In the fall of 1967, Nusseibeh went to study philosophy at Christ Church, Oxford. There he became friends with Avishai Margalit, as well as Ahmad Walidi, the only other Palestinian undergraduate there at the time, and son of the distinguished scholar Walid Khalidi.[16][17] It was a period marked by student revolutionary upheavals and it was at this time that Ahmad introduced him to the intricacies of Palestinian political factions, parodied in Monty Python's The Life of Brian.[18] The summers he spent back in Jerusalem, where, in 1968 he began studying Hebrew did a stint of work at the HaZore'a kibbutz,[19] and, the following year, was on hand to help quench the flames caused by Australian Christian fundamentalist arsonist Michael Rohan when the latter tried to burn down the Al-Aqsa Mosque by setting alight Saladin's 1,000 year old Aleppo pulpit.[20]