The poetical is political Mahmoud Darwish -- 1941-2008
August 9, the Palestinian national poet Mahmoud Darwish died at the age of 67. His personal fate, coinciding with the most dramatic period in Palestinian history, predestined this writer of poetry to become the voice of the Palestinian fate.
On June 11, 1948, the village where Darwish was born -- al-Birwa, on the Acre-Safad road -- was captured by the forces of the newly formed IDF. Its 224 houses were totally razed down soon after the war, as were those in hundreds of other Palestinian
villages. Only some cactus plants and a few ruins still testify to their past existence.
The Darwish family fled just before the arrival of the troops, taking 7-year old Mahmoud with them, to escape the fighting in a neighboring village. Mahmoud Darwish grew up in the State of Israel as a member of an internal refugee family. They were
accorded the status of "present absentees" -- implying that though they were legal residents of Israel, their lands were taken from them under a law that dispossessed every Arab who was not physically present in his or her village when it was occupied. (On
the lands of their village a Kibbutz and a Moshav were set up.)
During the first 15 years of the State of Israel, Arab citizens were subject to a "military regime" -- a system of severe repression that controlled every aspect of their lives, including all their movements.
An Arab was forbidden to leave his village without a special permit. Young Mahmoud Darwish violated 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", a poem expressing the anger of a youngster growing up under these humiliating conditions. It opens with the thunderous words: "Record: I am an Arab!"
After having been editor of the Israeli Communist paper in Arabic, Darwish went to Moscow for studies. For an Arab student to enter an Israeli university was not an easy thing -- and Darwish was among the many who went to study abroad. In the 1970s he
decided not to come back to Israel. Instead he joined the PLO and went to Yasser Arafat's headquarters in Beirut.
While Arafat was the political leader of the Palestinian national movement, Darwish soon became its spiritual leader. It was he who wrote the Palestinian Declaration of Independence, which was adopted by the 1988 session of the National Council. Its
text is very similar to the Israeli Declaration of Independence, which Darwish had learned at school.
In the Oslo period, Darwish broke with Arafat. Since then he lived in Paris, Amman and Ramallah. More than anyone else he was the uniting factor between Palestinians, whether living under occupation, or in refugee camps scattered in the neighboring
countries, or living as Arab Israeli citizens, or as Palestinian intellectual overseas.
Some 20 Israelis of different groups attended the funeral in Ramallah. The Palestinians received them with marked friendliness; many shook hands with the Israelis, thanking them for being there. Uri Avnery, one of those who had known Darwish
personally, told to a group of people, among them journalists:
Darwish understood the nature of the conflict. He called it 'a struggle between two memories.' The Palestinian historical memory clashes with the Jewish historical memory. Peace can come about only when each side opens itself for understanding of the
other memories; when Arab pupils learn Bialik's poem 'The Valley of Death', about the [1903] Kishinev pogrom, and when Israeli pupils learn the poems of Darwish about the Naqba. Yes, also the poems of anger, including the line 'Go away, and take your dead
with you.' In order to achieve peace we have to face each other's anger, longing -- and hope.
