Once upon a country (2007)

A Palestinian political memoir by Sari Nusseibeh, a philosophy professor educated at Oxford and Harvard, descended from an old Jerusalem family, a former PLO representative and later president of Al-Quds University. His father had been a Jordanian minister and governor of Jerusalem, so the family story runs through 1948 and 1967 from the inside. Its particular value is the author's own path to firm support for two states, argued by someone who also writes candidly about expulsions and dispossession. Readers who have only met Palestinian politics through its hardest voices will find a different one here, shaped by years teaching at Birzeit University and working in the national movement.