a liberal in jerusalem: the paradoxes of sari nusseibeh

8/14/2019 A Liberal in Jerusalem: The Paradoxes of Sari Nusseibeh

1/6

A Liberal in Jerusalem:The Paradoxes of Sari NusseibehBy Anthony David April 2008

Heart of a paradox: Arabs and Jews in east JerusalemPhoto credit: Jill Granberg

the fteen minute drive between west Jerusalem and Sari Nusseibehs oce

at Al-Quds University in east Jerusalem is a trip into the heart of a paradox, or

rather a number of them. To begin w ith, there is the municipal paradox of a

divided city where the obvious divisions can camouage as strange forms of

togetherness.

Nusseibehs oce is in largely middle class neighborhood of Beit Hanina.

The neighborhood is unmistakably Arab, a stronghold of Fatah movement,

and center to the Arab intelligentsia of Jerusalem. One thing you notice while

driving to the edge of town is the construction of a new light rail line that willtake the residents to the gates of the Old City in mi nutes. The locals will tell you

that the only reason this expensive piece of modern mass transport is being built

is to bind the Jewish settlements in the area to west Jerusalem, guaranteeing

that east Jerusalem will forever be a part of the Eternal Capital of Israel.

Whatever the motives of the politicians, it is easily to imagine that one day

the train will be packed on Friday mornings with Palestinian worshippers

headed to the Dome of the Rock, the most poignant symbol of their national

identity and of their struggle against Israeli control. Jewish and Arab na -

tionalists will thus be riding the same train, each with their respective ags,

ESSaYabout thE author

Anthony David is a writer and translator.

He is the co-author with Sari Nusseibeh

ofOnce Upon a Country: A Palestinian

Life and the editor and Translator of

Lamentations of Youth: The Diaries of

Gershom Scholem, 1913-1919. His biography

of the Israeli-American arms smuggler

and entrepreneur, Al Schwimmer, will

shortly be published by Schocken Books

in Tel Aviv.

Anthony David

about ZWorD

CrEDItS

Z Word is an online journal focusing on

the contemporary debate over Zionism,

anti-Zionism, antisemitism and related

areas. Editorially independent, Z Word

identies and challenges anti-Zionist

orthodoxies in mainstream political

exchange.

Z Word is supported by the American

Jewish Committee. To learn more about

Z Word, visit us online at:

www.z-word.com

or contact the editors at:

[email protected]

Copyright the American Jewish

Committee (AJC). All content

herein, unless otherwise specied, is

owned solely by the AJC and may not

disseminated in any way without prior

written consent from the A JC. All rights

reserved.


2/6

A Liberal in Jerusalem: The Pa radoxes of Sari Nusseibeh 2

heading to a city both claim for themselves. They will be

together in their seemingly i rreconcilable dierences.

Meeting with Dr. Nusseibeh brings up paradoxes

of the more human sort. He is the sort of man who

always has a string of worry beads in his hands, and yet

doesnt betray any worry. The beads seem to work.

When I arrived in early April Nusseibeh told me he

had just canceled a scheduled trip to New York City.

The rabbi who had invited him was backing out. Wasnt

worth it. Got too many death threats. So who would

want to target a rabbi? I asked him. Other Jews, he

said with a slight lilt to his voice, rubbing his beads. The

dear man got ten threats in as many days. Imagine

that. I assumed the rabbi was left-wing, but I was

wrong. It was a right-winger who got the death threats

for inviting an Arab intellectual to his synagogue.

Nusseibeh, who was once Yasser Arafats PLOs rep-resentative in Jerusalem, has become a celebrity among

many Jewish intellectuals worldwide. Abe Foxman and

Paul Wolfowitz have praised his courage and vision. The

Forward has called him a paragon of empathy and, by

extension, of compromise. His Once Upon a Country

was the most popular book at the Jewish book fair in

London. The Hebrew translation of the book is imminent.

