SARI NUSSEIBEH IN THE NEW YORKER: RAGE AND REASON

 

LETTER FROM JERUSALEM

THE NEW YORKER

 

RAGE AND REASON

by DAVID REMNICK

 

Will anyone listen to the P.L.O.'s voice of restraint?

Issue of 2002-05-06

Posted 2002-04-29

 

Sari Nusseibeh, the Palestine Liberation Organization's chief representative in Jerusalem, is perhaps the most moderate adviser in the councils of Yasir Arafat. (He is no doubt the only one to have worked on a kibbutz or to have written a graduate-school essay at Harvard on Wittgenstein and the role of jokes in philosophical discourse.) On many issues of moment within the Palestinian hierarchy—the morality of suicide bombings, the wisdom of Arafat's rejection of the Israeli offers at Camp David and at Taba, the refugees' demand for the "right of return" to historical Palestine—Nusseibeh disagrees, publicly and in all languages, with the hard men of the P.L.O. and Hamas, and even with Arafat (to the extent that Arafat reveals himself). To him, "martyr operations" are blatantly "immoral," the flat rejection of the Israeli proposals a "major missed opportunity," and the right of return a painful delusion best forgotten. It is not obvious why Arafat, who craves the support and supposed authenticity of the maximalists of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, appointed a mild man in corduroy and tweed to run the East Jerusalem portfolio. As a scholar and as the scion of a distinguished family, Nusseibeh wields about as much street credibility in the refugee camps of Nablus as a duke among the sansculottes. He has no muscle to offer Arafat, no immediate value, except, perhaps, as an ornament of democracy where democracy hardly exists. There is no argument to be made for Nusseibeh's power—unless one happens to believe in the power of restraint and rational thought.

 

Nusseibeh is fifty-three years old. He was born in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem. His forebears came to the city in the seventh century, with Caliph Omar. For centuries, the Nusseibehs have been involved in public affairs. Sari's grandfather was a top city official under the pre-1948 British Mandate, and Sari's father, Anwar, was, at various points in his career, a Palestinian warrior, the Jordanian minister of defense, the governor of Jerusalem, and Amman's Ambassador to the Court of St. James's. (His mother, Nuzha, was from a wealthy family in Ramle, a town between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv; they became refugees in 1948, losing their house and all their belongings, and resettling in Cairo and Jerusalem.) The signs of a Nusseibeh dynasty are abundant. For the past five hundred years, the family has been charged with holding the keys to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the Old City, which many Christians believe is the site of the Crucifixion. When it was time for Sari to send his eldest son, Jamal, to school, he sent him to Eton. As a boy, Jamal had participated in the first intifada—an uprising that was outlined in a Fatah paper called "The Jerusalem Document." The principal author of "The Jerusalem Document" was Sari Nusseibeh.

 

Nusseibeh came to politics obliquely, without a sense of calling. In 1968, just a year after Israel won the Six-Day War and took possession of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem—as well as gaining dominion over more than a million Palestinians—he was far away, reading philosophy at Christ Church, the most socially radiant of the Oxford colleges. (After university, Sari married Lucy Austin, the daughter of J. L. Austin, an Oxford don who wrote "How to Do Things with Words" and helped found the "ordinary language" school. They have four children.) Nearly every morning at eleven, Sari walked to the St. Aldates Church coffee house to meet with a young Israeli scholar from Queen's College named Avishai Margalit. "We talked politics in a sort of analytic way," Margalit, who now teaches philosophy in Jerusalem, told me. "There was no preaching to the other. It was melancholic talk, with me knowing that Israel was triumphalist and intoxicated after the war and him knowing that the Palestinians were in disarray. Sari was a sort of aristocratic kid, beautifully groomed and with great charm." Anwar Nusseibeh, who had been badly wounded in the war of 1948, sensed in his son a decidedly more pacific and private temperament. Margalit recalled, "His father said to me, 'I wanted to keep Sari outside of it because he would end up in trouble.' " As it happened, trouble could not be avoided.

