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Each new American administration seems to develop amnesia about the failures of previous administrations to achieve positive movement in negotiations concerning these people without a state and rapidly dissolving territory. The Palestinians have a bottom line: self-government, a small state with borders with its capital in East Jerusalem. Israel has had a bottom line for decades, which the PLO long ago signed on to – recognition of the state of Israel. Mr. Netanyahu says that Palestinians have held up negotiations by refusing to recognize a Jewish State. It seems he will say anything the American public and politicians will believe to be true, and history be damned. In fact, the Oslo agreement of the 1990s features PLO acceptance, in black and white, of “a Jewish state” of Israel. (Even though it is not yet accepted by one party, Hamas, it has long been accepted by the entities enjoined to negotiate with Israel: the Palestinian Authority and the PLO.) The Palestinian bottom line is time sensitive, for Israel as well. More than anything else, the most urgent problem is the settlements, a problem Mr. Netanyahu has actively exacerbated. He has just thrown more gas on that fire by punishing the Palestinians for their application to join UN bodies by ordering the development of more settler housing in Arab East Jerusalem. The other burning issue is the impossible system resembling Apartheid that the occupation has inexorably led to.
The status quo in the long-running Israel-Palestine tragedy feels safer to US politicians, even those who are normally advocates of human rights and international law. For hawks in Israel the “status quo” has meant the continued encouragement of Israeli settlements inside the areas of the West Bank formed by the pre-1967 borders – which from the Palestinian point of view means 22% of the original Palestine. That is, the land which until 1948 fell within the borders of the British Palestinian mandate created by the Balfour accords. The Palestinian authority today is permitted to administer 17% of that 22%, which on any realistic map looks like drops of olive oil on a platter. These are the “Bantustans” that Edward Said long warned about.
Now, however, history has brought dramatic changes – and Israelis are in real danger that their governing politicians will be the stiff twig that breaks in high winds, instead of the reed that knows how to bend.
The facts on the ground: Walls not bridges
Having just spent this last summer on an arts and peace project in East Jerusalem and the West Bank I would like to share a few observations on the state of things there. The actions and utterances of the Netanyahu government is causing Israel to become increasingly isolated, causing deep anxiety in his own country. Everyone knows it, almost everyone is saying it – but no change in policy results from that. Israel’s leaders doggedly pursue policies which in almost every instance can be seen as shooting themselves in their collective foot. Increasing numbers of people in Israel know it is time to take action which would lower the anxiety threshold, and many Israelis, even those who don’t read Haaretz, are hoping for leadership that can work in the spirit of enlightened self-interest if not respect for international law—something which can lead to a two state solution. Otherwise, as Israeli President Shimon Peres recently cautioned, they will be heading for a “one state solution.”
Peres left out the illusory option that those who envision a greater Israel including the Biblical "Judea and Samaria" are promoting: to move forward slowly but steadily squeezing the borders of the proposed Palestinian state down to almost nothing – leaving only scattered communities of Palestinians which will never be able to govern anything even if such a state were granted to them. In fact, we have almost arrived at that point already. But this is not a good solution for thinking Israelis, especially due to demographic issues, which was Peres’ point.
Still, that untenable option is being slowly but doggedly pursued by the Israeli government. As it has turned out, the settlements have been made to work hand in hand with the so-called security wall and is breaking up Palestinian lands. The wall stretching throughout the Palestinian territories is much more expansive than most Americans and Europeans imagine from the photos of segments of the wall they see on the news. The justification for the wall was the terrorist acts committed by radicalized Palestinian resistance groups, mostly after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin when all bets were suddenly off and the powerful Israeli army was in. The wall in the end is a grotesque scar on the broader landscape, something that might emerge comes out of a story by Kafka (Kafka did in fact write a sequence of short works on the absurd construction of an endless wall.). It has been built inside the borders of the “Palestine” envisaged in the endless negotiations of recent decades, sometimes reaching a hundred meters into Palestinian land, sometimes more than a kilometer. It circles around settlements built on land previously designated as a potential part of Palestine – some of which intrude far more deeply into the West Bank.
The wall is now being built in the north to cordon off the proposed Palestinian state from Lebanon by a wide swath of land, supposedly intended as part of the future Palestinian state. The plan is to continue the wall till it reaches the northernmost point of the Jordan valley in the east. The valley is in the complete control of the Israeli military from the north to south down to Sinai. Its width is close to a quarter of all the tiny West Bank. Thus, the people of this 22% of British Mandate Palestine would be surrounded, as they are now. Their piece of land would be yet smaller.
