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Once Upon a Country: A Palestinian Life | 
 enlarge | Author: Sari Nusseibeh
Creator: Anthony David
Publisher: Picador
Category: Book
List Price: $16.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  14 reviews
Sales Rank: 120376
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 584
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.3 x 1.1
ISBN: 0312427107
Dewey Decimal Number: 915
EAN: 9780312427108
ASIN: 0312427107
Publication Date: April 29, 2008
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Condition: New.
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Product Description
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
A teacher, a scholar, a philosopher, and an eyewitness to history, Sari Nusseibeh is one of our most urgent and articulate authorities on the conflict in the Middle East. From his time teaching side by side with Israelis at the Hebrew University through his appointment by Yasir Arafat to administer the Arab Jerusalem, he has held fast to the principles of freedom and equality for all, and his story dramatizes the consequences of war, partition, and terrorism as few other books have done. This autobiography brings rare depth and compassion to the story of his country.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 9 more reviews...
 Amazing author and wonderful tale February 13, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
The writer knows a country we know very little about. I loved learning about the people of Palestine and their culture from a non-politicized source.
 An acceptable book December 2, 2007
3 out of 8 found this review helpful
This book forms part of a larger group of first person memoirs by wealthy Palestinians (Out of Place: A Memoir andPalestine: A Personal History andThis Side of Peace: A Personal Account and Strangers in the House: Coming of Age in Occupied Palestine). Sari Nusseibeh was born in 1949 in Demascus, and was descended from one of the wealthiest and most aristocratic Jerusalemite family (along with the Hussaynis, Nasashibis, Khalidis and Dajanis). He studied at Oxford and received a Phd in Islamic Philosophy from Harvard and moved to the West Bank in 1978 to teach as Bir Zeit University. Later he would be President of Al Quds ('the Holy') University.
He has lived a life devoted to being anti-Israeli and at the same time a 'peace' activist. His memoir is one long diatribe about his reighteousness, his love of Islam("How could a civilized nation rooted in palestine for welel over a thousand yeats be so easily plucked out and chased away at gunpoint"-surely the Jews wondered the same of the Romans and the Byzantines of the Arabs).
He speaks frequently of his "love for Jersualem" a city he did not grow up in, nor was he born in. For Nusseibeh the 'peace' activist Abdel Khader Husseini, who was a terrorist and ambusher of civilian busses, is "the great Abdel Kader el-Husseini". Nusseibeh, despite his obsession with Islam, marries a western woman named Lucy who he then converts to Islam.
Nusseibeh's life is one of wealth and privilidge. While he was sipping tea as a young boy the Millions of Jewish refugees of the Holocaust and the other million tossed out of Islamic countries were living in cramped apartments in Israel. While he was as Harvard, Israelis were working in the fields and the factories. His was a classic life of a Bourgeoisie and like the children of White Russians who spoke of exotic 'mother Russia' and their desire to return, he too shares the yearning for a time gone by, for a new 1939, for a different outcome to the Second World War and the 1948 war. But his father, Anwar Nusseibeh, helped seal the fate of the Palestinians in 1948, Sari's account would have been more honest if, despite all the other factual errors, he at least noted the truth about his family's role.
Seth J. Frantzman
A moderate Palestinian's story August 23, 2007
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
If you want to understand the immense gulf between Israel and Palestine even among moderates, read this book.
Once Upon a Peace Maker! August 8, 2007
6 out of 9 found this review helpful
This is a truly important book for anyone wishing to understand fully the Arab / Palestinian - Israeli conflict. It sheds tremendous light on very important events, thus far not fully presented from the Palestinian side, especially that of the non rejectionist Palestinian camp. Sari Nusseibeh is a truly visionary man with tremendous courage and is a highly gifted activist and indeed very clever politician despite his own denials.
I have thoroughly enjoyed, and was often moved by, the first half of the book which dealt with the history of Nusseibeh's family and contained his even handed description of the events leading to 1948 and all the way through the 1967 war and his subsequent return to live in Palestine with his British wife. Nusseibeh's portrayal of the lives of the Palestinians between the wars of 1948 and 1967 was very helpful.
