Nusseibeh was born in Damascus, Syria, to the politician Anwar Nusseibeh who was a distinguished statesman, prominent in Palestinian and (after 1948) Palestinian-Jordanian politics and diplomacy. His mother, Nuzha Al-Ghussein, daughter of Palestinian political leader Yaqub al-Ghusayn was born in Ramle,[8] into a family of wealthy landed aristocrats with land in Wadi Hnein (now the Israeli town of Nes Ziona),[9] His mother had left Palestine in 1948 to avoid the fighting, and his father lost a leg when wounded while participating in the 1947–48 Civil War in Mandatory Palestine.[10] They moved to Cairo some years later, where his father participated in the formation of the First Palestine Government in exile.[11] On returning to Jerusalem, he lived just a few hundred yards over the other side of No man's land from Amos Oz, and in reading the latter's memoir of his upbringing, was struck by the profound differences between their respective experiences as children in the same city.[12] Their family owned farmland in Karameh which he helped till by driving a tractor during summer vacations. It was to be the site of what in Palestinian memory became known as the bloodbath of their Palestinian Stalingrad.[13] During Israel's conquest of the West Bank in the Six-Day War, Israel troops sacked the family home in Jerusalem, looting it of all of their heirlooms, though the family car was later returned.[14] Some months later, the occupation authorities then expropriated the family's 200 acre country estate in the Jordan Valley.[15]