The wall is twelve meters tall (four meters higher than the Berlin wall was). It is made out of mind-numbingly oppressive grey concrete, with large guard towers with surveillance equipment along its vast length, giving the impression of an endless prison wall. If a one walks around the towns of Alazaria and Abu Dis, one will take a turn left, and in a few blocks come up against the wall. If you choose to turn right instead, then after ten minutes you will come up against the wall again. In fact the wall snakes through the region of the territories facing the Israeli border everywhere. It is not one bold line like the old familiar Berlin wall. Beyond the two cities just mentioned, there is the open desert. However, out on that arid zone is a large, white gleaming settlement on a high hilltop to which the wall leads.
Behind the wall: Life in the "A, B and C" zones.
Abu Dis, home to the Palestinians’ largest university, is by and large dusty, in many places lacking sidewalks or street names, as the Palestinian Authority is not permitted to administer things there. It is designated as a “B” zone, which the Israeli’s can’t regulate or police, but neither can the Palestinian Authority. They may regulate and police “A” zones. “C,” zones in their land the Palestinians cannot touch, so out beyond the wall in a “C” zone no construction of any kind is allowed by any Palestinian. (This arrangement, once intended as a short term measure in the Oslo Accords prior to expected to be a very temporary arrangement in the Oslo agreement on the road to Palestinian state hood, over time have begun to evoke Kafka again. Or perhaps Orwell provides the better model.) Villagers in ancient Palestinian towns face police action by the IDF if they try to build additions onto their houses or even driveways or a barn. Thus “C” zones for Palestinians are unregulated no man’s land now placed on hold for Israeli "settlers." In these areas, among Palestinian communities, old tribal habits and frauds of cyclical revenge break out. What is in fact happening there is the construction of Israeli settlements and various Israeli military posts.
As said, the “A, B and C” areas were once intended, in the Oslo agreements, to give Palestinians a step by step approach to administer their own land, but it depended too much on “good will” from the side with all the power. Hence the Orwellian outcome. Palestinians still living there have no recourse for protection or emergency assistance. They cannot improve their lives in any way.
Not so long ago the lawlessness of this unregulated zone became apparent when villagers poured over this portion of unguarded wall in Abu Dis and into the university campus as part of an old fashioned vendetta fight. The students were put in lock-down and quickly ushered out of the university – which must hire its own guards and police to cover every gate as no police are permitted in the town. Some businesses on the University side of the wall were burned down. Meanwhile, the Israeli settlement on an unassailable hill above Abu Dis is surrounded by its own wall, designed to keep people out, rather than to keep people in. It is a secure and quiet place. A Palestinian Muslim friend of mine, who has secretly been driven into that settlement by an Israeli friend (yes there are many Palestinians who number Jews among their friends, and even enjoy scheming together for little jaunts like this) was astonished to see well watered greenery everywhere, and more astonishing yet – a variety of swimming pools.
What is Jerusalem? And where is it?
From these two Palestinian towns, which comprise the “East Jerusalem” that Ehud Barak’s last Labour Government was proposing to cede to the Palestinians at the Camp David talks, one can see Jerusalem not far off, even the Temple Mount and Dome of the Rock. From the edge of town it used to be a three minute drive or ten minute walk to Jerusalem proper. Now it takes an hour and fifteen minutes by car or bus. Not that most Palestinians can get into Jerusalem’s Arab “old city” at all. The majority do not have the passbook that would allow them in. There are families where one spouse has permission to go to Jerusalem, and the other, even if born in Jerusalem, does not have the right to enter. They are turned back at the military checkpoints. Any Palestinian resident of Jerusalem who leaves and takes up residence elsewhere is generally never permitted to come back.
Palestinians, struggling to find financial means to build a decent hospital system (the University at Abu Dis is struggling to build up its medical school) have to go to Jerusalem for major procedures, and Israeli government spokespeople proudly point out that Palestinians use their hospitals for such procedures. Indeed, the Israeli physicians and hospital staff have proven to be among the most even-handed, unbiased and humane people in the region. But for a Palestinian to get an appointment in a hospital there takes going through perhaps several long visits, and sometimes appeals, at the Israeli consulate. Many are simply turned down. A few of the latter can scrape together the money to get to Europe. For most this is not possible.
