ONE of the wisest pronouncements I have heard in my life was that of an Egyptian 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 very curious about was: How did you manage to surprise us at the beginning of the October 1973 war? The general answered: “Instead of reading the intelligence reports, you should have read our poets.”
I reflected on these words last Wednesday, at the funeral of Mahmud 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 Palestinian destiny. His personal fate coincided with the fate of his people. He was born in Al-Birwa, a village on the Acre-Safad road. In 1931, 10 years before the birth of Mahmud, the population of the village numbered 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 houses were eradicated soon after the war, together with those of 650 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 Mahmud 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 cunning Israeli invention. It meant that they were legal residents of Israel, but their lands were taken from them under a law that dispossessed every Arab who was not physically present in his village when it was occupied. On their land the Kibbutz Yasur (belonging to the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair movement) and the cooperative village Ahihud were set up.
MAHMUD’S father settled in the next Arab village, Jadeidi, from where he could view his land from afar. That’s where Mahmud grew up and where his family lives to this day.
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 Mahmud 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!” It was during this period that I met him for the first time. He came to me with another young village man with a strong national commitment, the poet Rashid Hussein. I remember a sentence of his: “The Germans killed six million Jews, and barely six years later you made peace with them. But with us, the Jews refuse to make peace.”
He joined the Communist party, then the only party where a nationalist Arab could be active. He edited their newspapers. The party sent him to Moscow for studies, but expelled him when he decided not to come back to Israel. Instead he joined 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 my life, when I crossed the lines in July 1982, at the height of the siege of Beirut, and met with Arafat. The Palestinian leader insisted that Mahmud Darwish be present at this symbolic event, his first-ever meeting with an Israeli. He sent somebody to call him.
His description of the siege of Beirut is one of Darwish’s most impressive works. These were the days when he became the national poet. He accompanied the Palestinian struggle, and at the sessions of the Palestinian National Council, he electrified the hall with readings of his stirring poems. During those years he was very close to Arafat.
Darwish believed that Arafat had conceded too much. Since then Darwish lived in Paris, Amman and Ramallah — the Wandering Palestinian, who has replaced the Wandering Jew.
He did not want to be the national poet. He did not want to be a political poet at all, but a lyrical one, a poet of love. But whenever he turned in this direction, the long arm of Palestinian fate dragged him back. Many believe that he was the greatest Arab poet, and one of the greatest poets of our time. His poetry enabled him to unite all the parts of the fractured and fragmented Palestinian people — in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, in Israel, in the refugee camps and throughout the diaspora. He was the poet of anger, of longing, of hope and of peace. These were the strings of his violin. In the documentary by the Israeli-French filmmaker Simone Bitton, he pointed at the donkey as a symbol of the Palestinian people — a wise, patient animal that manages to survive. He understood the nature of the conflict better than most Israelis and Palestinians. 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 understands the memories of the other — their myths, their secret longings, their hopes and fears. That is the meaning of the Egyptian general’s saying: Poetry expresses the most profound feelings of a people. And only the understanding of these feelings can open the way for a real peace. Real peace, peace between the peoples, peace between the children 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 Nachman Bialik “The Valley of Death”, about the Kishinev pogrom, and when Israeli pupils learn the poems of Darwish about the Naqba.
And as another great Palestinian man of letters, Edward Said, said: Without understanding the impact of the Holocaust upon the Israeli soul, the Palestinians will not be able to deal with the Israelis. I was not present at the state funeral arranged by the Palestinian Authority in the Muqataa, so orderly, so orchestrated. I was there, two hours later, when his body was buried on a beautiful hill, overlooking the surroundings.
I was deeply impressed by the public, which gathered under the blazing sun around the wreath-covered grave and listened to the recorded voice of Mahmud reading his poems. Those present, people of the elite and simple villagers, connected with the man in silence, in a very private communion. We bade our silent farewell to a great Palestinian, a great poet, a great human being.
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