In Search of a Way Out: Rethinking the Arab-Israeli Conflict

A Palestinian Scholar Discusses How a Solution Could Help Resolve the Larger Clash Between Islam and Christianity

July 12, 2007

Few Palestinian families have deeper roots in Jerusalem than Sari Nusseibeh's. In the 7th century, immediately after the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem, the caliph Omar the Great entrusted one of Nusseibeh's ancestors with the key to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. From childhood onward, Nusseibeh, who was educated as a philosopher at Oxford and Harvard universities, couldn't avoid Middle Eastern history, Palestinian politics or observing the influence of religion on society.

After the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, Nusseibeh studied Hebrew, worked on a kibbutz and became a student of both Israeli and Palestinian society. As a philosophy professor, he began his career at a struggling West Bank university where divisions among the teachers and students mirrored tensions within the larger society over how best to respond to Israel's control of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. He worked largely underground during the first Palestinian uprising against Israel in the late 1980s and early 1990s to try to fashion achievable political goals. An increasingly public figure, he was arrested by Israel in 1991 and released after three months.

Nusseibeh was the chief representative for the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in Jerusalem in 2001 and 2002. For more than two decades, he has advocated coexistence over violence. President of Al-Quds University in Jerusalem for the last 10 years, he is the author of a recently published memoir, Once Upon a Country (2007).

From his office in Jerusalem, Nusseibeh spoke with Forum Senior Editor Robert Ruby by telephone. In the following edited excerpt, ellipses have been omitted to improve readability. Read the full transcript at pewforum.org.

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Forum: In recent public talks in the United States, you've remarked that when people ask whether it's possible to resolve tensions between Islam and other faiths in the Middle East, they're asking the wrong question. You've instead said that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict could embody the solution to the larger religious conflict. What do you mean by that?

Sari Nusseibeh: First -- in my mind, people control their own destiny, and therefore people can make things happen. As to whether things turn out for the better or for the worse, I think it's normally because of our own doing. The second point is that therefore the Israeli-Palestinian conflict shouldn't be looked upon as something that, independently of our will, can be a forerunner of a major clash between Islam and Christianity or between Islam and the West. That conflict -- that situation -- can be transformed by what we choose to do.

I would use the example of a pyramid, or an iceberg, and say that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could be regarded either as the tip of an iceberg constituting a major clash between two civilizations -- two faiths if you like -- or it can be the building block. It can be the building block of understanding between the two sides. Whichever it is, I believe it's something that we -- primarily the people of both sides -- can in fact make happen. So it is in our own hands.

Forum: In your memoir, Once Upon a Country, you write about teaching at Birzeit University in the West Bank in the 1980s. Those students in the early to mid-1980s were opposed to violent confrontation with Israel. How and why did their view about religion and violence change?

Nusseibeh: At the time, the student body was probably divided into two main parts. One of them was the part that embodied the stirring of the national movement, and this included all kinds of people who identified themselves with the different factions of the PLO. Some people identified themselves with Marxist movements [of the PLO] like the Popular Front or Democratic Front, and then there were those who identified themselves with a secular – or generally secular – movement like Fatah. On the whole, these were the students who were looking at the question of national identity – of liberation of the country from occupation. Most of them believed in the idea of a struggle.

And then, on the other hand, was a group of students who identified themselves with religion. By "religion" I mean Muslims rather than Christians. We had and still have a number -- a diminishing number, unfortunately -- of Christians in the country. But it was mostly Muslims on the religious side. Because they felt closer identification with God, with religion, with the divine plan so to speak, they distanced themselves from the so-called earthly pursuits of other students who were busy trying to achieve national independence. They believed that this pursuit of national independence was not something that people should bother with. They believed that we should really be more focused upon developing ourselves – our sense of what it means to be human beings identified with the divine plan, fulfilling our religious rights and so on.

And because they did not identify themselves with the political struggle that was confronting us, they stood to one side. So this is how it was at that time: people on the one hand who saw the political struggle as the most important thing in their lives, and then those – the Muslims – who believed that what was more important was man's place in the universe and pursuing religious rights.

Forum: How did the people who thought the most important thing was determining man's place in the universe switch from what sounds like an almost pacifist approach to something very different?

Nusseibeh: I think it was force of circumstance. I mentioned in the book that one morning I was driving to the university campus with Lucy, my wife. We were stopped, and it turned out that there were demonstrations [in which] there was a confrontation with Israeli soldiers. I'm not sure whether it was by design or by accident, but two of the students that were shot and killed by the soldiers turned out to be members of this religious group.

I remember at that time thinking, this is a turning point. Until that point, [the religious students] did not look upon Israel as an enemy that had to be fought. Maybe it was an enemy, but it wasn't an enemy that could be fought against. But when the killings happened, I think the students began to change. This is just one example. A couple of years later when the first intifada broke out, those people were already involved in the demonstrations and the violence.