 

After completing a Ph.D. in medieval Islamic philosophy at Harvard, in 1978, Nusseibeh began teaching at Bir Zeit University, in the West Bank, a center for both higher learning and elementary politics. At first, Nusseibeh kept out of public life, concentrating instead on problems of logic and moral philosophy; but eventually he was dragooned into academic politics—union issues and the like—and then into Palestinian politics generally. Nusseibeh was not mild in his opinions about the occupation. He demanded that the Palestinians in the occupied territories either be annexed as equal citizens of Israel (with the knowledge that in such an arrangement Arabs would eventually become a majority, ending the Jewish state) or, the more likely prospect, be made citizens of a new country, adjacent to Israel, called Palestine. And yet in the early eighties Nusseibeh outraged many of his fellow faculty members, and members of Arafat's Fatah organization, by attending a conference at Harvard to meet with Israeli politicians. As Palestinian politics grew more radical, Nusseibeh insisted on a rhetoric of moderation and on contact with the putative enemy. During the first intifada, he was quoted in the International Herald Tribune as saying, "I think it is a kind of exorcism to throw a stone at Satan," but he threw no stones himself and pressed for a "generally nonviolent" uprising. To call for the elimination of Israel, he argued publicly, was irrational; the Jews, he said, had a deep historical connection to Jerusalem just as the Arabs did. This was not, in all circles, a popular argument. One morning, on the Bir Zeit campus, several masked members of a Jordan-based branch of Fatah jumped Nusseibeh. He was badly beaten and one of his arms was broken.

 

Nusseibeh summoned up that day with a wry smile. "I remember it well," he said to me. "I'd just finished delivering a lecture at the university on liberalism and tolerance."

 

 

 

A few weeks ago, I met Nusseibeh at the Damascus Gate, one of the gates leading into the Old City of Jerusalem. Israeli troops and tanks were still in cities throughout the West Bank, and Colin Powell had been dispatched to the region, travelling everywhere and, it appeared, getting nowhere.

 

Nusseibeh sat on a stone step under a midday sun. He was in the company of a few dozen other Palestinians, and they were chanting slogans directed against Ariel Sharon and calling for his rapid demise. It was not an especially impressive demonstration, and Nusseibeh did not make for an impressive firebrand. He wore a slouchy baseball cap and a houndstooth jacket, and his expression, as he held up a hand-lettered anti-occupation placard and joined in the chanting, was sheepish. Over the years, he has repeatedly told friends that he would just as soon live a quiet academic life, one of teaching and contemplation and sabbaticals abroad—"Just like Avishai's life!"—and to see him now, hot and uncomfortable, was to take him at his word. He seemed both unhappy and out of place. And yet Nusseibeh is capable of absorbing every variety of political menace: anonymous telephone calls, hate mail, death threats. Even more unusual for someone in public life, he does not seem to mind being called irrelevant, as he often is. In January, when he declared that the Palestinians would be best served by the creation of a demilitarized state, Israel's environment minister, Tzahi Hanegbi, waved him off as an "esoteric character," and the minister of public security, Uzi Landau, warned that Nusseibeh was trying to pull off some kind of "trick." Landau refers to Nusseibeh as "the pretty face of terrorism."

 

This was not the first time that Nusseibeh had been so accused. In 1991, during the Gulf War, he was jailed after Israeli military-intelligence officials said he had called the Iraqi Ambassador to Tunisia and described how better to target the Scud missiles that Baghdad was lobbing at Israel. After three months, Nusseibeh was released. He says that the charge that he helped Iraq in any way was "absurd," and that the Israelis had been tapping his telephone, collecting a file, and hoping to "nail" him since the 1987 intifada. In fact, such charges still come up. Recently, an article in the Jerusalem Post warned that Nusseibeh is a "con man," who plays the "good cop" in a media dumb show "orchestrated by Arafat." Nevertheless, leading politicians, including Israel's foreign minister, Shimon Peres, and its defense minister, Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, who are not in the habit of endorsing enemies of the state, have praised Nusseibeh as a courageous and trustworthy interlocutor.

 

Arafat clearly understands Nusseibeh's value. Until last year, Arafat's representative in Jerusalem had been another of the city's Palestinian dynasts, Faisal Husseini, and when Husseini died, of a heart attack, while travelling in Kuwait, Arafat turned to Nusseibeh. For months, Nusseibeh resisted, worrying that he would be a for-display-only appointment. More important, he thought that the second intifada, which followed Arafat's rejection of Israeli proposals for a final settlement and Ariel Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount in September, 2000, was not an effective uprising—"not really an intifada at all" but, rather, a series of terrible mistakes and improvisations that would lead to radicalization on the Palestinian side, a strengthening of the right wing on the Israeli side, and, above all, the bloody dissolution of trust on both sides. Nusseibeh finally took the job, but his forecast proved all too accurate.