Not all Israelis or Jews are so attering, of course.

Morton Klein, the president of the Zionist Organization

of America, once referred to him as a wolf in sheeps

clothing. There were many people in the Israeli securityservices that obviously had similar suspicions when

they arrested him during the rst Gulf War. And yet

remarkably enough, the only time he has been physi-

cally attacked was by Palestinian militants, and for the

crime of negotiating with Israelis. More recently, he

got his own stack of death threats after he poured cold

water on the notion of the right of return of the 1948

refugees to their former villages inside the Jewish state.

The Moral Basis for Israels Existence

That a Palestinian should be feted by Jews and attacked

by fellow Arabs is not in itself so anomalous. The paradox

appears when you take a closer look at his position. Unlike

other Palestinian or Arab intellectuals, Nusseibeh does

not simply accept the political reality of Israel because the

Arabs are too weak to snatch back from the Israelis what

they lost in 1948. He accepts the moral right of the Jews

to stay putthough without paying for his moderation

by ignoring his peoples plight. Better than most he is

acutely aware of the steep price Palestinians paid in 1948

for the Jewish people to have their own independent state.

This melancholy story of the past sixty years is not an

abstraction for Nusseibeh; it cuts close to the bone. The

UN decision to partition Palestine into two Jewish and

Arab states in November 1947 triggered a bitter civi l war

in Jerusalem. Each side sniped and tossed bombs at the

other. In the months until the declaration of Israeli inde-

pendence in May 1948, Arab irregulars operating in the

mountains between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem cut o supplies

to Jewish neighborhoods in West Jerusalem, strangling

the city. In Jerusalem itself, however, the Haganah and the

other Jewish militia groups were better armed than the

Arabs, had superior training, and with the Holocaust so

fresh in everyones memory, were vastly more motivated.Anwar Nusseibeh, Saris father, was a judge at the

time. He and his friends feared that if they didnt put up

an eective defense, the Old City would be lost. To defend

their homes and heritage, they formed a militia run by

men who had mostly never held guns before, let along

red at other human beings. The head of the group was a

retired inspector of education. Its members laid no bombs,

planned no attacks. Their group was defensive in nature.

Anwar Nusseibehs job was to scrape together weaponry.

Sari was conceived during one of his shopping trips to

Beirut. Af ter a brief rendezvous with Saris mother, whowas in Beirut due to the ghting, he returned to Jerusalem

just in time for the British to announce the end of their rule

in Palestine. On May 14 David Ben-Gurion announced that

after two thousand years, the foreign rule of Palestine

was over, once and for all. Jewish forces immediately took

over the Arab neighborhoods of Talbieh, the German

Colony, and Baqa. In the Old City there were attacks at Jaa

Gate, New Gate, and Zion Gate. For four days the ragtag

Nusseibeh accepts the moralright of the

Jews to stay putthough without paying

for his moderation by ignoring his peoples

plight


3/6


Arab forces held out. With ammunition running danger-

ously short, Nusseibeh slipped o to Ramallah for fresh

supplies. He was in the car on his way back to Jerusalem

when he was shot in the thigh. The leg was later amputated.

By the time the ghting was over a year later, the

Nusseibeh family had lost its vast property holdings in what

was now Israel. The spot where Ben Gurion International

Airport now sits had been ancestral Nusseibeh land.

Saris mother lost far more. After her husband was

shot, she returned to her family in the Arab city of Ramle

near the coast. In June 1948, the Israeli army showed up.

Yitzhak Rabin, at the time a commander of the Haganah,

obeyed the tacit orders from Ben-Gurion to clear out the

town. Some of the Arabs were given transport in trucks or

buses. Pregnant with Sari, Nusseibehs mother was forced

to travel by foot back across the demarcation lines and into

Jordanian-controlled east Jerusalem and the West Bank.

