It is bad enough that diaspora Palestinians have had to endure unspeakable suffering for well over half-a-century as they waited for their right of return to be implemented, by force of reason or by force of arms — whichever came first. And it was bad enough that, as they waited, the frenzied packs descended on them at Tal Za’atar in 1976, at Sabra and Shatilla in 1982 and during that dreadful time in 1983 known as the "war of the camps," when, living under siege for months, they were reduced to eating stray animals off the streets.
But it is worse than bad when they were told, by an influential Palestinian, no less, that all that waiting and all that suffering had been in vain.A month ago, Sari Nusseibi, the Palestinian Authority’s "commissioner for Jerusalem affairs," proclaimed publicly that he would go along with the idea that Palestinian exiles, the entire four million of them, should forget about their right of return.
Though we rightly chastised the man for his remarks at the time, we still cut him a bit of slack. Nusseibi, after all, is a child of privilege. Not only did he not experience the hunger, the cold and the destitution that were the lot of Palestinians expelled from home and homeland in 1948, but he did not know that behind the blackened walls of that encapsulated world we call a "refugee camp," a whole generation of Palestinians grew up to whom the notion of Palestine had immediacy and concreteness. Its memory sustained them, its idiom defined them, and its reality was as real to them as the wince of their own muscles.
The reason they survived, the reason they survived as Palestinians with a straightness of back, as it were, knowing all along who they were and where they came from, was because they were convinced that history had implacable laws and that eventually they would reclaim their ancestral patrimony. It was their historical right. Justice will, one day, prevail.
That was what held them together. That was what enabled them to avert madness and death in exile.
So when the Palestinian Authority’s "commissioner for Jerusalem affairs" pronounced that right an unrealistic dream, a figment of the imagination of these Palestinians, he was getting out of line. We let those remarks slide then because Nusseibi, we felt, did not know any better. We hoped that he would not get out of line again, that is, he would not dismiss the political fate of an entire community whose experience he had not shared and on whose behalf no one had authorized him to speak.
But he did.
Truth be told, one should not put much stock in Nusseibi’s moniker as a "commissioner of Jerusalem affairs." It should be recognized for what it is, a mere self-conferred honorific post whose authority is dubious at best. The low esteem with which the Israeli government holds such PA-appointed figures was shown recently when, at Christmas time, this commissioner was prevented by Israeli police from even "commissioning" a reception in his home for foreign dignitaries, a demand with which he had to comply, albeit resentfully.
And I’ll tell you this: When I met the man in the West Bank several years ago, I discovered that, contrary to the image of him that the American media loved to project ("a leading moderate" and "an articulate spokesman"), he was not — let’s put it gently here — an overly sophisticated or worldly individual.
But, as I say, he did it again.
Last Saturday, Nusseibi, attending a "peace rally" that brought together 700 Palestinians and Israelis in Jerusalem, again voiced his sentiments about how Palestinian refugees should forget about their right of return. It’s not going to happen, he said, and, hey, get used to it.
This is no less than a scandalous display of both naivete and disloyalty, not to mention the case of an official exceeding the bounds of the authority vested in him by the PA. For it should be understood here that neither the PA, the governing body in the West Bank and Gaza, nor its designated "commissioners" for Jerusalem affairs are the voice of the refugee community. That community’s representatives are the Palestine Liberation Organization and its parliament in exile, the Palestine National Council, the official arbiters of all issues that concern Palestinians living outside the occupied territories.
The right of return, however remote at this point in history it may appear, is a central, life-giving force in the life of Palestinian exiles, having created possibilities of apprehension and a consensus of perceived values without which these Palestinians’ identity could not have been sustained. These exiles need offer no apology for believing in and clinging on to their concept of what they have come to call al-awda.
No outsiders, and certainly Nusseibi in this context is an absolute outsider, should insinuate themselves into this smoldering debate with unsolicited, not to mention provocative and inflammatory, observations.
Sure, we libertarians who value free speech will not hold it against Nusseibi for saying what’s on his mind — as a private citizen. As an official, however, he should be more thoughtful and circumspect. He should know better.
Whichever it is, I have a piece of advice for the "commissioner." I proffer it as a Palestinian from the camps, and as a Palestinian who daily seethes with rage at seeing Jews from Brooklyn, Moscow and Kiev, moving to Haifa, with some of them already living in the house that his grandparents had built with the sweat of their peasant foreheads. The advice is proffered with compliments of my red-neck friends in Arlington, Virginia, where I live, who never hesitate to dish it out to my face whenever I get out of line: If you want to be heard, speak up; if you want to be seen, stand up; if you want to be appreciated, shut up.
Sari Nusseibi, I’m afraid, was out of line. And my parents, both simple folk whose hearts were broken in exile, who had lost everything after the refugee exodus of 1948, and who died broken in back and spirit, would surely turn in their graves if they thought for one moment that children of privilege, whose foreheads do not sweat from toil, are now speaking on their behalf.