 

After the demonstration, we drove to his office at Al-Quds, a university with six thousand students in East Jerusalem, where he is the president. Nusseibeh has bushy, graying hair and wears wire-rimmed glasses. In a frantic political realm, he moves laconically, thoughtfully. He slumped into a Naugahyde armchair and tried to cool off and smoke at the same time. An assistant came around with coffee. As Nusseibeh's attention alternated among the coffee, his cigarette, and a set of blue worry beads, he managed to describe the current disaster "through our prism," as if this were a kind of tutorial.

 

"The escalation has an internal objective dynamic," he began, blowing smoke to the ceiling. "Things moved from one stage to the next in a kind of inevitable way, leading to the point where people felt they had no way to react other than . . . this."

 

"This," of course, was a catchall category of violence, including so-called targeted assassinations, bus bombings, bat-mitzvah shootings, arrests, strip searches, bulldozers, stones, F-16s, Kalashnikovs, helicopter gunships, and, on March 27th, the Passover bombing at the Park Hotel in Netanya that left twenty-eight people dead, and Sharon's armored incursions into nearly every major city in the West Bank.

 

"A lot of this is Sharon's fault," Nusseibeh said. "He knew just how to elicit the kinds of reactions from us that would then be a justification for going one step further."

 

After fending off a few calls on his cell phone, Nusseibeh continued, "I look at it this way: before Camp David, when the Oslo accords were first signed, people assumed, and were told by their leaders, that this was a first step, and at the end of five years we were going to regain the territories occupied since 1967 and establish a state with East Jerusalem as its capital. So people went along with Arafat and this process. There were several positive steps taken. On the other hand, the Palestinians saw the Israelis doing things that were not consistent with withdrawal. They saw them continuing to confiscate territory and increase settlements. So they began to develop a kind of schizophrenia. If you were living in a place like Nablus or Jenin and were told by your leadership that things were going ahead and you heard about negotiators coming and going, you assumed it would happen. But, if you looked outside, you saw the opposite on your doorstep: territories being confiscated, settlements, lack of freedom of movement. And things were getting postponed—five years went to almost seven—so there was a sense of frustration among the population.

 

"When they went to Camp David and Arafat said afterward that we didn't get what we thought we should, people in the territories felt that their suspicions about Israel were vindicated. From the Palestinians' perspective, Barak did not come as far as they thought he should. So Arafat came out of Camp David feeling angry with Barak, and Barak, because he didn't get a proper or positive response and felt he went out on a limb, felt betrayed by Arafat and the entire P.L.O. leadership. And Clinton, who wanted his Nobel Peace Prize, and wanted it to be done in ten days, also walked out feeling angry."

 

The biggest problem, as Nusseibeh sees it, is that neither side contained its anger, and so "the system of discussion was blown to smithereens." Each side indulged its worst suspicions about the other: an increasing number of Israelis felt that Arafat had been unmasked as a messianic terrorist who had never really wanted compromise except, perhaps, as a tactic; the Palestinians felt confirmed in their suspicion that Israel had no intention of giving up the settlements or their general dominance. According to Palestinians, Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount, the most disputed of all pieces of land, was the spark that set off the "cycle of armed violence." According to Israelis, the uprising had been planned months before.

 

As the violence accelerated, Arafat recognized that the leaders of Hamas and other Islamic radicals, with their calls for armed insurrection and the elimination of Israel from the map, were growing steadily more popular, while his own team, especially its members who were tied to the Oslo process, was seen as passé. And so Arafat began to encourage some of his younger lieutenants, including Marwan Barghouti and Jibril Rajoub, in the West Bank, and Muhammad Dahlan, in Gaza, to use the weaponry of the Palestinian police and security forces to create, in essence, a civilian army that could compete with Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Arafat's Fatah organization now sponsored the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, which was soon claiming responsibility for more suicide-bombing attacks in Israel than even Hamas.

