About the author ESSaY

A Liberal in Jerusalem:
Anthony David
Anthony David is a writer and translator.
The Paradoxes of Sari Nusseibeh
He is the co-author with Sari Nusseibeh By Anthony David April 2008
of Once Upon a Country: A Palestinian
Life and the editor and Translator of
Lamentations of Youth: The Diaries of
Gershom Scholem, 1913-1919. His biography
of the Israeli-American arms smuggler
and entrepreneur, Al Schwimmer, will
shortly be published by Schocken Books
in Tel Aviv.

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reserved.
the fifteen minute drive between west Jerusalem and Sari Nusseibeh’s office
at Al-Quds University in east Jerusalem is a trip into the heart of a paradox, or
rather a number of them. To begin with, there is the municipal paradox of a
divided city where the obvious divisions can camouflage as strange forms of
togetherness.
Nusseibeh’s office is in largely middle class neighborhood of Beit Hanina.
The neighborhood is unmistakably Arab, a stronghold of Fatah movement,
and center to the Arab intelligentsia of Jerusalem. One thing you notice while
driving to the edge of town is the construction of a new light rail line that will
take the residents to the gates of the Old City in minutes. The locals will tell you
that the only reason this expensive piece of modern mass transport is being built
is to bind the Jewish settlements in the area to west Jerusalem, guaranteeing
that east Jerusalem will forever be a part of the “Eternal Capital” of Israel.
Whatever the motives of the politicians, it is easily to imagine that one day
the train will be packed on Friday mornings with Palestinian worshippers
headed to the Dome of the Rock, the most poignant symbol of their national
identity and of their struggle against Israeli control. Jewish and Arab na-
tionalists will thus be riding the same train, each with their respective flags,
heading to a city both claim for themselves. They will be
together in their seemingly irreconcilable differences.
Meeting with Dr. Nusseibeh brings up paradoxes
of the more human sort. He is the sort of man who
always has a string of worry beads in his hands, and yet
doesn’t betray any worry. The beads seem to work.
When I arrived in early April Nusseibeh told me he
had just canceled a scheduled trip to New York City.
The rabbi who had invited him was backing out. Wasn’t
worth it. Got too many death threats. So who would
want to target a rabbi? I asked him. “Other Jews,” he
said with a slight lilt to his voice, rubbing his beads. “The
dear man got ten threats in as many days. Imagine
that.” I assumed the rabbi was left-wing, but I was
wrong. It was a right-winger who got the death threats
for inviting an Arab intellectual to his synagogue.
“Nusseibeh accepts the moral right of the
Jews to stay put—though without paying
for his moderation by ignoring his people’s
plight”
Nusseibeh, who was once Yasser Arafat’s PLO’s rep-
resentative in Jerusalem, has become a celebrity among
many Jewish intellectuals worldwide. Abe Foxman and
Paul Wolfowitz have praised his courage and vision. The
Forward has called him a “paragon of empathy and, by
extension, of compromise.” His Once Upon a Country
was the most popular book at the Jewish book fair in
London. The Hebrew translation of the book is imminent.
Not all Israelis or Jews are so flattering, of course.
Morton Klein, the president of the Zionist Organization
of America, once referred to him as a “wolf in sheep’s
clothing.” There were many people in the Israeli security
services that obviously had similar suspicions when
they arrested him during the first Gulf War. And yet
remarkably enough, the only time he has been physi-
cally attacked was by Palestinian militants, and for the
crime of negotiating with Israelis. More recently, he
got his own stack of death threats after he poured cold
water on the notion of the right of return of the 1948
refugees to their former villages inside the Jewish state.
The Moral Basis for Israel’s Existence
That a Palestinian should be feted by Jews and attacked
by fellow Arabs is not in itself so anomalous. The paradox
appears when you take a closer look at his position. Unlike
other Palestinian or Arab intellectuals, Nusseibeh does
not simply accept the political reality of Israel because the
Arabs are too weak to snatch back from the Israelis what
they lost in 1948. He accepts the moral right of the Jews
to stay put—though without paying for his moderation
by ignoring his people’s plight. Better than most he is
acutely aware of the steep price Palestinians paid in 1948
for the Jewish people to have their own independent state.
This melancholy story of the past sixty years is not an
abstraction for Nusseibeh; it cuts close to the bone. The
UN decision to partition Palestine into two Jewish and
Arab states in November 1947 triggered a bitter civil war
in Jerusalem. Each side sniped and tossed bombs at the
other. In the months until the declaration of Israeli inde-
pendence in May 1948, Arab irregulars operating in the
mountains between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem cut off supplies
to Jewish neighborhoods in West Jerusalem, strangling
the city. In Jerusalem itself, however, the Haganah and the
other Jewish militia groups were better armed than the
Arabs, had superior training, and with the Holocaust so
fresh in everyone’s memory, were vastly more motivated.