History Without Rancor

This history of the rst Arab-Israeli war is important to

mention because it relates directly to the most puzzli ng

aspect of Sari Nusseibehs thinking. After the war his one-

legged father refused to be eaten away by ra ncor, melan-

choly, or defeatism. He went on to become the governor of

the Jerusalem region and the Jordanian minister of defense.

After 1967, he often invited Moshe Dayan, the late Israeli

Defense Minister, and Teddy Kollek, the late Mayor ofJerusalem, into his home to discuss practical solutions for

the problems facing east Jerusalemites in the united city.

His mother, by stark contrast, could never slough o

her bitterness at Israel and the Jewish people for robbing

her of her homeland. Her family had owned orange groves,

and she raised her children with tales of the sweetest

oranges on earth growing on a plantation stretching all

the way from Ramle to the gently swelling waves of the

Mediterranean. To this dayshe is over 90she hasnt

given up on her dream of returning to her familys lands,

even if the orange trees have long given way to an Israeli city.

Like most refugees, Mrs. Nusseibeh wants justice

in the form of restitution. One of Saris similes for this

approach, so typical of Palestinian refugees, is of a stolen

carpet that an owner nds after years of searching. Unlike

the pristine carpet in his imagination, the owner nds it

covered with furnitureor rather houses, skyscrapers,

highways, universities, an international airport, millions

of people. Disturbed by the clutter, he wants to give it a

good shake and restore it to its origi nal state. Nusseibeh

has spent years trying to tell his fellow Palestinians how

impossible, but also morally indefensible, such a fantasy is.

Returning to the paradox, how does a man raised with

the smell of the worlds most perfect orange blossoms

in his imagination accept Israels moral right to exist?

Nusseibeh doesnt doubt for a moment that his mother

was wrongfully driven from her home during the 1948

ghtingclearly a brutal thing to do. And yet in his mind

the Jewish state has a moral right to remain r ight where it

is, on those very lands. Prima facie it seems like an impos-

sible position to hold. Many Palestinians call it treason.

Ive known Nusseibeh for four years now, and I

could never square what he says about Israels moral

right to exist with the history of his family. It was only

during our recent chat that his seemingly contradic-tory statements began to make some sense.

Philosophy Without Abstractions

What struck me most while we spoke was how he is more

of a novelist than a traditional philosopher or politi-

cian. He shies away from abstract ideas, rarely tries to

trap you in a syllogism, and never comes at you with a

manifesto or slogan. He has a horror for abstract moral

codes written into a sacred book or a nationalist credo. If

he wants to make a phi losophical point, he refuses to doso as a professional philosopher, a member of the elite,

or an Arab prince as people like to describe him. The

only authority Ive ever heard him citewith the excep-

tion of his daughter, whose literary tastes he regards

as authoritativeis that of the concrete individual. It

seems like every other sentence he refers to the normal,

average person like us. But the funniest thing happens

when you add up his statements about normal people:

like magic, a philosophy emerges. This normal, average

Nusseibehs mothercould never slough

off her bitterness at Israel and the Jewish

people for robbing her of her homeland


4/6


person functions as a heuristic device keeping the various

components of his systemnation, memory, identity,

justice, dialogue, and nally peacefrom ying into pieces.

Every age gets the political theory it deserves, or needs.

The English Civil War produced Thomas Hobbes eleva-

tion of the all-powerful state as the defender of life and

property; like a genie from a bottle, the age of European

colonial global expansion conjured up Smiths Invisible

Hand, Hegels Weltgeist, and Marxs international Working

Class. Saris normal, average person can be seen as

his philosophical response to our contemporary situ-

ation of peoples, tribes, and ethnic groups demanding

historical justice, and citing a litany of real or imagined

past grievances to boost their case. What makes our point

in history particularly perilousjust think of Gazais

how easy it is for groups seeking to shake the carpet,

as it were, to get their hands on modern weaponry. The

ghosts of past injustices have never been so well armed.

