This is not the first time Darwish’s poetry has caused a political uproar. In 2000, when reformist Israeli Education Minister Yossi Sarid attempted to introduce Darwish’s poetry into the high school curriculum, the government was threatened by a vote of no confidence.
Darwish, who died in 2008, grew up in what is now Israel. In 1965, when Darwish was 24, he became a sensation with “Identity Card,” a book that opened with the bold line: “Write it down! I am an Arab,” a refrain repeated throughout the poem. In this and many other works, he gave unprecedented voice to the lived experience of Palestinians, particularly those who live within Israel. In 1970, he voluntarily left Israel to study in the Soviet Union, and was barred from returning when he joined the Palestinian Liberation Organization. For a brief period starting in the late 1980s, he served on the PLO executive committee.
Darwish was what was called a “present absentee,” an expression used to describe Palestinians who fled or were driven from their land during the 1948 war but remained in what became Israel. They were given Israeli citizenship but never regained their land.
Darwish could be intemperate; he could rage at Israel, and claimed that seminal events like the 1948 massacre of Palestinians in Deir Yassin happened in every Palestinian village. Yet to associate Darwish with terrorism wholly misunderstands the man, his work and his politics. Darwish was not a man of violence. He was a humanizer, that rare spirit within a bitter conflict who insisted on taking the measure of the Other, one person at a time.
Consider this passage from “Memory for Forgetfulness — August, Beirut 1982,” in which Darwish gives an autobiographical account of the Israeli siege. Even as he was surrounded by Israeli tanks, he recalls his love affair with an Israeli woman some fifteen years earlier:
” ‘Take me to Australia,’ she said. And I realized the time had come for us to get away from discord and war …
But why am I remembering her in this hell, and at this hour of the afternoon? And in this air raid shelter of a bar?”
Darwish goes deeper into his memory:
” ‘It’s five in the morning my dear.’
‘And does the Arab get sleepy?’ she asked playfully. ‘As for me, I don’t want to sleep.’
I said, ‘Yes the Arab does get sleepy, and tries to sleep.’
She said, ‘Go ahead. I’ll guard your sleep …’
I asked, ‘Do the police know the address of this house?’
She answered, ‘I don’t think so. But the military police do. Do you hate Jews?’
I said, ‘I love you now.’
She said, ‘That is not a clear answer.’
I said, ‘And the question itself wasn’t clear. As if I was to ask, ‘Do you love Arabs?”
She said, ‘That is not a question.’
I asked, ‘And why is your question a question?’
She said, ‘Because we have a complex. We have more need of answers than you do?’
I said, ‘Are you crazy?’
She said, ‘A little. But you haven’t told me if you love Jews or hate them?’
I said, ‘I don’t know, and I don’t want to know. But I do know that I like the plays of Euripides and Shakespeare. I like fried fish, boiled potatoes, the music of Mozart, and the city of Haifa. I like grapes, intelligent conversation, autumn, and Picasso’s blue period. And I like wine and the ambiguity of mature poetry. As for Jews, they are not a question of love or hate.’
She said, ‘Are you crazy.’
I said, ‘A little.’ ”
What is most relevant here is not the purely autobiographical, that Darwish had a Jewish love. Darwish, a celebrated Arab writer and esteemed “resistance poet,” chose to write for his Palestinian readers a piece that declared: this is what it is to be human, to, in the midst of Israeli tanks, to be remembering being with the Israeli woman I once loved.
Or consider this exchange from a 2002 interview about his poetry:
Darwish: So I always insist that I write lyrical poetry, but with an aspect of the epic because there is a sense of voyage, a human voyage between cultures and peoples …
Q: You are referring, I assume, to the voyage of the Palestinian people.
Darwish: Yes, I speak about the voyage of the people in my society. It’s an extremely plural society. All cultures, all civilizations in history have come to Palestine, and I believe I have the right to this whole inheritance.”
Here he challenges the conventional division of self and other. When Darwish says that all civilizations in history have come to Palestine and “I have the right to this whole inheritance,” he is claiming as part of himself a Palestinian richness that includes the ancient Jewish presence. He is saying that being Palestinian means being partial inheritor of the Israelite experience, that Palestinian and Israeli are not opposite poles, there is ancient Israel that is a part of both of them.
Lest anyone doubt this interpretation, we must consider the most important of Darwish’s political writings, the Palestinian Declaration of Independence. This was the height of so-called “Palestinian unilateralism,” the Palestinian effort to bring their state into being. Darwish wrote the text in 1988 while he was a member of the PLO executive committee. It was the core document of Palestinian nationalism, and it opens with these words, “Palestine, the land of the three monotheistic faiths.”
Thus, from the very beginning, Palestine is defined in partial relation to Judaism, and implicitly the people of that faith. And in words that will echo Darwish’s claim to the “whole inheritance” of the history of Palestine, the Declaration too situates the Palestinian experience within the larger history of the territory:
“Nourished by an unfolding series of civilizations and cultures, inspired by a heritage rich in variety and kind, the Palestinian Arab people added to its stature by consolidating a union between itself and its patrimonial land.”
Here Darwish is not merely instructing Palestinians in how to think about the Other, but in how to think about the Self. He is saying, “It is from the Other, from the ‘series of civilizations’ that we have been ‘nourished’ and ‘inspired.’ ”
Today, when we hear that Palestinian refusal to recognize Israel as a Jewish state is the central reason the conflict continues, it is instructive to study the Declaration that Darwish wrote and Arafat proclaimed. Within its text, with full self-awareness that the Israeli Declaration of Independence grounded Israel’s international legitimacy in the historic United Nations Partition Resolution, the Palestinians also cited the Partition Resolution, thus linking the legitimacy of their state to that of Israel. But unlike the Israeli Declaration of Independence, Darwish explicitly states that the U.N. called for two states, “one Arab and one Jewish.” This was done unilaterally. With no negotiations and no Israeli quid pro quo. This unilateralism offered more progress toward ending the conflict than was achieved in 25 years of subsequent negotiations. Astonishingly, it was ignored by Israel when it occurred in 1988, and is even now largely unknown.
Today, when the prospects for peace seem so slim, rather than focusing on a defense minister who can’t distinguish Darwish from Hitler, we should think about the unknown programmer for Israel Army Radio who decided to include Darwish “as one of our own.” Like Darwish, he or she was laying claim to all of the inheritance of Palestine. In this there is grounds for hope.