Anwar Nusseibeh, Sari’s father, was a judge at the
time. He and his friends feared that if they d­ idn’t put up
an effective defense, the Old City would be lost. To defend
their homes and heritage, they formed a militia run by
men who had mostly never held guns before, let along
fired at other human beings. The head of the group was a
retired inspector of education. Its members laid no bombs,
planned no attacks. Their group was defensive in nature.
Anwar Nusseibeh’s job was to scrape together weaponry.
Sari was conceived during one of his shopping trips to
Beirut. After a brief rendezvous with Sari’s mother, who
was in Beirut due to the fighting, he returned to Jerusalem
just in time for the British to announce the end of their rule
in Palestine. On May 14 David Ben-Gurion announced that
after two thousand years, the “foreign rule” of Palestine
was over, once and for all. Jewish forces immediately took
over the Arab neighborhoods of Talbieh, the German
Colony, and Baqa. In the Old City there were attacks at Jaffa
Gate, New Gate, and Zion Gate. For four days the ragtag
A Liberal in Jerusalem: The Paradoxes of Sari Nusseibeh 2
Arab forces held out. With ammunition running danger-
ously short, Nusseibeh slipped off to Ramallah for fresh
supplies. He was in the car on his way back to Jerusalem
when he was shot in the thigh. The leg was later amputated.
By the time the fighting was over a year later, the
Nusseibeh family had lost its vast property holdings in what
was now Israel. The spot where Ben Gurion International
Airport now sits had been ancestral Nusseibeh land.
“Nusseibeh’s mother…could never slough
off her bitterness at Israel and the Jewish
people for robbing her of her homeland”
Sari’s mother lost far more. After her husband was
shot, she returned to her family in the Arab city of Ramle
near the coast. In June 1948, the Israeli army showed up.
Yitzhak Rabin, at the time a commander of the Haganah,
obeyed the tacit orders from Ben-Gurion to clear out the
town. Some of the Arabs were given transport in trucks or
buses. Pregnant with Sari, Nusseibeh’s mother was forced
to travel by foot back across the demarcation lines and into
Jordanian-controlled east Jerusalem and the West Bank.
History Without Rancor
This history of the first Arab-Israeli war is important to
mention because it relates directly to the most puzzling
aspect of Sari Nusseibeh’s thinking. After the war his one-
legged father refused to be eaten away by rancor, melan-
choly, or defeatism. He went on to become the governor of
the Jerusalem region and the Jordanian minister of defense.
After 1967, he often invited Moshe Dayan, the late Israeli
Defense Minister, and Teddy Kollek, the late Mayor of
Jerusalem, into his home to discuss practical solutions for
the problems facing east Jerusalemites in the united city.
His mother, by stark contrast, could never slough off
her bitterness at Israel and the Jewish people for robbing
her of her homeland. Her family had owned orange groves,
and she raised her children with tales of the sweetest
oranges on earth growing on a plantation stretching all
the way from Ramle to the gently swelling waves of the
Mediterranean. To this day—she is over 90—she hasn’t
given up on her dream of “returning” to her family’s lands,
even if the orange trees have long given way to an Israeli city.
Like most refugees, Mrs. Nusseibeh wants justice
in the form of restitution. One of Sari’s similes for this
approach, so typical of Palestinian refugees, is of a stolen
carpet that an owner finds after years of searching. Unlike
the pristine carpet in his imagination, the owner finds it
covered with furniture—or rather houses, skyscrapers,
highways, universities, an international airport, millions
of people. Disturbed by the clutter, he wants to give it a
good shake and restore it to its original state. Nusseibeh
has spent years trying to tell his fellow Palestinians how
impossible, but also morally indefensible, such a fantasy is.
Returning to the paradox, how does a man raised with
the smell of the world’s most perfect orange blossoms
in his imagination accept Israel’s moral right to exist?
Nusseibeh doesn’t doubt for a moment that his mother
was wrongfully driven from her home during the 1948
fighting—clearly a brutal thing to do. And yet in his mind
the Jewish state has a moral right to remain right where it
is, on those very lands. Prima facie it seems like an impos-
sible position to hold. Many Palestinians call it treason.
I’ve known Nusseibeh for four years now, and I
could never square what he says about Israel’s moral
right to exist with the history of his family. It was only
during our recent chat that his seemingly contradic-
tory statements began to make some sense.
Philosophy Without Abstractions
What struck me most while we spoke was how he is more
of a novelist than a traditional philosopher or politi-
cian. He shies away from abstract ideas, rarely tries to
trap you in a syllogism, and never comes at you with a
manifesto or slogan. He has a horror for abstract moral
codes written into a sacred book or a nationalist credo. If
he wants to make a philosophical point, he refuses to do
so as a professional philosopher, a member of the elite,
or an Arab prince as people like to describe him. The
only authority I’ve ever heard him cite—with the excep-
tion of his daughter, whose literary tastes he regards