It has also become all too easy to kill in the name of

justice. Inevitably, the people who have caused the harm

turn into spectral embodiments of injustice, bondage, and

repression. The gun-toting settler appears in the mind of

the refugee as the incarnation of a hundred years of bit-

terness. Of course, it is much easier to shoot at a walking

idea than a esh and blood human being like yourself.

What dreams of perfect justice will never do is lead

to real freedom. The political leaders and demagogues

who like promising the moon might benet from slogans.The average, normal person will remain in his squalid

camp, or crumbling school or prison. The average, nor-

mal person gets lost in the pursuit of absolute justice.

Nusseibeh can accept Israels moral right to exist

despite the events of 1948 because he interprets his-

tory through the real needs of the normal, average

person. History has to ser ve life, not cripple it. The

person, not the political paradigm, is what interests him.

Because Israelis as individuals have the moral right to

life and libert y, so does the state that represents them.

The Lives of Others

The inability to understand the life of the Other is what

keeps the Israeli-Palestinian conict going, Nusseibeh told

me. What is needed to solve the century-old Arab-Israeli

conict is for both sides to develop a sense of empathy for

actual people. Palestinians must recognize the Israeli Jews

right to existhis right to life, freedom, dignity, security,

and so onas the Israelis must recognize the Palestinian

Arabs. The minute people climb down from their abstrac-

tions and distant memories to see the humanity in the

Other, the demons of 48 can be banned, and t wo states,

one Jewish and the other Palestinian, can exist in peace

side by side. Olmert and Abbas could go into a room, and

come out an hour later with a deal. Im sure of it, he says.

Nusseibeh rst realized the importance of empathy dur-

ing the bloodletting of the Second Intifada, a time of suicide

bombing and Israeli reprisals. He was Arafats Jerusalem

man, a thankless job that earned him threats from Israelis

and Palestinian militants alike. To calm his nerves one day

he read a book about two Jewish philosophers in Vienna

after the NaziAnschluss in 1938. In reading he began to

identify with the two mens suocating sense of doom andterror due to their problems with citizenship, residency

papers, travel documents, venal bureaucracies, the threat

of property conscation, and arrest. Suddenly the dry

historical facts of Nazi antisemitism were infused with

real emotions. The tale of these two Viennese philosophers

gave him an empathic insight into their fate. He understood

emotionally why Jews felt they needed Palestine as a refuge.

What average, normal Palestinian could deny them this?

Nusseibeh decided to conduct a thought ex periment.

His mother was his test case. Just suppose, he asked

her during a visit, that in the early years of the centuryan elderly and learned Jewish gentleman from Europe

had come to her father to consult with him on an urgent

matter. And suppose this gentleman told him that an

unimaginable catastrophe was about to befall the Jews of

Europe. And suppose he threw in that, as an Abrahamic

cousin with historic ties to Palestine, he wanted to

prevent the coming genocide by seeking permission for

his people to return to the shared homeland, to provide

Nusseibeh can accept Israels moral right to

exist despite the events of 1948 because he

interprets history through the real needs of

the normal, average person


5/6


them with safety and refuge. What did she think he would

have said? he asked her. Would he have permitted a

wholesale return of the Jewish people to Palestine?

Her reply was surprising. Nusseibeh had braced

himself for a string of conditions and clauses and

caveats, and in so many words, a resounding No.

Instead she responded straightaway with a wave of

her hand, How can you even ask such a question?

He NEVER would have refused them refuge.

Just by changing the terms of reference, from the orange

blossoms to the desperation of the Jewish people, over

half a century of pain and resentment was wiped away.

Nusseibehs catalogue of average, normal rights

includes, inter alia, respect for a persons dignity; a sense

of equality; the right of movement; security; and the space

to develop and practice ones abilities. Unsurprisingly,

one of his favorite lines from the political-philosophical

canon is Life, libert y, and the pursuit of happiness.

