The Anger, The Longing, The Hope

ONE OF the wisest pronouncements I have heard in my life was that of anEgyptian general, a few days after Anwar Sadat's historic visit to Jerusalem.

We were the first Israelis to come to Cairo, and one of the things we were verycurious about was: how did you manage to surprise us at the beginning of theOctober 1973 war?

The general answered: "Instead of reading the intelligence reports, youshould have read our poets."

I reflected on these words last Wednesday, at the funeral of Mahmoud Darwish.


DURING THE funeral ceremony in Ramallah he was referred to again and again as"the Palestinian National Poet".

But he was much more than that. He was the embodiment of the Palestiniandestiny. His personal fate coincided with the fate of his people. 

He was born in al-Birwa, a village on the Acre-Safad road. As early as 900 yearsago, a Persian traveler reported that he had visited this village and prostratedhimself on the graves of "Esau and Simeon, may they rest in peace". In1931, ten years before the birth of Mahmoud, the population of the villagenumbered 996, of whom 92 were Christians and the rest Sunni Muslims.

On June 11, 1948, the village was captured by the Jewish forces. Its 224 houseswere eradicated soon after the war, together with those of 650 other Palestinianvillages. Only some cactus plants and a few ruins still testify to their pastexistence. The Darwish family fled just before the arrival of the troops, taking7-year old Mahmoud with them.

Somehow, the family made their way back into what was by then Israeli territory.They were accorded the status of "present absentees" - a cunningIsraeli invention. It meant that they were legal residents of Israel, but theirlands were taken from them under a law that dispossessed every Arab who was notphysically present in his village when it was occupied. On their land thekibbutz Yasur (belonging to the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair movement) and thecooperative village Ahihud were set up.

Mahmoud's father settled in the next Arab village, Jadeidi, from where he couldview his land from afar. That's where Mahmoud grew up and where his family livesto this day.

During the first 15 years of the State of Israel, Arab citizens were subject toa "military regime" - a system of severe repression that controlledevery aspect of their lives, including all their movements. An Arab wasforbidden to leave his village without a special permit. Young Mahmoud Darwishviolated this order several times, and whenever he was caught he went to prison.When he started to write poems, he was accused of incitement and put in"administrative detention" without trial.

At that time he wrote one of his best known poems, "Identity Card", apoem expressing the anger of a youngster growing up under these humiliatingconditions. It opens with the thunderous words: "Record: I am anArab!"

It was during this period that I met him for the first time. He came to me withanother young village man with a strong national commitment, the poet RashidHussein. I remember a sentence of his: "The Germans killed six millionJews, and barely six years later you made peace with them. But with us, the Jewsrefuse to make peace." 

He joined the Communist party, then the only party where a nationalist Arabcould be active. He edited their newspapers. The party sent him to Moscow forstudies, but expelled him when he decided not to come back to Israel. Instead hejoined the PLO and went to Yasser Arafat's headquarters in Beirut.


IT WAS there that I met him again, in one of the most exciting episodes of mylife, when I crossed the lines in July 1982, at the height of the siege ofBeirut, and met with Arafat. The Palestinian leader insisted that MahmoudDarwish be present at this symbolic event, his first ever meeting with anIsraeli. He sent somebody to call him.

His description of the siege of Beirut is one of Darwish's most impressiveworks. These were the days when he became the national poet. He accompanied thePalestinian struggle, and at the sessions of the Palestinian National Council,the institution that united all parts of the Palestinian people, he electrifiedthe hall with readings of his stirring poems.

During those years he was very close to Arafat. While Arafat was the politicalleader of the Palestinian national movement, Darwish was its spiritual leader.It was he who wrote the Palestinian Declaration of Independence, which wasadopted by the 1988 session of the National Council on the initiative of Arafat.It is very similar to the Israeli Declaration of Independence, which Darwish hadlearned at school. 

He clearly understood its significance: by adopting this document thePalestinian parliament-in-exile accepted in practice the idea of establishing aPalestinian state side-by-side with Israel, in only a part of the homeland, asproposed by Arafat.

The alliance between the two broke down when the Oslo agreement was signed.Arafat saw it as "the best agreement in the worst situation". Darwishbelieved that Arafat had conceded too much. The national heart confronted thenational mind. (That historical debate has still not been concluded today, afterboth of them have died.)