as authoritative—is that of the concrete individual. It
seems like every other sentence he refers to the “normal,
average person like us.” But the funniest thing happens
when you add up his statements about “normal” people:
like magic, a philosophy emerges. This “normal, average
A Liberal in Jerusalem: The Paradoxes of Sari Nusseibeh 3
person” functions as a heuristic device keeping the various
components of his “system”—nation, memory, identity,
justice, dialogue, and finally peace—from flying into pieces.
Every age gets the political theory it deserves, or needs.
The English Civil War produced Thomas Hobbes eleva-
tion of the all-powerful state as the defender of life and
property; like a genie from a bottle, the age of European
colonial global expansion conjured up Smith’s Invisible
Hand, Hegel’s Weltgeist, and Marx’s international Working
Class. Sari’s “normal, average person” can be seen as
his philosophical response to our contemporary situ-
ation of peoples, tribes, and ethnic groups demanding
historical justice, and citing a litany of real or imagined
past grievances to boost their case. What makes our point
in history particularly perilous—just think of Gaza—is
how easy it is for groups seeking to “shake the carpet,”
as it were, to get their hands on modern weaponry. The
ghosts of past injustices have never been so well armed.
“Nusseibeh can accept Israel’s moral right to
exist despite the events of 1948 because he
interprets history through the real needs of
the ‘normal, average person’”
It has also become all too easy to kill in the name of
justice. Inevitably, the people who have caused the harm
turn into spectral embodiments of injustice, bondage, and
repression. The gun-toting settler appears in the mind of
the refugee as the incarnation of a hundred years of bit-
terness. Of course, it is much easier to shoot at a walking
idea than a flesh and blood human being like yourself.
What dreams of perfect justice will never do is lead
to real freedom. The political leaders and demagogues
who like promising the moon might benefit from slogans.
The “average, normal person” will remain in his squalid
camp, or crumbling school or prison. The “average, nor-
mal person” gets lost in the pursuit of absolute justice.
Nusseibeh can accept Israel’s moral right to exist
despite the events of 1948 because he interprets his-
tory through the real needs of the “normal, average
person.” History has to serve life, not cripple it. The
person, not the political paradigm, is what interests him.
Because Israelis as individuals have the moral right to
life and liberty, so does the state that represents them.
The Lives of Others
“The inability to understand the life of the Other is what
keeps the Israeli-Palestinian conflict going,” Nusseibeh told
me. What is needed to solve the century-old Arab-Israeli
conflict is for both sides to develop a sense of empathy for
actual people. Palestinians must recognize the Israeli Jew’s
right to exist—his right to life, freedom, dignity, security,
and so on—as the Israelis must recognize the Palestinian
Arab’s. The minute people climb down from their abstrac-
tions and distant memories to see the humanity in the
Other, the demons of ’48 can be banned, and two states,
one Jewish and the other Palestinian, can exist in peace
side by side. “Olmert and Abbas could go into a room, and
come out an hour later with a deal. I’m sure of it,” he says.
Nusseibeh first realized the importance of empathy dur-
ing the bloodletting of the Second Intifada, a time of suicide
bombing and Israeli reprisals. He was Arafat’s Jerusalem
man, a thankless job that earned him threats from Israelis
and Palestinian militants alike. To calm his nerves one day
he read a book about two Jewish philosophers in Vienna
after the Nazi Anschluss in 1938. In reading he began to
identify with the two men’s suffocating sense of doom and
terror due to their problems with citizenship, residency
papers, travel documents, venal bureaucracies, the threat
of prop­erty confiscation, and arrest. Suddenly the dry
historical facts of Nazi antisemitism were infused with
real emotions. The tale of these two Viennese philosophers
gave him an empathic insight into their fate. He understood
emotionally why Jews felt they needed Palestine as a refuge.
What “average, normal” Palestinian could deny them this?
Nusseibeh decided to conduct a thought experiment.
His mother was his test case. Just suppose, he asked
her during a visit, that in the early years of the century
an elderly and learned Jewish gentleman from Europe
had come to her father to consult with him on an urgent
matter. “And suppose this gentleman told him that an
unimaginable catastrophe was about to befall the Jews of
Europe. And suppose he threw in that, as an Abrahamic
cousin with historic ties to Palestine, he wanted to
prevent the coming genocide by seeking permission for
his people to return to the shared homeland, to provide
A Liberal in Jerusalem: The Paradoxes of Sari Nusseibeh 4
them with safety and refuge. What did she think he would
have said?” he asked her. “Would he have permitted a
wholesale return of the Jewish people to Palestine?”
Her reply was surprising. Nusseibeh had braced
himself for a string of conditions and clauses and
caveats, and in so many words, a resounding “No.”
Instead she responded straightaway with a wave of
her hand, “How can you even ask such a question?
