Sidebar: A Fairy Tale

Since its founding in 1948, the Arab world has engaged Israel in war on six different occasions. In addition, acts of Palestinian terrorism have disrupted peace talks whenever both sides appeared to be making progress. After the failure of the Clinton-driven talks at Camp David in 2000 and Ariel Sharon's "visit" to the Al-Aksa mosque, Palestinian violence exploded as the Second Intifada escalated out of control, leading many Israelis to conclude that the term "moderate Palestinians" was an oxymoron.

The violence and terror of the Palestinians discredited Israel's peace movement, as it did those who sought dialogue with others on the Palestinian side. Some Israelis became disillusioned about the possibility of ever reaching peace with the Palestinians and concluded that the real difference between the so-called "moderate" Palestinians and Hamas was one of strategy. The former, the argument went, hoped to destroy Israel in incremental steps by first negotiating a Palestinian state and then confronting the Jewish state in a war of extermination; while Hamas, for religious and political reasons, refuses to recognize Israel, let alone engage in peace talks, and continues to call for its destruction.

Sari Nusseibeh would disagree with this assessment in regard to resolving the seemingly irreconcilable conflict. Nusseibeh, the president of Al-Quds University, the only Arab university in Jerusalem, and the PLO's chief representative in the city in 2001 and 2002, writes: "Israelis needed to know that for them to keep their Jewish state required a free Palestinian state along the 1967 borders, with east Jerusalem as its capital. Palestinians needed to know that to get their state required acknowledging the moral right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state. There could be no blanket right of return into Israel for the refugees."

Elsewhere he writes, "I believe…that the Palestinian Arabs and the Jews are natural allies, not adversaries."

The scion of one of the oldest and most important political Palestinian families, Nusseibeh was educated in the West and earned a doctorate in philosophy. Although an academic by training, he has been active politically, lending his family's stature among Palestinians to engage with Israelis seeking some solution to this seemingly intractable conflict. A self-styled advocate of nonviolence, Nusseibeh places much of the blame for the failure to bring about peace not only on terrorist groups like Hamas and the political limitations of Yasser Arafat, but also on Ariel Sharon and his ideological followers. Specifically, Nusseibeh charges that Israeli leaders such as Menachem Begin and Sharon welcomed Palestinian violence and viewed moderates like himself as threats to Israel's true agenda, the absorption of as much Palestinian land as possible.

"Israel often used violence as a tactical step to provoke violent reaction," Nusseibeh writes, "which it then used as an excuse for further violence in pursuit of its political end. The Israeli leaders wanted to create the impression that theirs was a life-and-death struggle against a band of ruthless terrorists…committed to the genocidal destruction of the Jewish state."

"‘Terror' was why the Israelis were in the territories, and ‘terror' was the reason they were building ‘defensive' settlements."

Nusseibeh cites a reporter from the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz who was told by an Israeli government official in 1982 that it was a "catastrophe" that the Palestinians were turning away from terror. It would be preferable to Israel, the reporter claimed the official stated, for the PLO to "return to its earlier exploits, to plant bombs all over the world, to hijack plenty of airplanes, and to kill many Israelis." In short, Nusseibeh believes that focusing on terrorists provides Israel with the perfect cover for preventing a functioning Palestinian government from developing in the West Bank. The war against the PLO, states the author, permitted a permanent state of emergency, and all civil dissent was cast as an extension of the international terrorist war of extermination against the Jewish state.

Nusseibeh cites polls among both populations that show a desire for peace, a fact that "scares Sharon as it did Sheikh Yassin," the Hamas leader who was assassinated by Israel; he concludes that if the Israeli and Palestinian people were allied in their quest for peace, "some of our leaders were allies in stoking conflict."

Nusseibeh saves his most bitter salvos for the security wall erected during Sharon's tenure as prime minister. According to the author, realizing that his dream of a Greater Israel was not realizable, Sharon had decided to pull the settlers out of Gaza and announced a unilateral withdrawal with the purpose of preserving a strong Jewish majority within Israel. This he would do, claims the author, while "locking up strategic assets in the West Bank and East Jerusalem — settlements, lots of empty real estate, and water resources — behind a wall." Nusseibeh notes that Sharon's move guaranteed that Palestinian violence would follow, thus precluding any chance of negotiations: "By clearing out of Gaza — a classic red herring — [Sharon] could divert international attention while he cut the West Bank into pieces."

Sharon's unilateralism, argues Nusseibeh, made things worse insofar as it led to Hamas' victory in the subsequent Palestinian election. According to Nusseibeh, Hamas' triumph was hailed by Israelis opposed to negotiations because it reinforced their argument that the Palestinian people were incapable of peace. For the author, the electoral victory of Hamas and Sharon's wall are two sides of the same coin — "both slam the door shut on dialogue."

This is an important book if only because it provides the reader with an opportunity to understand how a prominent moderate Palestinian intellectual understands the conflict. This is the Palestinian side of the struggle written by someone who accepts the legitimacy of Israel and is outspokenly in favor of a two-state solution. We may not agree completely with his analysis of the failure of efforts to bring about peace or with his cast of villains, but read the book we must, if only to understand the other side.