 

Nusseibeh, however, denies that the Palestinians were so calculating or so organized. "On the whole, the Palestinian reaction to the Israelis was basically haphazard, emotional, out of anger," he said. "Israeli action toward the Palestinians was very determined, planned, and cold-blooded. This is why I thought from the beginning that a strategy was being worked out to provoke the Palestinians and draw them into a battle of which they are not the masters—namely, of violent confrontation. The goal is the destruction of the Oslo process and the Palestinian Authority, to be followed by the implementation of a Sharonian regime of what peace should look like for the Palestinians. Which is basically to give the Palestinians something that they can call a state, maybe something like forty per cent of the West Bank and Gaza, but under total security scrutiny by Israel." He added, "The good thing about Sharon is that he is a very systematic and straightforward thinker, and determined. He tells you what he wants to do and does it. Sharon has a vision."

 

In his narrative, Nusseibeh negotiated between history and apologia. He would not, for instance, argue that Arafat is innocent of incitement to violence. But he hints around the edges; he is brave but not a fool.

 

"Certainly Arafat is not a Gandhi," he said, with just a trace of a smile. "He is not someone who believes only in nonviolent action. He believes in the usefulness, the utility, of force."

 

Nusseibeh got another telephone call, this time from his wife, Lucy, telling him to come home. Their daughter had hurt her neck at a basketball game. Nothing too serious, but she was in the hospital.

 

"Sorry," he said. "We'll meet later."

 

He left, with his bodyguards, and rode home in the back seat of his S.U.V.

 

 

A few minutes later, when I was back at my hotel in West Jerusalem, the sirens began.

 

Then the phone: an Israeli friend who writes for the daily Ha'aretz said he'd heard that there had been a suicide bombing at the Mahane Yehuda market in the midst of the pre-Sabbath shopping rush. Within five minutes, I was there, to witness the aftermath of an event that has taken place so many times: yet again, a young Palestinian wrapped with explosives had got as close as possible to as many Israelis as possible and pushed a button. It was a woman this time, twenty years old, Andaleeb Taqtaqah, from a small town near Bethlehem. A police spokesman said that the woman had tried to make it into the market, where scores of poorer shoppers were taking advantage of the last, closing discounts before dusk and the beginning of the Sabbath. Apparently, when she saw that the entrance was well guarded, she turned toward the bus stop nearby. Then she did what her masters in the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades had trained her to do. Six dead, eighty wounded. A human head rolled down the street, we were told. Religious men trained to work at such sites put on sterile bodysuits and went around picking up body parts and scraps of flesh and putting them in garbage bags.

 

The wave of suicide bombings in Israel has steadily undermined the assumptions and the habits of everyday life. In Jerusalem, there are guards at the door of nearly every restaurant and café. People make all kinds of fine calculations. They try to sit at the back of public rooms or buses, the better to avoid the blast from a nervous bomber coming through the door. Parents of two children will send them to school on separate buses.

 

Many Palestinian leaders endorse suicide bombing as the answer to Israel's F-16s and Apache helicopters; the rest, the moderates, attempt to explain, if not justify, the phenomenon in terms of the frustrated hopes and the pressure of everyday life under Israeli occupation—never mind that the bombings began not at a time of despair but, rather, in the mid-nineties, when Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, the initiators of the Oslo process, were in office. One prominent Palestinian spokesman, Ghassan Khatib, the director of the Jerusalem Media and Communications Center, told me that the occupation, with its checkpoints and its violence, "accumulates a feeling of bitterness and creates a spirit of revenge, a feeling of anger, and brings reaction in a way that people feel is the only way they can respond. In Ramallah, not long before these suicide activities, an Israeli tank shell killed a mother and five children. The Israelis said they were aiming at Palestinian policemen and mistakenly hit the civilians. You might believe them. I might believe them. But the perception of the public is what comes out of it."

 

In traditional Islamic theology, suicide is anathema. The Koran says that those who commit suicide are doomed to eternal damnation, forever repeating the act. There have been suicide attacks in the region, however, since the eleventh and twelfth centuries, when the Persian leader Hasan ibn al-Sabah led a group called the Assassins on raids of rival fortresses. The Islamic revolution in Iran ushered in the modern version. Now Iran supports Hezbollah in Lebanon and Islamic militants in the occupied territories and ships arms to Arafat. Recently, at the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Sheikh Abdul-Rahman al-Sudais gave a sermon, broadcast live, in which he prayed to Allah to "terminate" Jews, "the scum of humanity, the rats of the world, prophet killers, pigs, and monkeys." Suha al-Taweel Arafat, Yasir Arafat's wife, was quoted by Al-Majalla, a London-based weekly, as saying that if she had a son there would be "no greater honor" than to sacrifice him for the Palestinian cause: "Would you expect me and my children to be less patriotic and more eager to live than my countrymen and their father and leader who is seeking martyrdom?"