Forum: You also write that religious militancy borrows less from the Koran than from what you call revolutionary European nihilism. Would you expand on that?

Nusseibeh: First of all, I believe that religions are very often what people make of them. For instance, one can read into Islam that it is a religion that is very peaceful, universalist in nature, tolerant. One can also read into Islam that it is a religion that calls upon people to fight, to shed blood and so on. Once when I was watching a television interview with Osama bin Laden, he referred to one specific clause in the Koran that uses an Arabic word that might be used to justify terrorist tactics. This was an interpretation that he chose to give to the Koran, but one could give it other interpretations. This is the case whether we're talking about Islam or other religions: People very often make things what they want them to be.

Now, the revolutionary tactics: Anarchists in Europe first brought about the idea of using explosions for political reasons. It developed in Europe in the various uprisings of the 18th and 19th centuries. In my mind, these methods were not used in the Islamic period [when Islam first won religious and political influence over a wide region]. These methods weren't used as a legitimate means, for instance, to change political systems in the Islamic world.

Forum: You also write, "Education is a tool to prevent people from passively stewing in their own resentment and either giving up by submitting or lashing out by tossing bombs." Where does religious faith fit into this?

Nusseibeh: You'll excuse me for being very skeptical about religious faith. Speaking from where I happen to be speaking, as I look around I see religious faith primarily being expressed in ways that bring about extreme pain to people and very often bring about degradation and humiliation -- and certainly violence and bloodshed. So I'm very skeptical about religious faith -- about people who claim to have that faith and to speak on behalf of God as they pursue their designs on earth. And therefore, thinking to myself, I decided that perhaps quite aside from the role that religious faith can play, one should perhaps instead focus on something else, which is something I call secular faith, or faith in our own power and in our own abilities or capacities as human beings -- faith in our own values as human beings.

Secular faith needn't be inconsistent with religious faith, but it seems to me that one should be guided by secular faith because it is much safer. You cannot settle a dispute between the protagonists of different religions about whose faith should be applied or implemented on earth. On the other hand, secular faith -- faith in human values or human beings -- is something that people can come to agree upon. [I]t can be made consistent with the essences of different faiths. One should make sure that people's education in religious faith doesn't close the window to seeing the significance of the human values in secular faith.

Forum: That fits well with your rereading of the Koran when you were in prison. You concluded that the Koran's message to man was that he's on his own -- that the era of miracles or divine revelation is over, that there are not going to be any more oracles or prophets, that man is going to have to depend on reason as well as faith. Why does this have such a hard time taking hold in the Middle East?

Nusseibeh: I think that the circumstances -- political and economic -- have made it difficult for people to emancipate themselves or to be emancipated. In my view, a lot of people in the Islamic world have committed the very mistake that the prophet Muhammad tried to rectify when he asked people to believe in God and not to believe in men.

Unfortunately, after he died, a lot of people who became Muslims actually became "Muhammadans," people who place Muhammad above -- something very special that should be sanctified or looked upon as holy. In fact, they've missed the point of Muhammad being simply a human messenger who came basically to reassert the holiness and sanctity and divine nature and unique nature of God.

Forum: You've written about the importance of apology in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. You have said that offering apologies would let the parties feel that their dignity was recognized and allow them to forgive. For what should each side in the conflict apologize?

Nusseibeh: Once, I was taken aback when I was talking to an Israeli official and saying that the Palestinian refugee problem wasn't going to constitute such a major obstacle to peace. What the Palestinian side will insist on, I was telling him, is Israel's recognition of the principle of the right of return, but the Palestinian side was well aware of the difficulty of implementing that right. It was only asking for the principle to be recognized. I was surprised when, as I was saying this, the Israeli suddenly jumped up and said: But you are asking me to admit, to recognize, that my country, my own country, was born in sin -- unlike how I imagined it or how I was brought up to believe it was created -- that it is its creation that caused your tragedy.

It took me some time to understand what was being said. But finally I realized that there is a lot of psychological territory that needs to be covered on both sides in order for the two sides to somehow see eye-to-eye on this particular issue. The Palestinians believe that Israel's creation is the cause of their tragedy, and Israel cannot and will not see its own birth in those terms.

So what can be done? And, you know, something needs to be done. I believe that the Palestinians should somehow come to realize, for example, that it wasn't because Israelis wished to cause a tragedy to the Palestinians that the country was created. Israel was created in response to a more horrific pain that had been caused to the Jewish people.

On the other hand, Israelis should come to recognize that, in fact, a tragedy did occur and that Israel's creation was a cause for this tragedy. There's a need here to separate first cause and second cause -- a need for the Palestinians to realize that Israel was created for Jewish reasons and for justifiable reasons and it should be acknowledged. And Israelis should likewise realize that the creation of their own state created this tragedy for the Palestinians. I think this is psychological territory that needs to be covered by both sides.

Read the full transcript at pewforum.org.