A wall that unites and fortifies "urbanized" settlements
Meanwhile, the wall has been built down the center of busy market streets when it hits various commercial centers, killing the social and commercial life in this areas. This is true in Alazaria where a long busy former market street faces the monolithic structure – all the storefronts are dead, shuttered. The people have moved out. There is another such street in the ancient town of Beit Jala adjoining Bethlehem – though there are now quite cheap apartments to be had in the area where the wall is all that can be seen from the front windows of any home or apartment. Even in the temporary capital of the Palestinian Authority, Ramallah, the wall cuts parts of the town off abruptly from the countryside around it.
Above Bethlehem itself on the hillsides one can see the wall snaking around another white gleaming mini-metropolis – which is the look of the larger permanent settlements built by the settler movement and protected by the IDF forces. There has been lobbying by the travel industry in Israel to name this new bright settlement which glows in the sun on Palestinian land, and which will include a number of fine hotels, “Bethlehem” as well. This will encourage tourists to stay in the hotels being built there if they want to visit the Church of the Nativity and Manger Square in the real Bethlehem – offering guests Israeli style comforts and almost complete separation from both Muslim and Christian Palestinian communities, especially when they come in large numbers to celebrate the long Christmas season. The real Bethlehem itself has many good hotels.
As a tourist or visitor to Israel and the occupied territories, one moves from place to place swiftly on four and six lane highways, limited to cars that have the yellow Israeli plates. (Green or white Palestinian plates are not permitted.) Often, on both sides of these highways there is yet another security wall – even though the Israeli roads often pass directly through Palestinian territory. If there is an Israeli community on one side, the wall protecting it often sports an attractive brick design reminiscent of the sound barriers used in American suburbs to keep out the noise adjacent highways. But for Palestinian areas – it’s the same old monolithic wall crested with razor wire keeping people in. These are straight fast roads that do not weave about over ridges and down into valleys – like the one this writer customarily took at night after working in Bethlehem to return to Abu Dis. In my case, in a car with Palestinian plates, the driver had to take the harrowing one lane road down the cliffs into the "Valley of Fire." No, that is not something drawn from the Old Testament, it received that name centuries ago to warn off travelers not to take that tortuous route, but to use the more sensible one. That is, the route, which today only Israeli drivers and tourist vehicles use through the West Bank.
The problem of Hebron
In the ancient city of Hebron, or Al Khalif in Arabic, the final resting place of the patriarchs and matriarchs of the lineage of Abraham—figures who are therefore great prophets of the both the Jewish and Islamic traditions—the settlement movement for many years has taken on a more aggressive approach. Though Hebron has been a primarily Palestinian town from times even before the advent of Islam in the region, a group of 500 settlers following one zealous “pioneer” leader organized an effort to populate the town with Israelis. They moved in to the heart of the ancient city. Some of it was done through legal purchases, much by seizures and occupation of property without redress to the owners.
Many of these settlers live above the old and large central market of the town. One of the former main streets of the market has been almost completely walled off to protect a stack of Israeli abodes, creating one of those dead streets with shuttered buildings. It goes on that way for a quarter kilometer, beneath the upper floor apartments of the newcomers—many of whom are dual-citizenship Americans.
The central street of the market also lies below these buildings. It became the habit of settlers living above the souk to throw household garbage, debris and even human waste down into the market streets, so that these days there is a net of metal mesh permanently in place above the market to protect the people there. The netting always holds lots of junk and rubbish which lies in its wire hammock over people’s heads during market hours. Some settlers on occasion have gone on excursions to break the windows of the Palestinian homes in the narrow streets around the center, and on several occasions beat large numbers of people, even to death. These settler communities are apparently unregulated by the IDF units occupying parts of the town. Some years ago a group seized control of a multi-floored Palestinian school near the Ibrahmi Mosque, and turned it to uses for the settler community.
This is not to say that all settlers are engaging in this sort of violent intimidation and violation of the rights of locals, nor are all of them unrepentant bigots. However there is no doubt that settlement activity has been stoking anger and polarization on both sides, and this is only the most visible example. Netanyahu says that settlements are not the issue – but wait, there is more.