 

Leaders throughout the Palestinian movement have become emboldened by the lurid notion of liberation via a prolonged campaign of teen-agers blowing up themselves and Israelis in restaurants and buses. What they see is that a suicide bombing, like no tactic before it, works; it is the ultimate terror act. Israelis go about their lives, but at the same time they are, in the profoundest sense, terrified.

 

That evening, when I went back to Al-Quds and met with Nusseibeh again, he told me he had learned of the bombing when the doctors at Hadassah Hospital, where his daughter was being treated for her neck injury, cleared out the emergency room in anticipation of the wounded who would surely come from the Mahane Yehuda market.

 

Nusseibeh was born a Muslim, but he is not a practicing one, he said. He does not believe, for example, in a real afterlife, for martyrs or anyone else. And yet when I asked him about suicide bombers he slowed down the rate of his conversation, as if he were being careful not to make a mistake. In front of whom—the authorities of religion or the P.L.O.—it was hard to tell.

 

"Personally, I don't think that one should be afraid of death, nor should one be excessively in love with life," he said. "But that's another thing. A person, in my mind, who brings death to himself and who causes, in the meantime, death to innocent civilians, is not a martyr."

 

"What is he?"

 

"I think he has a problem, psychologically," Nusseibeh said.

 

"Is he a murderer?" I asked.

 

"I don't know that I would call him a murderer as such," he said. "A murderer is someone, perhaps, who seeks out a specific person and, in a premeditated way, goes off and kills him. In this case, if you just go and kill a group of people of whom you have no knowledge, it's more than a murderer. I don't know what . . ."

 

I asked Nusseibeh if Baruch Goldstein, a settler from Brooklyn who gunned down twenty-nine Arabs at the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron in 1994, was a murderer.

 

Nusseibeh leaned back in his desk chair and propped his feet up on a window ledge. He took a long drag on his cigarette.

 

"Again, I wouldn't call him a murderer in that sense," he said. "I would call his act a terrorist act. I would call a suicide bomber's attack a terrorist attack. People killed in a terrorist attack are murdered. But I don't know if the person himself would be called a murderer. A killer? Hmm. I don't really know."

 

"This is a terrible semantic game, isn't it?" I said.

 

"It's not a game," he replied. “But, whatever it is, it's morally unjustified, by whatever name it goes by. . . . This is certainly abnormal, not normal, in a society that has this as a general state of mind."

 

Finally, I asked Nusseibeh if Arafat has ever expressed any reservations about the pervasive culture and celebration of martyrdom among the Palestinians.

 

"Uh, no," he said. "It's not just that he doesn't. In general, not many people do who are in a position of leadership. It's a social order, a social attitude, and people who partake of it are spread all over the community: the imams, the teachers, maybe mothers, and then, therefore, the kids. It's not Arafat. It's widespread, it's prevalent in society."

 

 

 

Jenin is a city of some thirty thousand in the northern region of the West Bank. It is known as a center for suicide bombers: a quarter of the bombers in this intifada so far have come from Jenin. Northern cities like Nablus, Tulkarm, and Jenin are generally poorer than central cities like Ramallah, and the politics there are more radical, the influence of Hamas and Islamic Jihad more pervasive. Iz al-Din al-Qassam, an Islamic preacher and a rebel against the Jews and the British in the thirties, was killed by British forces in a village near Jenin, and Hamas named its military wing after him. "For the Israelis he is a terrorist forefather and for the Palestinians he is the first martyr," Danny Rubinstein, a columnist for Ha'aretz who has been covering the Palestinians since 1968, told me. "He is a hero, like Jeanne d'Arc for the French."

 

Before the Passover bombing, the Israeli government had relied on targeted assassinations to go after the leaders of terrorist cells, using missiles, car bombs, exploding cell phones. Last year, Israeli security forces killed a leader of Islamic Jihad in the Jenin region at a booby-trapped public telephone. But now the operations in cities throughout the West Bank were less delicate and remote. On April 3rd, after encircling Jenin for several days and preparing reservists, Israeli Army officers ordered tanks, Cobra helicopters, and armored D-9 bulldozers into the city and its refugee camp.