Since then Darwish lived in Paris, Amman and Ramallah - the WanderingPalestinian, who has replaced the Wandering Jew.


HE DID not want to be the National Poet. He did not want to be a political poetat all, but a lyrical one, a poet of love. But whenever he turned in thisdirection, the long arm of Palestinian fate dragged him back. 

I am not qualified to judge his poems or to assess his greatness as a poet.Leading experts on the Arabic language are still bitterly quarreling amongthemselves about the meaning of his poems, their nuances and layers, images andallusions. He was a master of classical Arabic, and equally at home with Westernand Israeli poetry. Many believe that he was the greatest Arab poet, and one ofthe greatest poets of our time.

His poetry enabled him to do what no one had succeeded in doing by other means:to unite all the parts of the fractured and fragmented Palestinian people - inthe West Bank, the Gaza Strip, in Israel, in the refugee camps and throughoutthe Diaspora. He belonged to all of them. The refugees could identify with himbecause he was a refugee, Israel's Palestinian citizens could identify with himbecause he was one of them, and so could the inhabitants of the occupiedPalestinian territories, because he was a fighter against the occupation.

This week some people of the Palestinian Authority tried to exploit him fortheir struggle with Hamas. I don't think that he would have agreed. In spite ofthe fact that he was a totally secular Palestinian and very far from thereligious world of Hamas, he expressed the feelings of all Palestinians. Hispoems also resonate with the soul of a member of Hamas in Gaza.


HE WAS the poet of anger, of longing, of hope and of peace. These were thestrings of his violin.

Anger about the injustice done to the Palestinian people and every Palestinianindividual. Longing for "my mother's coffee", for his village's olivetree, for the land of his forefathers. Hope that the conflict would come to anend. Support for peace between the two peoples, based on justice and mutualrespect. In the documentary by the Israeli-French film-maker Simone Bitton, hepointed at the donkey as a symbol of the Palestinian people - a wise, patientanimal that manages to survive.

He understood the nature of the conflict better than most Israelis andPalestinians. He called it "a struggle between two memories". ThePalestinian historical memory clashes with the Jewish historical memory. Peacecan come about only when each side understands the memories of the other - theirmyths, their secret longings, their hopes and fears.

That is the meaning of the Egyptian general's saying: poetry expresses the mostprofound feelings of a people. And only the understanding of these feelings canopen the way for a real peace. A peace between politicians is not worth verymuch without a peace between the poets and the public they express. That's whyOslo failed, and why the present so-called negotiation for a "shelfagreement" is so worthless. It has no basis in the feelings of the twopeoples.

Eight years ago, then Minister of Education Yossi Sarid tried to include twopoems of Darwish in the Israeli school curriculum. This caused a furor, and thePrime Minister, Ehud Barak, decided that "the Israeli public is not readyfor this". This meant, in reality, that "the Israeli public is notready for peace." 

This may still be true. Real peace, peace between the peoples, peace between thechildren born this week, on the day of the funeral, in Tel Aviv and Ramallah,will only come about when Arab pupils learn the immortal poem of Chaim NachmanBialik "The Valley of Death", about the Kishinev pogrom, and whenIsraeli pupils learn the poems of Darwish about the Naqba. Yes, also the poemsof anger, including the line "Go away, and take your dead with you."

Without understanding and courageously facing the flaming anger about the Naqbaand its consequences, we shall not understand the roots of the conflict andshall not be able to solve it. And as another great Palestinian man of letters,Edward Said, said: without understanding the impact of the Holocaust upon theIsraeli soul, the Palestinians will not be able to deal with the Israelis.

The Poets are the marshals of the struggle between the memories, between themyths, between the traumas. We shall need them on the road to peace between thetwo peoples, between the two states, for building a common future.


I was not present at the state funeral arranged by the Palestinian Authority inthe Mukata, so orderly, so orchestrated. I was there, two hours later, when hisbody was buried on a beautiful hill, overlooking the surroundings.

I was deeply impressed by the public, which gathered under the blazing sunaround the wreath-covered grave and listened to the recorded voice of Mahmoudreading his poems. Those present, people of the elite and simple villagers,connected with the man in silence, in a very private communion. Despite thecrowding, they opened a way for us, the Israelis, who came to pay our respectsat the grave.

We bade our silent farewell to a great Palestinian, a great poet, a great humanbeing.