'Once Upon a Country': a path to Mideast peace?

Arab philosopher Nusseibeh insists on our ability to effect change – even in the Middle East.

from the May 22, 2007 edition

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"The standard kibbutznik was a model humanist [whom] I had no choice but to admire," he says. That he had "no conception of the steep price we Arabs had paid for his freedom ... wasn't a product of malevolence...."

Studying at Oxford and Harvard, Nusseibeh finds strength for his convictions by reading medieval Islamic philosophers, such as Avicenna. Through their writings, he becomes convinced that no matter how hopelessly entrenched Palestinians and Israelis seem in their positions the feud can be overcome through reasoning.

In 1978, Nusseibeh returns home, flush with the idea of spreading tolerance and the power of logic and will.

It's 11 years after the 1967 Six-Day War confounded Palestinians, and Israeli occupation has crept through the West Bank. But to him life is not too hard for his ideals to take root. Nusseibeh's activism soon begins, from a campus effort to defend academic freedom to the first intifada which began in 1987 as a nonviolent, nationalist movement.

"The intifada ... voices the Palestinian cry for peace," a leaflet proclaimed. "It is not to destroy another state, but to create our own. It is not to bring death to others, but to give life and hope to ourselves."

Initial peace talks in the early 1990s bring jubilation. "Maybe you'd have to go back to Jefferson's America to find such spirited activity among would-be state-builders," he says.

People feel empowered. Even his many students who spend time in Israeli prison assert their freedom there by not capitulating in their minds. Nusseibeh practices this himself during his own brief prison stay, in 1991. "A glorious state," he says of solitary confinement. "The long hours alone left me with my thoughts."

But as the intifada gives way to years of failed negotiations and a "macabre cycle" of violence, Nusseibeh's optimism shows cracks. Behind the "revolution's philosopher" emerges a human, grappling with the sense of enormous loss. "I felt as if I was watching a slow act of homicide, the killing of a city that constituted the soul of my family and of my people," he writes.

Still, he insists, "All that was needed was calm, reasoned deliberation.... The tempest would pass, I had no doubt."

Nusseibeh's lofty attitude can seem a bit far-fetched, even insensitive. Yet he remains proud of his efforts to grow a grass-roots movement for a future state, even though it's been trampled by aggression.

"Over the past few years I've seen my share of smashed dreams," he writes, " but ... rubble ... often makes the best building material."

• Carol Huang is an intern at the Monitor.

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