopher. And when you look a bit
more closely you realise that in the final analysis it's not so
complicated. It can be reduced to the actions of a person, and that person
can in fact make a lot of difference."
Nusseibeh is soft-spoken, tweedy and academic. But the professorial style
is misleading: conversations about Kant provided him with cover from
Israeli eavesdropping when he was involved in the first intifada
(uprising), producing the clandestine leaflets that shook the occupation
to its core.
He may never have fired a shot or thrown a stone in anger, yet his ideas
are a powerful antidote to fatalism and the (increasingly widespread)
argument that after 40 years Israel's control over the West Bank, its
Palestinians caged into disconnected bantustans, is now an irreversible
reality.
"Things could work out if people put their minds to it," he
says. "My faith is in the power of people to write history. One of
the tragedies is that we very often sit back feeling that we have no power
and that all we can do is express is our optimism or pessimism."
Nusseibeh is no Palestinian everyman. Born into the privilege and wealth
of one of Jerusalem's oldest Muslim families, he studied at Oxford before
teaching at Bir Zeit University.
With an English wife and a fancy foreign education, he cut an exotic
figure in other ways. Having grown up literally on the post-1948 front
line - when the Jordanian and Israeli parts of the city were divided by
minefields and barbed wire - he ventured across them, curious to explore
the new reality.
When most Palestinians were reeling from their stunning defeat, he worked
on a kibbutz in Israel and discovered that the enemy had a human face.
"Until 1967," he writes in his memoirs Once Upon a Country,
published in Britain this week, "we had hardly existed in the minds
of these fine people. This absence wasn't a product of malevolence or ill
will. Physically, we simply weren't part of their world, with most Arabs
having been cleared out 20 years earlier. Morally speaking, it was a case
of out of sight, out of mind. Their humanism never had to face us."
Unusually for any Arab or Muslim, Nusseibeh recognised that Jews had
emotional claims on the holy land (their roots in Jerusalem
"existential and umbilical"), and refused to see Zionism as just
another facet of western colonialism, or to ignore the role of the Nazi
Holocaust in forging Jewish nationalism.
"Isn't the ability to imagine the lives of the 'other' at the heart
of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?" he asks.
Even so, there were limits to empathy: he taught at the Hebrew University
in Israeli west Jerusalem before the grim and sometimes brutal reality of
living under military rule - facing a young soldier at a roadblock who
might have been one of his own students - forced him to retreat.
In his Bir Zeit lecture hall he realised early on that Islamist students
were hostile to the dawning understanding among Palestinians (many of them
"graduates" of Israeli prisons) that there had to be two-state
solution to the conflict.
The Israelis, though, foolishly encouraged the groups who were to become
Hamas as a counterweight to the secular nationalists of Yasser Arafat's
Fatah and the rest of the PLO.
Nusseibeh's book is fascinating on the relationship between West Bankers
and the PLO leadership in exile, describing the peremptory Armani-suited
apparatchik who tried to control grassroots activism on the campus.
Even when becoming the organisation's representative for Jerusalem,
harassed by Israeli agents and doing time in prison (accused, absurdly, of
spying for Iraq) he remained semi-detached - an intellectual uncomfortable
with the intrigue and short-term thinking of "professional"
politicians.
Over the years Nusseibeh's independence and his advocacy of co-existence
and dialogue attracted suspicion, hostility and death threats - though
none intimidating enough to crush his sense of duty to speak out.
Now back on campus as president of Jerusalem's al-Quds university, he is
openly critical of Fatah for provoking this summer's Hamas coup in Gaza.
But there is, he suggests, still an argument to win, if Abbas can make a
case for light at the end of the negotiating tunnel.
"The thing is not to try to change their ideology, but to win the
people over to one's own side. The relevant issue is not whether the
ideology exists but how much support it has."
In 2002, at the height of the second intifada, with its bus bombings,
martyrs and Israeli re-conquest of the West Bank ("a catastrophic,
slapdash brawl ... a ruinous and sanguinary fit of madness")
Nusseibeh teamed up with Ami Ayalon, the dovish former head of Israel's
Shin Bet secret service, to try to galvanize the majority of people on
both sides who say they want to live in "two states for two
nations" - but doubt whether it can ever be achieved.
Nusseibeh's faith and determination that it can be rings through. And if
this is the triumph of hope over bitter experience it is still inspiring
to hear it.
"In retrospect people will feel it was stupid to spend so much time
over dividing this piece of land," he muses. "I'm not saying
it's easy to reach a mathematical solution, but such a solution does still
exist. I'm not saying that it's guaranteed. It's a question of deciding in
which direction to walk."
Ian Black