In some ways this catalogue resembles what tradi-

tional liberals, from John Locke to John Rawls, have

always said. The dierence between Nusseibeh and

these other philosophers, and the reason his approach

makes more sense in our sloppy world of ethnic and

religious conicts, is that his average, normal person

still bears the welts from handcus. The real history and

identity of a person are not stripped away in the processof looking for universal values; rather, universal rights

become the prism through which past grievances are

projected, and life-arming identities are formed.

A good example of this theory in action is Al Quds

University. Though himself a child of the 1960sback

then Nusseibeh loved attending demonstrationsif you

visit the campus of Al Quds you wont see many banners

denouncing the Occupation, the settlements, the closures

and the separation wall, all things Nusseibeh and his

students naturally detest. The task of the university, as he

sees it, is to actualize the needs of his 10,000 students.

The university has a history department, where the

history of the conict is taught. There is even a his-

tory museum dedicated to the memory of PLO military

commander Abu Jihad, a 48 refugee who is regarded by

many Palestinians as their own Che Guevara. But in the

museum, as in the history department, the emphasis

is on self-empowerment rather than revanchism; on

individual dignity, not ressentiment; on the ability to take

control of history and tragedy rather than being a help-

less victim. The uniqueness, even sheer audacity, of this

liberal political philosophy can best be appreciated when

compared to the prevailing attitudes among Palestinian

intellectuals, politicians, and especially the Islamists, who

regard the Naqba of 1948 rather than individual rights as

their starting point, making compromise with the Jewish

state at best a tactical maneuver borne out of weakness.

The Justice of Two States

Self-empowerment is the real underlying logic behind

Nusseibehs work as a n educator and a philosopher. At his

university he has introduced an Israeli studies program,

and no one in Palestine has cooperated so actively with

Israeli institutions. Making cooperation with Israel

into an aspect of self-empowerment, however, should

be profoundly disturbing to those Israelis who insiston maintaining control of the West Bank and Gaza. If

ags, historical memory, and so-called eternal rights

are secondary to the concrete rights of the individuals

freedom and dignity, then the state formthe color of a

ag, the faces on the currency - becomes secondary. An

independent Palestinian state is important only to the

degree in which it can guarantee the rights and liberty of

the individual. If the average person can derive greater

freedom within a bi-national Arab-Jewish state than

through a dysfunctional Palestinian Authority without true

sovereignty, then that is what Palestinians and all thosewho seek a humane solution to the conict should ght for.

Yet, herein lies the greatest paradox of all. The so-

called One State solution, being the direct by-product

of a failed Palestinian state, naturally puts into question

the moral underpinni ngs of the Jewish state. To avoid

this from happening, the fervent Palestinian national-

ist and the equally fervent Israeli Zionist, both as it

were riding the same train to the same sacred city of

Jerusalem, become allies in advocating for a successful

Self-empowerment is the real underlying

logic behind Nusseibehs work as an

educator and a philosopher


6/6


Palestinian state in which individual Palestinians enjoy

basic political and economic rights and freedoms on

their side of the Green Line, including East Jerusalem.

In this scenario, the Palestinians will get their state

and the sole responsibility to manage it in a rational,

transparent, demilitarized, and democratic mannerand

the Israelis will be assured that future Palestinians will

not put to question the Jewish state through a one-man-

one-vote campaign or the insistence on the right of return.

As Nusseibeh told an audience at the Hebrew University

shortly af ter the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United

States, when talk of the clash of civilizations was in the

air: Our shared future has to provide Israel with a secure

guarantee for its existence as a Jewish state, but it has also

to provide Palestinians with a secure guarantee for their

freedom and independence in their own state. Israelisand Palestinians. If anything, we are strategic allies.

As Nusseibeh told an audience at the

Hebrew University shortly after the 9/11

terrorist attacksIsraelis and Palestinians.

If anything, we are strategic allies

a liberal in jerusalem: the paradoxes of sari nusseibeh

Documents