RAGE AND REASON.(PLO representative Sari Nusseibeh)

Sari Nusseibeh, the Palestine Liberation Organization's chief representative in Jerusalem, is perhaps the most moderate adviser in the councils of Yasir Arafat. (He is no doubt the only one to have worked on a kibbutz or to have written a graduate-school essay at Harvard on Wittgenstein and the role of jokes in philosophical discourse.) On many issues of moment within the Palestinian hierarchy--the morality of suicide bombings, the wisdom of Arafat's rejection of the Israeli offers at Camp David and at Taba, the refugees' demand for the "right of return" to historical Palestine--Nusseibeh disagrees, publicly and in all languages, with the hard men of the P.L.O. and Hamas, and even with Arafat (to the extent that Arafat reveals himself). To him, "martyr operations" are blatantly "immoral," the flat rejection of the Israeli proposals a "major missed opportunity," and the right of return a painful delusion best forgotten. It is not obvious why Arafat, who craves the support and supposed authenticity of the maximalists of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, appointed a mild man in corduroy and tweed to run the East Jerusalem portfolio. As a scholar and as the scion of a distinguished family, Nusseibeh wields about as much street credibility in the refugee camps of Nablus as a duke among the sansculottes. He has no muscle to offer Arafat, no immediate value, except, perhaps, as an ornament of democracy where democracy hardly exists. There is no argument to be made for Nusseibeh's power-- unless one happens to believe in the power of restraint and rational thought.

Nusseibeh is fifty-three years old. He was born in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem. His forebears came to the city in the seventh century, with Caliph Omar. For centuries, the Nusseibehs have been involved in public affairs. Sari's grandfather was a top city official under the pre-1948 British Mandate, and Sari's father, Anwar, was, at various points in his career, a Palestinian warrior, the Jordanian minister of defense, the governor of Jerusalem, and Amman's Ambassador to the Court of St. James's. (His mother, Nuzha, was from a wealthy family in Ramle, a town between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv; they became refugees in 1948, losing their house and all their belongings, and resettling in Cairo and Jerusalem.) The signs of a Nusseibeh dynasty are abundant. For the past five hundred years, the family has been charged with holding the keys to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the Old City, which many Christians believe is the site of the Crucifixion. When it was time for Sari to send his eldest son, Jamal, to school, he sent him to Eton. As a boy, Jamal had participated in the first intifada--an uprising that was outlined in a Fatah paper called "The Jerusalem Document." The principal author of "The Jerusalem Document" was Sari Nusseibeh.

Nusseibeh came to politics obliquely, without a sense of calling. In 1968, just a year after Israel won the Six-Day War and took possession of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem--as well as gaining dominion over more than a million Palestinians--he was far away, reading philosophy at Christ Church, the most socially radiant of the Oxford colleges. (After university, Sari married Lucy Austin, the daughter of J. L. Austin, an Oxford don who wrote "How to Do Things with Words" and helped found the "ordinary language" school. They have four children.) Nearly every morning at eleven, Sari walked to the St. Aldates Church coffee house to meet with a young Israeli scholar from Queen's College named Avishai Margalit. "We talked politics in a sort of analytic way," Margalit, who now teaches philosophy in Jerusalem, told me. "There was no preaching to the other. It was melancholic talk, with me knowing that Israel was triumphalist and intoxicated after the war and him knowing that the Palestinians were in disarray. Sari was a sort of aristocratic kid, beautifully groomed and with great charm." Anwar Nusseibeh, who had been badly wounded in the war of 1948, sensed in his son a decidedly more pacific and private temperament. Margalit recalled, "His father said to me, 'I wanted to keep Sari outside of it because he would end up in trouble.' " As it happened, trouble could not be avoided.

After completing a Ph.D. in medieval Islamic philosophy at Harvard, in 1978, Nusseibeh began teaching at Bir Zeit University, in the West Bank, a center for both higher learning and elementary politics. At first, Nusseibeh kept out of public life, concentrating instead on problems of logic and moral philosophy; but eventually he was dragooned into academic politics--union issues and the like--and then into Palestinian politics generally. Nusseibeh was not mild in his opinions about the occupation. He demanded that the Palestinians in the occupied territories either be annexed as equal citizens of Israel (with the knowledge that in such an arrangement Arabs would eventually become a majority, ending the Jewish state) or, the more likely prospect, be made citizens of a new country, adjacent to Israel, called Palestine. And yet in the early eighties Nusseibeh outraged many of his fellow faculty members, and members of Arafat's Fatah organization, by attending a conference at Harvard to meet with Israeli politicians. As Palestinian politics grew more radical, Nusseibeh insisted on a rhetoric of moderation and on contact with the putative enemy. During the first intifada, he was quoted in the International Herald Tribune as saying, "I think it is a kind of exorcism to throw a stone at Satan," but he threw no stones himself and pressed for a "generally nonviolent" uprising. To call for the elimination of Israel, he argued publicly, was irrational; the Jews, he said, had a deep historical connection to Jerusalem just as the Arabs did. This was not, in all circles, a popular argument. One morning, on the Bir Zeit campus, several masked members of a Jordan-based branch of Fatah jumped Nusseibeh. He was badly beaten and one of his arms was broken.

Nusseibeh summoned up that day with a wry smile. "I remember it ...