 

Israeli Army officers said they expected that there would be some resistance, some shooting, as there had been elsewhere, especially in the refugee camp, but that it would soon subside at the sight of superior firepower. Instead, the Palestinian fighters in Jenin, firing rifles and setting off bomb traps from two- and three-story apartment buildings in the camp, held out for more than a week, and by the time the battle was over there were twenty-three Israeli soldiers dead. The number of Palestinian deaths remains in dispute; the Palestinians say there were hundreds, many of them civilians; the Israeli Army says the number was closer to fifty. The center of the refugee camp is, indisputably, a pulverized ruin.

 

When I first drove up to the outskirts of the city with some colleagues, the Israeli Army was not letting journalists in and had blocked the roads with checkpoints and tanks; far more important, it was turning away aid workers and ambulances. The Israelis claimed that there were still snipers and booby traps in the city, especially near the camp, and that they were concerned about safety, not public relations.

 

In an attempt to get around the roadblocks and reach the city center, we spent an hour crisscrossing some fields before a tank pulled up next to us and wagged its cannon threateningly. This was unnerving. Then an Israeli reservist with wire-rimmed glasses and an ironic smile popped out of the hatch and ordered us to leave. We headed toward an outlying neighborhood of Jenin and knocked on the door of a tour guide in his thirties named Hassan al-Ahmad. Hassan told us what he knew of the assault on Jenin, describing it, as all the Palestinians we spoke with did, as a slaughter complete with executions and mass graves. Then someone asked him about the suicide bombings, twelve in March alone, which the Israelis said had led them to initiate what they called Operation Defensive Wall.

 

"Suicide bombers?" Hassan said.

 

His expression slackened, and he was quiet for a while. "Suicide bombers? You ask me? Honestly, I'll answer you. It's O.K. I don't think I ever thought it was O.K. before. But when I see this, and seventy-five per cent of the Israeli people support Sharon, well, what can we do against these tanks? I have lived in Germany, in Europe, but I can't live in my own home with any security. They can drink coffee at night in the cafés of Tel Aviv but I can't in my home?"

 

Hassan's wife, who had just served us drinks, nodded in agreement.

 

Hassan said that there were still Palestinians who were prepared for a settlement, two states for two peoples, but "there are a lot of people who don't see it that way, who don't want compromise. They think that the Turks were here for four hundred years, and they left. The English were here in 1917, and they left in 1948. What is Great Britain now? It belongs to the States. And you hear from Hamas and Islamic Jihad that we will fight until the Israelis are gone, too. Arafat still has respect, and Israel has a serious chance with him. He has respect because he has fought for the Palestinian people for forty years. You know who comes after him? Rantisi. Zahar." Both are leaders of Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

 

A little later, we went back to the car to try again to reach the center of Jenin. This time, we succeeded. We parked in a narrow, shot-up alleyway and slowly walked toward the marketplace. The façades of the storefronts and the houses were cratered by tank and machine-gun fire. Every house that was still standing was pitted and charred. The Israelis had imposed a curfew, and the few people who dared come out onto the streets led us into houses that had been either destroyed or thoroughly trashed by soldiers searching for weapons. The streets were muddy, chewed up by tank treads. A couple of dusty dogs trotted along and then stopped when they felt the vibrations from a tank. On every wall along the way there were posters of Palestinian martyrs; the most common was of Abu Ali Mustafa, once the head of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the second-largest faction of the P.L.O., after Fatah, and a supporter of terror attacks. Mustafa was decapitated by an Israeli missile last August while he was reading papers at his desk in Ramallah. In retaliation, less than two months later, P.F.L.P. gunmen assassinated an Israeli Cabinet minister, Rehavam Ze'evi, outside his room in a Jerusalem hotel.

 

Another tank rumbled down the street about a hundred yards away. A middle-aged man called us into an alley and over to a huge pile of concrete slabs.

 

"This was my home," the man, whose name was Assam Fashafsha, told us. "When they came in here, they called all the people out of their homes. In Arabic, on loudspeakers, they said, 'If you don't come out of your houses now, we'll knock them down with you inside.' This was at nine in the morning on the first day. And the tanks came in and destroyed it." Two of his relatives, a nephew and a sister-in-law, were killed, he said, when their house was bulldozed.