The spread of settlements inside the "future" Palestine
The road to Hebron-Al Khalif from Bethlehem (if you take a car with a yellow plate) opens up into broad vistas of sandy mountains, flat-top mesas, and in the area of the ancient fortified hill built by Herod during Roman times, one will get a glimpse of another “gleaming city on a hill” a massively developed settlement. This is not the most worrisome element. Thereafter one sees small thriving gated communities with bursts of greenery around them in the desert. Then another, and yet another. These turn out to be part of the network of many dozens of small established Israeli settlements throughout the West Bank. In fact, they are everywhere. If the Israeli government often points to its traumatizing forced withdrawal of settlers in a small area from Gaza as their greatest act of good faith (one which brought them only bad results, they complain) is it even possible to imagine the IDF one day surging throughout the Palestinian territories to the great and small settlements everywhere, to forcibly withdraw people from these well-fashioned homes and their civic infrastructure (with twenty four hour security provided by Israeli and, indirectly, American taxpayers). Not likely. Once again we must ponder Mr. Netanyahu’s assertion. Can it be true that settlements are not the issue?
The siphoning of West Bank water
In Bethlehem and Beit Jala this summer, the hottest of all summers in memory, it became doubly difficult to work and do business when the water disappeared. In the parts of Bethlehem struck by the water “outage” young people began to throw rocks at municipal building in futile protest. The oldest washing well in Beit Jala, at the Orthodox Club, went dry. Taps produced nothing. Bathrooms began to stink. At first a visitor might think this is some new tragic twist of fate or nature, befalling the unfortunate Palestinians. Hardly.
The West Bank aquifer, lying below the desert and arid lands there, is large. But 80% of the water drawn from it goes to Israel, 20% to the Palestine side. Water pressure is very low throughout the territories. This affects water taps, showers and toilets in the best of times. There has been much research recently indicating the uncontrolled use of water in Israel will result in a drying up of the supply. After one of the Israeli government's all too typical acts of anti-diplomacy—the helicopter and marine raid on Turkish aid ships in the flotilla to Gaza a year ago, including the killing of a dozen Turkish volunteers (some of whom, yes, were wielding metal rods against the IDF's automatic weapons during the pre-dawn assault be)—Israel lost Turkey as its only powerful ally in the Middle East aside fromthe Egypt of Mubarak, who is now gone. This may have other ramifications. Turkey in the future was expected to become an important source of water for Israel. For the moment, the Palestinians are experiencing what Israelis themselves may one day experience, if water is not more mindfully regulated and a peace settlement does not bring about procurement of other regional water sources.
Non-violence and violence
Is there a solution to this mayhem? As of this writing the Palestinian territories are one of the quietest places in the Middle East. That is indeed an exceptional circumstance in the area, and provides no cause for comfort for Israelis. The results of the Arab spring are taking root all around them. At the same time, a lot of Palestinians will admit openly that the second intifada—or the “Al Aqsa intifada”—brought them the opposite results of the first intifada, in which military weapons were not employed (though many rocks were). The second intifada, most Palestinians agree, brought down their international prestige. They lost the moral high ground, and most people I have spoken with want to regain that.
Like the Egyptians and Tunisians, there are many people studying non-violence. They are trying the methods out. The IDF will still sometimes still shoot to kill, as it did on unarmed demonstrators walking toward the Lebanese border in a civil disobedience action this year. Hamas has not made pledges to stop targeting civilians in the south, and neither has the Israeli army. It is still raiding Palestinian neighborhoods, regularly, and at regular intervals the innocent get killed in the process.
One of my colleagues in Ramallah had to hang off quickly during a phone conversation, as she had to "attend to" some problem. She sent an email to apologize. One of her students had just been shot and killed in a refugee camp by Israeli security forces when they conducted a night time raid to apprehend a suspect—another person entirely. Families who have had a member shot and killed by the IDF cannot expect to get redress or even an investigation leading to a remedy. The things most Palestinans have to attend to during their normal day-to-day lives, even when there is no open conflict, are much different than those of most Americans, or most Israelis for that matter.
