The Loneliness of a Palestinian Dove

...Yet not even they seem to believe that, despite his being kept on for some reason by Arafat, Nus-seibeh represents much or that when he says and writes things Israelis yearn to hear it's anything more than one Harvard man's position...

...Nusseibeh has said more than once in Arabic that his people should give up the idea of returning to their homes in what is now Israel...

...But when I ask him to be specific he says he'll leave that to historians...

...Really...

...The remaining hard-core Israeli doves meanwhile take comfort in Nusseibeh...

...Sweet American years...

...Indeed, at the Moment café in West Jerusalem, where a bomber had just killed himself and 11 Jews, it's only by chance that Nus-seibeh's daughter and English wife, frequent patrons, were not also blown up...

...What about the interview his predecessor in this job, Faisal Husseini, gave in Arabic last year just before his death, explaining that a Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem would be a phase, a stage leading to the wiping-out of Israel...

...As for the Lebanese analogy, Nusseibeh says he's tried explaining to his countrymen that it's a false one...

...For ages there've been Nusseibehs at or near the top...

...He spoke in Hebrew at a rally in Tel Aviv a few weeks ago...

...So far no one's responded...

...The human face of terror," one Likud minister called him...

...There are memories of working as a night watchman, a dishwasher at the Parrot restaurant, a tutor at Quincy House...

...Yes, terrorism is repugnant...

...He admits this is a hard sell...

...Sari Nusseibeh comes from a very old family in the Arab part of town, comparable maybe to the Saltonstalls in Boston...

...It produces only more hatred, Israeli counterattacks, a dead end...

...Nusseibeh like Husseini was appointed by Arafat and serves at his pleasure...

...Then when I ask what Bill Clinton and Israeli premier Ehud Barak offered Arafat in 2000 and Arafat turned down, Nusseibeh lights a cigarette and says he has no idea...

...answered some of my questions fairly honestly and ducked the rest...

...both the late King Hussein's defense minister and his ambassador to London, where Sari grew up...

...There's no shared vision, no program, no leadership, only individuals and various groups practicing violence for its own sake...

...And it would be understandable, the so-called "peace process" brought into the world in Oslo having culminated in a gory mess...

...He only knows what he reads, and what he's told by his friend Yossi Beilin, the foremost Israeli dove, which is that Barak went farther than any Israeli before him and if there'd just been a little more time a deal could've been reached...

...He says he wishes he knew, he really does, but that all he knows is that what's been going on for 18 months now shouldn't be called an intifada at all, because it's not coherent, organized, or strate-gized, as the first and only real intifada was, the one begun in 1987...

...Everything with such Palestinians is thought to be a game, a scam, a put-on...

...He'd be surprised if Faisal actually said that...

...Is there any connection between Arafat's turning Clinton and Barak down and the present uprising or intifada...

...Of course, plenty of Israelis credit nothing the man says...

...His late father Anwar was mayor briefly during the time (194867) when Jordan ran the West Bank and half of Jerusalem, and was also Edward Grossman has written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Les temps modernes (Paris...

...Nusseibeh doesn't quibble...

...I published a piece in Arabic," he reminds me, "challenging the so-called Palestinian leadership to tell us what it thinks it's doing and where we're heading...

...He calls himself an educator, not a politician or diplomat or soldier...

...There's pain and chaos but no one in charge...

...Maybe that's right...

...He's also said that the Jewish connection to Jerusalem and the Temple Mount is historical and legitimate and will have to be acknowledged by the Palestinians and Muslims in general...

...Whatever happens, even if Arafat finally goes, no man who fondly remembers writing a doctoral thesis on Avicenna is going to be doing any leading, negotiating, or deciding...

...Violence—no, call it terrorism—will have paid off...

...When I ask who or what caused Oslo's ruination, he fingers his worry beads and says the Israelis and his people are each right to blame the other...

...And it doesn't work...

...He would, I suspect, be happier to spend our entire meeting reliving them...

...For that matter, his daughter was there some time ago when another young man activated his load near the French School on Prophets Street in West Jerusalem—she and the other Israeli, Palestinian, and European children saw his head on the sidewalk...

...I'd give Nusseibeh the benefit of many doubts without overrating his influence...

...He gladly reminisces about life in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and his thesis on the philosopher Avicenna (980-1037), for which he had to learn German and classical Greek...

...I put it to him that if the Israelis crack first, if it turns out that bombings and ambushes yield a better deal than even Barak offered, if the Jews cut and run as they did from Lebanon, then he'll have to eat his words...

...That's unusual if not heretical— Arafat maintains the Jews have no such claim, and the very dovish Israeli ex-foreign minister, Shlomo Ben-Ami, says Camp David fell apart because Nusseibeh's boss demanded the return to their vanished homes of millions of Palestinian refugees...

...Today Sari is 50 years old and wears three hats: president of Al-Quds University ("al-Quds" being "Jerusalem" in Arabic), the Palestine Authority's man in the city, and the foremost Palestinian dove...

...There's no difference, he says to me, between September 11 and the suicide bombing of a cafe—"terrorism is terrorism...

...Many Israelis would dispute the part about there being no one in charge, including not a few who used to be doves until Arafat said no to Barak and greenlighted the intifada, the chaos, whatever you label it...

...What's true is that Nusseibeh did publish an article in an East Jerusalem paper, which, operating under Israeli rules, allows freer speech to everyone than newspapers in the Palestine Authority...