In the second half of the book Nusseibeh hammers in, over and over again, on the tacit unspoken alliance of the extremists on both sides and shows how Israel supported the creation of Hamas as a counter weight to the Fateh and PLO. He coherently and very persuasively presents the thought process that he went through to move from the one state solution to the two state solution and demonstrates very effectively the threats that prolonging the conflict would cause to it.
Nusseibeh was often right at the center of things or at least presents himself as such; we see him as a leading figure in standing up to the Israelis and to the Islamists, we see him as the key engine behind the first intefada, or uprising, and we see him winning the respect and approval of Yasir Arafat. In this, second, half, this book moves from being a truly exceptional account of the personal and family history more into an aggrandizing politician's memoir. This should not reduce nor detract from the tremendous personal sacrifice and commitment Nusseibeh made to his cause.
I have heard of the peace work of Dr. Nusseibeh and read some of his articles and interview for some years and while I admire him more than any other Palestinian public figure, this book troubled me in a number of ways. Unlike the other three Palestinian memoirs, originally written in English, that I have read (Gada Karami, Fay Kenfani & Edward Said) Nusseibeh sought to justify every action he has ever taken, to defend his various historic positions and to settle the scores with those of differing views. Most unlike the other three biographies, the book contained virtually no retrospective sole searching whatsoever and important topics such as his obvious passion and skill for politics vs. his academic eccentric persona were packaged for the purpose rather than thought through. Nusseibeh repeatedly simply presented himself as the reluctant professor, yet left us wondering about his very savvy organizational, political and survival skills. He seemed to know exactly how to deal with wily old Arafat, Hamas, the Israeli intelligence and the various factions of the PLO yet retain the freedom to advance his own agenda as well as build important relationships with Israelis.
The tremendous heights, in which, Nusseibeh holds his father, a former Governor of Jerusalem, ambassador and member of cabinet gives the feeling of an immature biography lacking in the distance to be objective. Indeed the first half of the book contains rework of the some of the father's own unpublished memoirs. Obvious points such as the father's commitment to an idealistic form of pan Arabism, albeit non Bathist and non Nasserist, and Nusseibeh own movement into being Palestinian nationalist, seeing Palestine being in natural alliance with Israel did not cause him to reflect further on the role and thinking of his father. A respectful critique and contrast of the views would have enhanced and not hindered the understanding of his father and need not be disloyal to his memory.
Most grating perhaps is the competitiveness displayed with other Palestinian peace advocates and the various attempts at discrediting them. This was particularly evident in describing the efforts that led to the Geneva Accord, which Nusseibeh referred as the plan by the name of the Israeli negotiator, thus marginalizing the Palestinian partner. At some point Nusseibeh clearly fell out with Hanan Ashrawi and Dr. Barghouti, both articulate advocates of the Palestinian cause and for peace and coexistence with Israel, he made his disdain of them very obvious and has not troubled himself to analyze their positions even in retrospect.
A genuine peacemaker and a pleasure and privilege to read July 24, 2007
4 out of 11 found this review helpful
In the Palestinian struggle against an apartheid, territorially hungry (manifest-Zioinst-destiny) Israel, there has been a shortage of local leaders of wisdom, character, and good fortune. This shortage has been partially circumstantial and partially managed by Israel who has been "sowing the wind" for decades by imprisoning moderates and secretly cultivating Islamist extremists. That Nusseibeh has managed to be spared assasination by Israel or others is fortunate for everyone. We may hope that just as modern Israel has risen from the ashes left in the ovens of the shoah, a viable modern Palestine will emerge from the ordeal of Israeli presecution and imprisonment, and Nusseibeh's voice might be revered as both prophetic and instrumental. Otherwise, we might well see a second shoah (of the sort for which, unfortunately, many end-times enthusiasts seem to hanker). We must hope, indeed we should pray, that Nusseibeh's humanitarian good will and good sense are not too late and that his voice, now seemingly crying in the wilderness, will not have been a waste of breath.
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