The occupation authorities do allow all opinions to be expressed and published in the territories: for after the intifadas they no longer try to control the towns, but only surround them. That said, they also reserve the right to arrest and sequester, after the fact, without warrant, anyone whose opinions make them suspect. The term for this is “administrative detention,” and it allows for no courts of law, nor even approval from a judge. Thousands of young people who have served time in Israeli jails, in special areas for political prisoners, having been arrested without notification to their families. Some may well be guilty of crimes—but it is hard to say when there is no need for trials. Most are only suspects, and have done nothing more than associate with the wrong people, including university clubs. This has worked out badly for Israel – the prisons are breeding grounds for underground networks and much more open defiance. This modus operandi is increasingly giving Israel a bad reputation in the West, and among a large circle of Jews in the US.
Another story illustrates this phenomenon. In Jenin in the north of the Palestinian areas last June, the Israeli director and actor Juliano Mer Khamesh, much loved by Israeli artists and the Palesinians of the Jenin refugee camp, was shot to death in his car outside his Freedom Theatre by unknown assailants. Neither Israeli nor the Palestinian authorities have “managed” to find any suspects, though the theatre’s fans at first believed it might have been a fundamentalist cell opposed to their innovative theatre. The Freedom Theatre then continued to receive threats – from unidentified sources, though terrorist groups tend to identify themselves. They moved their rehearsals to Ramallah and became a touring company. However, in early August this year two members of the production team were seized from their cars by Israel’s security forces, and in the usual fashion were blindfolded and taken to an unknown place. Two weeks later, a young actor from Freedom Theatre who had just made a name for himself in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot was taken from their touring vehicle by the IDF, in the same manner. If these artists were engaged in something illegal, there are many people who would have liked to know what--especially artists and intellectuals both in Israel and Palestine. There were no statements to the press, as usual. According to the law – or lack of law in an occupation – Israeli security operatives did not feel they had to tell anybody. The theatre company put out a sad press release, trying to be as polite and unprovocative as they could. The final line read, “Please, we want our clown back.”
This is the manner in which the occupation authorities continue to fumble along with a high-handed use of the powerful army and security force. The result, in the case just cited, is that there are more than a few people—both Jews and Arabs—who look back on Juliano Mer Khamesh’s murder and now doubt that it really was Islamic extremists who were behind it. It looks like the Israeli authorities are on a campaign against this small and courageous theatre company. Like the wall, like the support of settlements, like the lethal military attack on unarmed aid flotilla, like the recent killing of five Egyptian security personnel while chasing a handful of terrorists at the Sinai border—the Israeli government continues to shoot Israel in the foot over and over again. They have become their own negative publicists– and have isolated the country in a calamitous way. Now even for many who believe the Jewish people should have a homeland and a state, the issue is how to save the Israeli state from itself.
Advocates of nonviolent resistance in recent decades are not really respected more by Israeli authorities – as philosopher and Al Quds University President Sari Nusseibeh has described in his unique historical memoir Once Upon a Country. In fact, he argues that, perversely, the security apparatus has had a habit over the last couple of decades of coming down harder on them, as if more violent people and groups don’t disturb the status quo as much. The violent ones are a clear perceived enemy to the Israeli people, and justify “Fortress Israel” policies which they want to preserve. Nusseibeh traces the origins of Hamas in the 80s to the Israel’s facilitation of funding to Hamas leader Sheikh Yassin’s charitable foundations in order to create an organization that would be in continuous conflict with the PLO.
For the first four years Yassin engaged in almost actions in opposition to Israel, in fact. Scholar Rashid Khalidi in his history of the conflict from its earliest origins, The Iron Cage, points out that Yassin offered a traditional Islamic truce with Israel for one hundred years at this time—when the ancient tradition in fact is always to offer ten. After Yassin and Hamas turned their guns on Israel as well as the PLO, Israel took out the quadriplegic Yassin on a Gaza street with a heat seeking missile, killing members of a couple random families at the same time as collateral damage.
Dignity before statehood?
Without positive action to engage Israel and move things forward, Palestinians had, until Abbas’s recent appeal to the UN, found themselves either in despair—accepting the idea of a long term but morbid end to their community – or they have become exasperated as Palestinian leaders have found no leverage against the asymmetrical advantage of the Israeli government, which itself clings to a rigid ideology of territorial advance. Thus Abbas’s recent move at the UN is has the approval of 85% of the population. (In Gaza it was illegal to follow the events on television, as like the Israel government, Hamas too, for now, has a stake in maintaining the status quo.) Quite a number of Palestinians see it as the first imaginative act of non-violent action. Others who disagreed with Abbas, do so in the name of memory, dreaming of the powerful but unviable idea of “return” for all the dispossessed families of 1948.
