Personal

Nusseibeh’s central thesis (well, secondary thesis, the primary implicit one being that the Palestinian people should all along have appointed both his Dad and then him their oh-so-reluctant leaders) I too have felt almost in my bones: that Israelis and Palestinians are natural allies. Or, more accurately, that there’s a natural affinity which will enable us to be powerful allies if and when we ever get over our admittedly fundamental conflict.

If only the Palestinians had listened to Sari Nusseibeh’s father, or to Sari, how different and better things would be. The scion of a longstanding Jerusalem family, for generations entrusted with the key to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, shutting to and from the playing fields of Eton, yet, in what is probably the central moment of the book, arriving back from England at Ben-Gurion Airport and experiencing Israelis for the first time, and actually liking them ⁠— certainly more than the toffs he just left ⁠— and being taken for a coffee at Abu Ghosh by his Jewish taxi driver and seeing that Arabs can exist very nicely within the State of Israel.

Nusseibeh’s central thesis ⁠— well, secondary thesis, the first implicit one being that the Palestinian people should have made him their oh-so-reluctant leader ⁠— and one that I too have felt almost in my bones, is that Israelis and Palestinians are natural allies. Or, more accurately, have a natural affinity that will enable us to be powerful allies if and when we ever get over our admittedly fundamental conflict with each other.

I felt that many years ago in Chicago where the local shop was owned and run by Palestinians ⁠— sadly they’re now merely a slip of a 25+-year-old memory and I don’t remember the guys individually. It was somehow even more of a borderline potential tear-filled choking moment going in there than if it were other Jewish Israelis, because conflict. What one sees from here cannot be seen from there.

At any rate, it did make me wonder what Jerusalem was like before its Israelification. I wonder if current Jerusalem is like what northern Jaffa is to what Jaffa must have been, a stripped-back sterilized almost-husk. Not quite, Jerusalem is very much vivacious, but there are tracts of particulary the western side of the city that I felt seemed kind of emptier than is natural.