New Palestinian Official Puts His Feet to the Fire With Words of Moderation

After barely a month on the job, Sari Nusseibeh is already in trouble.

The patrician philosopher and highly respected intellectual has ended years of self-imposed exile from political life to take on the high-profile post of the Palestinians’ point man in Jerusalem.

It is a role that embodies Palestinian claims to the disputed holy city, and Nusseibeh’s ascent came at the personal insistence of Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat.

Thrust back into the spotlight, Nusseibeh immediately offered words of moderation and wisdom not often heard here in the last blood-soaked months.

He also said a couple of things that many Palestinians may think but that few utter aloud.

For example: The idea of returning Palestinian refugees to their original homes--a sacrosanct right in Palestinian political rhetoric--is impractical and would never work. And: The intifada of the last year has achieved very little and should be reconsidered.

Such pronouncements of dissent--and pragmatism--make Nusseibeh popular among progressive Israelis and Palestinians, foreign journalists and Western diplomats desperately seeking a Palestinian interlocutor. But his line of thought is anathema to militant Palestinian activists and many in the general population, who have lived through years of sacrifice and are in no mood for compromise on fundamental issues.

Nusseibeh’s critics quickly marshaled their forces and wrote to Arafat insisting that he be fired. A Palestinian refugee organization branded Nusseibeh’s ideas “dangerous” and “poisonous” and demanded that he be put on trial.

Nusseibeh, so far, has not been deterred. He added his name, tongue-in-cheek, to one petition demanding his removal. The job, he said, “seems to undermine my ability to express myself freely.” Rather than lie low, he made a rapid-fire series of appearances in Palestinian and, remarkably, Israeli media.

“I feel that something terrible happened this year and it’s time for me to speak my mind,” he said in an interview a few days after his appointment to the Jerusalem portfolio.

“We are living a tragedy,” Nusseibeh, 52, said, speaking in his slightly untidy office at East Jerusalem’s Al Quds University, where he is president. “Both sides behave in a totally irrational way toward each other. Given the fact we spent so many years building up a new order of peace and coexistence, to allow all of it to be thrown off orbit is simply beyond me.”

Descended from a prominent family that traces its roots in Jerusalem back more than 1,000 years, Nusseibeh is a man of cultured manners who was educated at Harvard and Oxford. He is quick to tell a visitor that he would rather stay out of the limelight but that duty calls.

Arafat appointed him Oct. 12 to replace the powerful Faisal Husseini, who died of a heart attack in May. After Husseini’s death, Israel seized and shuttered Orient House, the Palestinians’ de facto political and diplomatic headquarters in East Jerusalem.

Among Nusseibeh’s more surprising comments, he has minimized the importance of Orient House, cherished by many as a potent symbol of Palestinian nationalism. Husseini’s hands-on approach, which included doing everything from hosting foreign diplomats to solving neighbors’ land disputes, “is not my style,” Nusseibeh said. Instead, his priority is to establish a professional and institutional management structure for Arab Jerusalem’s 210,000-strong community, one that would counter both Palestinian Authority neglect and Israeli attempts to expand the Jewish presence in the district.

Nusseibeh, distinguished by a thick head of gray hair and an impish smile, was a leading political activist and philosophy professor at the West Bank’s Birzeit University throughout the 1980s. He said at the time that Israel might as well annex the West Bank and Gaza Strip and that the Palestinians, who would then make up nearly half the national population, should fight for equal rights.

Because that suggestion seemed to sacrifice the notion of a Palestinian state, Nusseibeh encountered harsh criticism. One day in 1987, he was beaten up by masked men as he left his Birzeit office.

Though it was not his first choice, he accepted the “two-state solution”--the proposed creation of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel--and played a visible role in the first intifada. Israeli harassment was frequent: Authorities closed an English-language journal he published chronicling the intifada, and during the Persian Gulf War in 1991, Israel jailed him for months, accusing him of spying for Iraq but never charging him.

Nusseibeh served as a key negotiator when Palestinians and Israelis finally held breakthrough talks in Madrid and Washington, and he was an early architect of the fledgling Palestinian administration that was ushered into the West Bank and Gaza Strip by the landmark 1993 Oslo peace accords.

But in 1994, he returned to academic life, taking a yearlong leave to study in Washington before assuming the leadership of Al Quds University, where he worked largely out of the public eye.

Finally, in September, he published a column in Israel’s Haaretz newspaper and the Palestinian daily Al Quds urging Israelis and Palestinians to make fundamental compromises lest “our shared destiny” be left to “opportunists . . . bent on wanton destruction.”

What gets Nusseibeh in trouble with many of his people is his argument that Palestinians cannot build a state if they continue to insist on the right of refugees and their descendants, altogether about 4 million people, to return to homes in what is now Israel. Israel, he notes, will never let that happen.

But, he argues, just as Israel cannot permit an influx of millions of Palestinians and preserve its Jewish character, so must the potential Palestinian state be rid of the estimated 150 Jewish settlements erected in the West Bank and Gaza, as well as Jewish settlers who have moved into East Jerusalem.

Nusseibeh said his criticism of the current intifada as futile is something that “needed to be said.”

“The Palestinian body is convulsing from pain, a sense of despair, an inability to end the negotiations and achieve freedom,” he said. “The Israelis also feel pain, but in isolated parts of their body. For the Palestinians, it is the whole body. Neither pain is acceptable. Neither side needs to go through this.”

Through his academic work, Nusseibeh managed to keep up contacts with Israelis, even during the worst of times this past year, and is urging renewed dialogue.

“Our real ally in building a state is Israel, and Israel’s real ally is its enemy: us,” he said. “We both have a joint interest, an existential interest, in the political and personal sense . . . to work together.”

Mossi Raz, an Israeli legislator from the leftist Meretz Party, arranged a meeting last week between a group of his colleagues and Nusseibeh to discuss ways to revive a peace camp that has been virtually silenced by the last 13 1/2 months of violence. Nusseibeh elaborated on his ideas about refugees and redirecting the Palestinian struggle. The Israelis were impressed.

“He’s a very brave man,” Raz said later. “Our history, and Palestinian history, shows we have to be worried [about moderates] because of opposition in both nations against the peace camp. In both nations, there are a lot of people who want to kill the supporters of peace.”

Nusseibeh got unusual support from an unexpected quarter. Jibril Rajoub--Arafat’s top security man in the West Bank, who has a fearsome reputation for stamping out dissent--declined to criticize Nusseibeh’s position on refugee returns. It was the timing, he said, not the substance, that was problematic.

“I trust him. I like him. I support him,” Rajoub, the gruff and powerful police commander based in Ramallah, said in an interview. “He surprised me with his courage.”