A Palestinian optimist in a pessimistic time
By Jeffrey Goldberg, Jeffrey Goldberg is the author of "Prisoners: A Muslim & a Jew Across the Middle East Divide" and is a staff writer at the New Yorker.
April 1, 2007
DURING the first Palestinian intifada, which began in 1987 and ended with the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, the Israeli occupation authorities committed any number of deeply stupid acts. Perhaps the stupidest was the arrest by the Shabak, the internal security police, of a Palestinian man named Attalah Mahmud Najar, who was charged in early 1991 with the crime of "distributing inflammatory poems" in the Golan Heights. Najar was editor of a monthly magazine published in East Jerusalem. His poems, to my recollection, weren't very good: What they possessed in nationalist ardor they lacked in literary merit. But that wasn't the point. Najar was not a terrorist poet or a suicide-bomber poet. He was simply a poet. And yet the state of Israel, which has given the world Amoz Oz and A.B. Yehoshua and Yehuda Amichai and Aharon Appelfeld, declared a poet to be an enemy of the state. It struck me at the time that Theodor Herzl, the journalist (and novelist) who founded modern Zionism, would not have been made proud by Najar's arrest.
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But at the time, the Israelis believed they could arrest their way out of the problem. And so, on the night of Jan. 29, 1991, Nusseibeh, who was watching the film "A Fish Called Wanda" with his family, heard a knock on his door. An officer handed him an arrest order signed by the defense minister, Moshe Arens, who, with his prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir, overemphasized the value of military force. Nusseibeh had been accused, without supporting evidence, of spying on behalf of Saddam Hussein, and he was placed in "administrative detention," which was once used by the British occupiers of Palestine to imprison members of the Jewish underground. Nusseibeh was carted away, but not before one of his children handed him a copy of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy."
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This is not to say that Nusseibeh is a Zionist. For one thing, Zionists aren't in the habit of quoting — approvingly — Noam Chomsky, and Nusseibeh catalogs, sometimes at unwarranted length and in exaggerated form, the sins of Israel, particularly the sins of occupation and settlement. And the narrative he presents in this book is undeniably the one devised by Arab, and pro-Arab, historians. There is no doubt that the 1948 war, which erupted upon the establishment of the state of Israel, did not end the way his family hoped it would, and Nusseibeh unpersuasively argues that the Jews were the Goliath in the fight, rather than the David. But Nusseibeh seldom demonizes Israel, or Israelis, and states plainly a complicated truth about the conflict, one that has escaped another prominent commentator on Middle East affairs, former President Carter. A "Manichean view of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict," Nusseibeh writes, "with one side all light, the other all darkness, is impossible to take."
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Nusseibeh writes about the peace process, its petty conflicts and many failures, at a level of detail that could prove wearisome to the general reader. But even in this overlong section, indispensable themes emerge. Because he is not an enemy of Jewish nationhood, his criticism of Israel's excesses has genuine credibility, and I hope it is heard in Jerusalem. And because he is a Palestinian whose sacrifices for the cause of his people are real, his criticism of Palestinian extremism — he courageously calls Hamas what it is, an anti-Semitic hate group — and of Arafat, whom, he argues, "blew" a chance for a deal at the Camp David peace talks in 2000, should be heard in Ramallah and Gaza.
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http://www.latimes.com/features/printedition/books/la-bk-goldberg1apr01,1,7954389.story?coll=la-headlines-bookreview
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