Not one state, not two states: protecting the rights off all
Taking into account the dismal facts on the ground for both Israelis and Palestinians, it is possible to envision something that might in fact take the best features of the so far unsuccessful “two state solution” and the so-called one state solution—the latter of which is too frightening for a majority of Israelis despite the small number of Israeli writers and politicians who have raised the idea. As President Peres has pointed out, however, if the two state solution is abandoned and Israel must simply rule the West Bank denying millions of people civil rights, that will be a one state solution.
In his new book, What is a Palestinian State Worth? Sari Nusseibeh, who has been an advocate in recent decades of the two state solution, outlines the consequences. It will not be long before the next struggle will be a civil rights movement as Palestinians demand their rights under the Israeli state. In addition, this will mean that up to 45% of the population ruled by Israel will be Palestinian, the group with the higher birth rate.
Palestinians and Jews are already living in each other’s designated homelands. Accepting our facts on the ground, it is not impossible to envision the evolution of a new versions of the old options (the one state and two state solutions.) Nusseibeh has tossed out some new ideas such as a "federation" or "confederation" as possible outcomes. Perhaps a “dual citizenship option” might be proposed for the Palestinians families already living in Israel, and the Israeli families already living in settlements in Palestine.
Let us suppose that Palestinians comprising 20% of the population of Israel now were to be granted guarantees against discrimination and an end to “second class citizenship,” and with a dual citizenship rights to travel back and forth freely to and from a new Palestinian state -- with the right of return for the Palestinian diaspora transformed by negotiations into some form of compensation (and a review of special circumstances allowing some to return).
Suppose as well that Jewish settlers and other Jews who live in Palestine currently (there are a few sparse ancient communities who never left) were allowed to choose to leave with compensation, or to remain in a Palestinian state with a guarantee of their rights by that duly constituted state. They would have to abide by Palestinian-made laws, but with citizenship in both regions they would be free to come and go to Israel (as they are now).
In such a circumstance both groups might rule their own state, there would indeed be a Jewish state that would be viable -- without having to impose an apartheid system throughout the areas of its rule. Both groups would have members of their communities, with their rights guaranteed, living throughout the Holy Land -- even in the territory ruled by others. They are already doing it – but not in a productive way.
The option of offering dual citizenship to both Israelis in Palestine and Palestinians already living in Israel, in a confederation or some form of association, might create more security for each, and better protect their rights. The idea of compensation is one of fairness: both for Jewish settlers wanting to return to Israel if they are not comfortable with Palestinian self-government, and Palestinians not able to return to the lands of their families and origins: the descendants of the 700,000 refugees of 1948.
A Palestinian state with a protected Jewish minority, and a Jewish state with a protected Palestinian minority seems to be the future in any case, unless Israel's leaders want to try to rule it all. That, however, only brings us back to the simple one state solution which would no longer be one democratic state at that point. It’s a matter of how much blood and pain leaders are willing to tolerate among their peoples. Perhaps it is best that both the one-state and two-state solutions be reviewed for their flaws. If we agree with the premise that in some way there must be two countries, side by side, is it possible to go a bit beyond that somewhat simplistic idea, which has not worked thus far. The future, if there is to be one, might well be that of two states that are in many ways interlocked, allowed thereby to have their national aspirations, but with both groups being a presence throughout the Holy Land: with legal borders, rather than being walled off from one another.
A change is coming and is painfully overdue. The question is whether anyone will make a move to channel these simmering energies of frustration among Palestinians and fear among Israelis into something productive and realistic. The alternatives are, as so many are now saying in Israel and Palestine, unthinkable.
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Joe Martin is an author and Fellow in Arts and Peace at the Center for Peacebuilding and Development in Washington DC. In 2011 he has worked on theatre and peace projects in Jerusalem and the Palestinian territories.
SOURCES
Funk, Nathan C. and Abdul Aziz Said. Islam and Peacemaking in the Middle East. Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2009.
Khalidi, Rashid. The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood. Boston: Beacon Press, 2007.
Nusseibeh, Sari (with Anthony David). Once Upon a Country: A Palestinian Life. New York: Picador, 2007.
__________. What is a Palestinian State Worth? Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011.