 

The fighting in Jenin was far worse than in any other city. Israeli officers said that after thirteen soldiers died in a booby-trapped building their attack intensified. The Palestinians we talked to, and those who spoke to the many other reporters who managed to get into Jenin, talked of Israelis bulldozing houses without waiting for them to be evacuated, of wounded fighters and civilians left to die in the streets, of strip searches, of people handcuffed for days, twenty and thirty to a room. In a Jenin hospital, a teacher in his forties named Ali Sereh described how Israeli soldiers used him as a human shield, having him walk down the street knocking on doors and telling people to come out of their houses. At the fifth such house, a confused Israeli sniper from another platoon shot Sereh in the leg and he was left in the street.

 

"I tried to ask for help, but the soldiers were unsympathetic," Sereh said. He said that someone from the neighborhood got to him, and he was passed from roof to roof, until, finally, he was delivered to the hospital.

 

The Israeli attack on Jenin has been heavily criticized by Amnesty International; there have even been suggestions that the Army committed war crimes. In Ramallah and Jerusalem, Palestinian spokesmen began to talk of another Srebrenica or Sabra and Shatila, charges that the Israelis dismissed as outrageous. The Israelis, in fact, said that it was the tactics of the Palestinian fighters that led to civilian deaths and the destruction of so many homes. If there was evidence of atrocities in Jenin, Guy Siri, the deputy director of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, did not find it. "Everybody was thinking mass graves in the way we think of Kosovo," he told the Washington Post. "I don't think we have seen that." It remains now for the United Nations to investigate.

 

Even in late April, as the Israelis were pulling out of Jenin and the other cities of the West Bank, government officials were thinking about going in again. In an interview at the Israeli Army headquarters in Tel Aviv, a senior general involved in planning told me, "If Powell fails, then there will be more violence and more escalation. Then maybe we'll have to take even more aggressive actions against the Palestinian leadership. Maybe if we are forced to carry out other operations, we will enter and conquer all of the Palestinian areas and crush their infrastructure and stay there. Not that it's pleasant, but we might be forced to do it."

 

 

 

In Jerusalem, people were watching and reading reports not only on Jenin but on the anti-Israeli demonstrations abroad and, of course, synagogue bombings and desecrations in Europe and Tunisia. Among Israelis, the fear was not merely of more suicide bombers—no one believed that Sharon's operation would stop the bombings completely. The fear was of international isolation and, worse, a poisonous impasse with the Palestinians and a regional war.

 

I was reading the galley proofs of "Six Days of War," an excellent new history of the 1967 war by an Israeli diplomatic historian, Michael Oren, who had gained access to sources on all sides. We met at his office at the Shalem Center, a mainly conservative think tank in Jerusalem. Oren, who is in his mid-forties, was born in upstate New York and came to Israel when he was twenty-three. He fought in the Lebanon War in 1982, an experience that soured him for a while on Ariel Sharon; he and his fellow-soldiers in the special forces were furious that Sharon had led them to Beirut, far beyond their initial mission.

 

At lunch, Oren said he thought that there was now, as there had been in 1967, a real chance of regional war against Israel, headed by Syria, Iran, and Iraq. "The dynamic of Palestinian leaders trying to drag the Arab states into a military conflict with Israel is recurring," he said. "You can close your eyes and it's 1967, but the idiom has changed from Arab nationalism to Islamic fundamentalism, to a great degree."

 

Oren's hopes for a solution are roughly in synch with Israeli public opinion. That is, he is "schizophrenic," the recurring word of the moment: he favors a Palestinian state with secure borders but, at the same time, supports Sharon's incursions as a necessary response to the "existential threat" that suicide bombers pose to Israeli society.

 

"Look, I am not sure that the Palestinian people know what they are about," Oren said at one point. "They have been offered a state so often: in 1937, they were offered a state, bigger than the Jewish state, by the Peel Commission, and they turned it down; they were offered partition in 1947 by the United Nations, and they turned it down; and then there was Camp David, and they turned that down. It raises the question, then, if a people cannot seize a historical opportunity, what kind of people are they? Instead, they are basing their identity on victimhood, and that feeds the suffering."

 

For Oren, and for many Israelis left, right, and center, Arafat revealed himself as untrustworthy after he ended the negotiations with the Israelis in 2000 without offering a counter-proposal, insisting, yet again, on the Jews' lack of a historical connection to the Western Wall and on the right of Palestinian refugees abroad to return to Israeli territory. Such a return, Oren said, "is a euphemism for not recognizing Israel's right to exist."

