What Is a Palestinian State Worth?
Following up his personal story, Once upon a Country: A Palestinian Life (2007), Nusseibeh, president of al-Quds University in Jerusalem, speaks about the current political issues in Israel with the authority of citizen, academic, and activist, “both victim and protagonist.” His call is elemental, “for Israelis and Palestinians to see each other as human beings.” But beyond slogans of equality and freedom, he examines possible solutions on the ground. How to transcend the present stalemate? Neither force nor reason has worked. The two-state solution, he argues, is a “fantasy bubble,” an unworkable alternative to Palestinians and Israelis living in equality in one state. He witnesses first-hand settler rampages against Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank, but then there are the Palestinian suicide bombings, the bloody clashes between Hamas and Fatah. Citing Gandhi, he says that precisely because the Palestinians are the weaker military force, they have the greater power to transform, not to defeat. Nusseibeh’s informal style, urgent and passionate, and especially his call to sit down with the enemy, will engage all sides in intense debate. --Hazel Rochman