He NEVER would have refused them refuge.”
Just by changing the terms of reference, from the orange
blossoms to the desperation of the Jewish people, over
half a century of pain and resentment was wiped away.
Nusseibeh’s catalogue of “average, normal” rights
includes, inter alia, respect for a person’s dignity; a sense
of equality; the right of movement; security; and the space
to develop and practice one’s abilities. Unsurprisingly,
one of his favorite lines from the political-philosophical
canon is “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
In some ways this catalogue resembles what tradi-
tional liberals, from John Locke to John Rawls, have
always said. The difference between Nusseibeh and
these other philosophers, and the reason his approach
makes more sense in our sloppy world of ethnic and
religious conflicts, is that his “average, normal person”
still bears the welts from handcuffs. The real history and
identity of a person are not stripped away in the process
of looking for universal values; rather, universal rights
become the prism through which past grievances are
projected, and life-affirming identities are formed.
“Self-empowerment is the real underlying
logic behind Nusseibeh’s work as an
educator and a philosopher”
A good example of this theory in action is Al Quds
University. Though himself a child of the 1960s—back
then Nusseibeh loved attending demonstrations—if you
visit the campus of Al Quds you won’t see many banners
denouncing the Occupation, the settlements, the closures
and the separation wall, all things Nusseibeh and his
students naturally detest. The task of the university, as he
sees it, is to actualize the needs of his 10,000 students.
The university has a history department, where the
history of the conflict is taught. There is even a his-
tory museum dedicated to the memory of PLO military
commander Abu Jihad, a ’48 refugee who is regarded by
many Palestinians as their own Che Guevara. But in the
museum, as in the history department, the emphasis
is on self-empowerment rather than revanchism; on
individual dignity, not ressentiment; on the ability to take
control of history and tragedy rather than being a help-
less victim. The uniqueness, even sheer audacity, of this
liberal political philosophy can best be appreciated when
compared to the prevailing attitudes among Palestinian
intellectuals, politicians, and especially the Islamists, who
regard the “Naqba” of 1948 rather than individual rights as
their starting point, making compromise with the Jewish
state at best a tactical maneuver borne out of weakness.
The Justice of Two States
Self-empowerment is the real underlying logic behind
Nusseibeh’s work as an educator and a philosopher. At his
university he has introduced an Israeli studies program,
and no one in Palestine has cooperated so actively with
Israeli institutions. Making cooperation with Israel
into an aspect of self-empowerment, however, should
be profoundly disturbing to those Israelis who insist
on maintaining control of the West Bank and Gaza. If
flags, historical memory, and so-called eternal rights
are secondary to the concrete rights of the individual’s
freedom and dignity, then the state form—the color of a
flag, the faces on the currency - becomes secondary. An
independent Palestinian state is important only to the
degree in which it can guarantee the rights and liberty of
the individual. If the “average person” can derive greater
freedom within a bi-national Arab-Jewish state than
through a dysfunctional Palestinian Authority without true
sovereignty, then that is what Palestinians and all those
who seek a humane solution to the conflict should fight for.
Yet, herein lies the greatest paradox of all. The so-
called “One State solution,” being the direct by-product
of a failed Palestinian state, naturally puts into question
the moral underpinnings of the Jewish state. To avoid
this from happening, the fervent Palestinian national-
ist and the equally fervent Israeli Zionist, both as it
were riding the same train to the same sacred city of
Jerusalem, become allies in advocating for a successful
A Liberal in Jerusalem: The Paradoxes of Sari Nusseibeh 5
Palestinian state in which individual Palestinians enjoy
basic political and economic rights and freedoms on
their side of the Green Line, including East Jerusalem.

“As Nusseibeh told an audience at the

Hebrew University shortly after the 9/11
terrorist attacks…‘Israelis and Palestinians.
If anything, we are strategic allies’”

In this scenario, the Palestinians will get their state—

and the sole responsibility to manage it in a rational,
transparent, demilitarized, and democratic manner—and
the Israelis will be assured that future Palestinians will
not put to question the Jewish state through a one-man-
one-vote campaign or the insistence on the right of return.
As Nusseibeh told an audience at the Hebrew University
shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United
States, when talk of the “clash of civilizations” was in the
air: “Our shared future has to provide Israel with a secure
guarantee for its existence as a Jewish state, but it has also
to provide Palestinians with a secure guarantee for their
freedom and independence in their own state. Israelis
and Palestinians. If anything, we are strategic allies.”

A Liberal in Jerusalem: The Paradoxes of Sari Nusseibeh 6