 

I mentioned Sari Nusseibeh and his statement, deeply unpopular among his own people, that the Palestinians will have to give up the right of return and recognize Israel's right to a secure existence if there is ever going to be a real peace.

 

Oren smiled indulgently, as so many Israelis and Palestinians do at the mention of Nusseibeh's name. "Sari is a wonderful guy," he said, "but how many divisions does he have?"

 

 

 

A lot of things vex the question of Israel and the Palestinians: religious passion, the inability of each side to recognize the other's pain or historical claims, the sheer smallness of the region, its intimacy. By car from the center of Jerusalem, it is fifteen minutes south to Bethlehem, ten minutes north to Ramallah, ten minutes east to Abu Dis. (Without counting the delays at military checkpoints, that is.) David Makovsky, the former executive editor of the Jerusalem Post and a diplomatic correspondent for Ha'aretz, told me, "What people have never understood is that the reason an Israeli-Palestinian settlement is so hard is that there is too much history and too little geography. When the Egyptians and the Israelis made peace, they suddenly had a hundred miles of desert between them. They signed a treaty and, for the most part, they never really saw each other again. The quality of relations after the treaty was a footnote, like a divorce. But with the Israelis and the Palestinians the quality of the relationship after they make a deal is at the core of everything, as with a marriage. And when the Israelis begin to think that what the Palestinians really intend is not land-for-peace but land-for-war, well, it doesn't bode well for the marriage."

 

And yet, in the current environment of resentment, someone like Sari Nusseibeh can work only at the margins. Recently, when Ehud Ya'ari, Israeli television's leading expert on Palestinian politics, was asked if Nusseibeh could succeed Arafat, he said, "The long answer is no."

 

"He is a prince with all the characteristics of a prince," Nahum Barnea, whose column in Yediot Ahronot is the most popular in Israel, said. "When it came to real struggle, he was not there. It's part of his grace. He will not come to a barricade, or get into a fight with police. He's a gentleman, but this is not a gentleman's war. This war is so far from any idea of gentlemen that it is unimaginable." What Nusseibeh represents is the persistence of the idea of compromise, a certain sympathy not only with his own people but with the Other. He, like certain Israelis, has the ability to think as critically about his brethren as about the Other. One of the tragic signs of what has happened since Arafat's decision to pursue an uprising instead of signing a pact with Ehud Barak is that a man like Nusseibeh is even less representative of his people than he used to be. To visit the neighborhoods of relatively pacific East Jerusalem, to say nothing of the enraged precincts of Gaza City and the West Bank, is to understand how thoroughly the "spirit of Oslo"—the spirit that allowed Nusseibeh to quit politics in 1993 and start thinking about a new and totally private academic life—has been destroyed.

 

One afternoon, I stopped in to see Nusseibeh again, and I mentioned to him that Abu Ala, a deputy of Arafat's who had done much of the negotiating for the Oslo agreement, had told Joshua Hammer, of Newsweek, that "there are a hundred thousand Palestinians willing to become kamikazes."

 

Nusseibeh was once again smoking and working his worry beads. He seemed genuinely cast down by the comment; this was Arafat's ally, Abu Ala, not the head of Hamas.

 

Then he sighed and said, "It is possible you will have this. People are so desperate, so crazy, so resentful, that it is natural to expect more of this. I'd expect more in the next months. It will be a very difficult, uphill struggle to return to the path of sanity. From our side, these acts of violence will be good reason for the Israelis not to give in. The break will not come—and this is the main point—unless somehow the Palestinians manage to develop a new pattern of thinking, a new state of mind among themselves, in the way they act with the Israelis."

 

He stopped for a moment, as if to consider his language carefully. Then he shrugged and when he spoke he used a curious metaphor.

 

"The Palestinians have to resurrect the spirit of Christ to absorb the sense of pain and insult they feel and control it, and not let it determine the way they act toward Israel," Nusseibeh said. "They have to realize that an act of violence does not serve their interest. This is a gigantic undertaking."

 

It is indicative of Nusseibeh's elusiveness that his metaphor spoke at once of Palestinian martyrdom, the myth of Jewish violence against Jesus, and the need for a new culture of peace.