Once Upon a Country by Sari Nusseibeh

Author:Sari Nusseibeh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2015-08-12T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nineteen

A Declaration of Independence

FOLLOWING MY NATURAL INCLINATION, I did my best to look and act like the good soldier Schweik, naïve and not entirely of this world. My day job as a coffee shop philosopher both was a pose and reality, a convenient cover and precisely where my heart was. With all the exuberance and excitement, I wanted to call people’s attention to the humanism without which our rebellion was doomed to turn into just another Palestinian catastrophe—and farce.

In 1987 I was invited to the University of Pavia in northern Italy to deliver a lecture. At the entrance of the university I saw posters festooning trees and buildings proclaiming the merits of our cause. This brought back memories of 1967, when we were the pariahs of the world, and the only avid supporter we came across was an English Nazi. The intifada had turned us into the underdog du jour for the European left.

In Pavia, I chose to give my talk on the predicament of Palestinian prisoners, and my entrée into the subject was the notion of freedom, and how the will was inextricably linked with personal and national identity. I told my audience about my observations of students who had spent long hours in the interrogation cell, and how by refusing to confess, they came out of it with a new sense of self and, often for the first time in their lives, a genuine experience of freedom.

Freedom, I said, isn’t some innate quality stamped on our foreheads like a product bar code; nor is it something external like a particular passport or the right amount of money in the bank. Freedom is an expression of the will, and the amount you have of it is in direct proportion to your mastery over fear and egotism. By exercising the will, the individual carves out a distinct identity. There was as much Avicenna as there was of my father in that lecture.

If identity is created and not passively inherited like blue eyes, it admits of degrees. Individuals can have strong identities or almost none. The same holds true for a nation. Like an individual, a nation has to forge its identity through constant acts of the will. As Palestinians, our internal sovereignty and identity consist precisely in freely exercising our will, in defiance of the power employed to crush it. Through an act of the will, our nation can neutralize our jailer’s truncheon and his psychological weapons, and can transform the physical instruments of oppression into symbols of the interrogator’s utter impotence.

A nation can mysteriously develop a common sense of itself and a common sense of purpose … With this revolutionary consciousness, the national will becomes an instrument with which to achieve inner freedom, and with which to translate this into acts of objective struggle. A nation under occupation, just like a prisoner inside the cell, comes thus to be free through its acts or non-acts.

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