‘Is reconciliation between Jews and Arabs possible?’

The following is an excerpt adapted from “Jerusalem on Earth,” a new book by Abraham Rabinovich.

The brutal attack on Prof. Sari Nusseibeh followed his lecture on John Locke, the 17th-century British philosopher who preached tolerance.

Nusseibeh, a Palestinian philosophy professor, had lingered in his classroom in Birzeit University on the West Bank to respond to questions from students who came up to his desk as usual after his lecture. The corridor was empty when he emerged after the last student left. Waiting for him near an elevator were masked men carrying clubs and razor blades who broke his arm and cut his face. The attack was triggered by reports that Nusseibeh was involved in Israeli-Palestinian talks regarding a two-state solution to the conflict. It was 1987.

Memory of that event did not dissuade him a few years later from descending once again into the political arena from the ivory tower reserved for philosophy professors. Now president of Al-Quds University, which had campuses in several West Bank cities, he had been invited by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), representing the Palestinian national movement, to serve as its representative in Jerusalem.

The appointment was astonishing because of what many Palestinians regarded as Nusseibeh’s heretical positions. A few weeks earlier, he had published an article simultaneously in the Palestinian and Israeli press – itself an unusual reaching-out. In it he urged Palestinians to give up their demand for the return of Palestinian refugees to Israel and for Israel to give up its intention to retain territory it captured from Jordan in the Six-Day War. 

On the refugee question, Nusseibeh was abandoning a pillar of the Palestinian national movement. He wasted little time after his PLO appointment before undermining a second pillar – the claim of exclusive Muslim attachment to the Temple Mount.

“There is a deep existential connection that Jews have to Jerusalem,” he said on Israel Radio. “I would be blind to disclaim such a connection.” Leading Palestinian political and religious leaders had publicly claimed that a Jewish Temple never existed on the Mount, that it was the Muslims who rendered it sacred. Even those who acknowledged that a Jewish temple had existed objected to efforts by Israeli archaeologists to search for Jewish roots on the periphery of the Mount. In a transparent attempt at balance, Nusseibeh advocated giving veto rights to both the Arabs and the Jews regarding archaeological excavations on or near the Temple Mount, although it was clear that only the Arabs would exercise such a veto.

The interest aroused by his PLO appointment was evidenced by the foreign reporters waiting their turn in the administrative offices of Al-Quds University in East Jerusalem for a one-on-one interview with Nusseibeh. Interest was enhanced by the fact that Nusseibeh was a Palestinian ‘prince,’ born into a prominent Jerusalem Arab family. His father, the late Anwar Nusseibeh, lost a leg fighting Israel in the 1948 war and later served as Jordanian defense minister under King Hussein. The elder Nusseibeh, educated at Cambridge University, did not hesitate to engage Israelis in dialogue. He had long maintained that the Jews, as Semites, were in effect Arabs who followed a different religion like Christian Arabs and he encouraged his children to meet with them. In line with his father’s advice, Sari Nusseibeh joined with Israeli academic Mark Heller in writing a book offering proposals for resolving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

“In an ideal world,” said Sari Nusseibeh in an interview, “I believe Jews and Arabs should live together in the same state. But I realize that the Jews would like to have their separate state. And I’ve come to realize that Palestinian Arabs would also like their separate state. So, there are logical conclusions to be drawn. The Palestinians will have to come to terms with the fact that Israel is a primarily Jewish state and that it will not accept the return of four million Palestinian refugees. Conversely, Israelis will have to realize that if they want a state, the Palestinians must have the right to return to their 1967 borders, including in Jerusalem.” He offered no concrete proposals regarding the political configuration of Jerusalem as capital of two states except that the city should remain undivided.

There is something unsettling in Nusseibeh’s calm appeal to rationality; it invites the other side to respond in kind, which generally requires a disruptive reordering of thinking among people unprepared for it.

“How do you come to the strange notion of rationality in this sea of passions?” he is asked.

Nusseibeh laughs. “I guess I’m not a very passionate person.”

He was part of a Palestinian think tank formulating position papers prior to the Madrid Peace Conference in 1991 and then took a break for a year at a think tank in Washington. When he returned to Jerusalem he was offered the presidency of Al-Quds University.

Palestinians were by then losing interest in a two-state solution, he said, as they watched Israeli settlements in the West Bank grow and a separate network of roads built to serve them. “Palestinians do not see territory remaining where they had dreamt of building their state.” If the outline of a viable peace settlement is not arrived at, he said, “there will be no room left to dream.”

“And if that happens?”

“There is a nightmare instead. I believe the Palestinians would drop their demand for a separate state and go back to demanding the right of return of refugees and equal status.”

“Is reconciliation between Jews and Arabs possible?”

“It is not possible,” he answers. “But it is necessary. And it is the responsibility of the political leadership to see to it that what is necessary becomes possible.”

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Adapted from the recently published, “Jerusalem on Earth: Clamoring at Heaven’s Gate; Post-Six Day War Jerusalem.”