I heard a great story about Uri Avnery. A former member of the Irgun, the terrorist organization in the '40s, he became a member of the Knesset in the '60s and began speaking out against the occupation. Someone took him aside. "Uri, you could be prime minister some day, don't screw this up." But Avnery bombed out of mainstream political life, he sacrificed ambition for principle.
Here's Avnery on the death of Mahmoud Darwish, on Darwish's achievement in creating Palestinian consciousness, and on using Darwish's legacy to try and build two states. Notice he says what I say: recognition/acknowledgement precedes everything, precedes arguments over water rights and territory.
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….
Eight years ago, then Minister of Education Yossi Sarid tried to include two poems of Darwish in the Israeli school curriculum. This caused a furor, and the Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, decided that "the Israeli public is not ready for this". This meant, in reality, that "the Israeli public is not ready for peace."
This may still be true. 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 Nakba. Yes, also the poems of anger, including the line "Go away, and take your dead with you."
Without understanding and courageously facing the flaming anger about the Nakba and its consequences, we shall not understand the roots of the conflict and shall 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 the Israeli soul, the Palestinians will not be able to deal with the Israelis.The Poets are the marshals of the struggle between the memories, between the myths, between the traumas. We shall need them on the road to peace between the two peoples, between the two states, for building a common future.
Related posts:
- Mahmoud Darwish Could Have Been an Israeli Poet
- Mahmoud Darwish: ‘The invader fears his memories…’
- ‘Here Lie a Murderer and the Murdered, Sleeping in One Hole’ (Mahmoud Darwish, Remembered by Two Arabic-Speakers)
- Celebration of Darwish at Harvard
- Avnery: ‘billions of people have now seen us as a blood-dripping monster’
{ 22 comments }
Avnery is one Israeli I have a lot of respect for. Along with Gideon Levy, Avraham Burg, Neve Gordon, Amira Hass – truthtellers with the sort of courage to stand against the tide so notably lacking in the US, with CSun Uni just the most recent example.
'Notice he says what I say: recognition/acknowledgement precedes everything, precedes arguments over water rights and territory.'
When the reconciliation process (between the indigenous people and us whiteys) began here in Australia in the late 80s and early 90s, one of the first things on the table was a national apology, particularly to the Stolen Generations (those Aboriginal kids forcibly removed from their parents).
The conservatives were deadset against it of course – 'more useless symbolism from the liberal lefties, no substantive change or improvement, just the usual feelgood hot air' but the Aborigines themselves said they needed to hear the word 'sorry' first.
Recognition/acknowledgement must come first, then you can start to fix things up.
The greatest gift that a poet can give to the world is to inspire, to convey poetic consciousness.
Poetic consciousness itself ignores boundaries, though touches people deeply within boundaries.
Poets don't produce music, they live poetic lives. Their products are really by-products.
In bridging beyond borders, real poets touch even enemies with common references.
I haven't read much Darwish (except what's been published in obituary, and mostly his political works).
I'll bet that his work on the place would be a bridge. And, that would enable his political work to cross the bridge.
When ONLY the political is presented, his work ceases to be potentially a bridge, and makes the river a divider rather than a unifier.
"Recognition/acknowledgement must come first, then you can start to fix things up."
I hope this is true.
Do you think it is possible?
The aboriginal apology was 400 years after the fact though.
Avnery is one Israeli I have a lot of respect for.
Me too. And it has much to do with the huge time span of his experience, as suggested by Phil above. (Had I've been him, wouldn't I have been an Irgun fighter myself?)
He feels like a wise old men, with a timelessly young soul, always willing to learn. Something very rare compared with the life-is-a-fight power mad mainstream: the reigning win or loose tale.
hi. glad to see you have a google ads now. i hope it helps with ofsetting some of your costs etc. i have a sugestion. move the google column to the right side of the main text column. its is distracting in its currect location.
Mahmoud Darwish:
"He Embraces His Murderer":
translated by Munir Akash and Carolyn Forche
He embraces his murderer. May he win his heart: Do you feel angrier if I survive?
Brother….My brother! What did I do to make you destroy me?
Two birds fly overhead. Why don't you shoot upwards?
What do you say?
You grew tired of my embrace and my smell. Aren't you just as tired of the fear in me?
Then throw your gun in the river!
What do you say?
The enemy on the riverbank aims his machine gun at an embrace?
Shoot the enemy?
Thus we avoid the enemy's bullets and keep from falling into sin.
What do you say?
You'll kill me so the enemy can go home to our home and descend again into the law of the jungle?
What did you do with my mother's coffee, with your mother's coffee? What crime did I committ to make you destroy me? I will never cease to embrace you.
And I will never release you.
May the world rise to that spirit, rather than use his words as a weapon.
its is distracting in its currect location.
Wouldn't that mean it more effectively draws attention on that side? Needs getting used to, admittedly.
But would it be difficult to take links and archives to one side and the ads to the other?
This one wasn't even a bad selection: Mahmoud Darwish (1941 – 2008)
Maybe the Google alghoritms are better than the firms keeping up with its pace? Some links suggested offers that weren't there.
The similarity with Jesus is striking.
May the world rise to that spirit, rather than use his words as a weapon.
Amen.
CK: The similarity with Jesus is striking.
RW: May the world rise to that spirit, rather than use his words as a weapon.
CK: Amen.
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Will Peter Schaefer's new book, Jesus in the Talmud (Mar.), be controversial? "I'm afraid so," Schaefer told RBL. "That's why I'm nervous."
His editor at Princeton University Press, Brigitta van Rheinberg, laughed but agreed: "You think, oh, whoa, this is not going to go over well in certain circles."
Schaefer, who heads up Princeton's Judaic studies program, has collected and analyzed all the passages in the Talmud that apparently refer to the founder of Christianity, texts that were previously censored from Talmud editions for centuries. In his book he argues—against other scholars—that the scandalous passages indeed refer not to some other figure of ancient times but to the famous Jesus of Nazareth.
What exactly is so scandalous? How about Jesus punished in Hell for eternity by being made to sit in a cauldron of boiling excrement? That image appears in early manuscripts of the Babylonian Talmud, as does a brief account of Jesus' trial and execution—not by the Romans but by the Jewish high court, the Sanhedrin. The Jewish community, to the extent Jews were even aware of these excised texts, has been content to let them remain obscure and unknown.
Schaefer, a distinguished German-born Christian scholar who describes classical rabbinic literature as "my first love," has now definitively let the cat out of the bag. This undermines a widespread assumption that, of Judaism's and Christianity's respective sacred texts, only the Christian Gospels go out of their way to assail the rival faith, whereas Judaism's classical texts refrain from similar attacks.
It seems fair to say now, however, that the Talmud is every bit as offensive to Christians as the Gospels are to Jews.
http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6411679.html
——-
One day the Zionist religious literary canon will no doubt have Darwish and Avnery being punished in Hell for eternity by being made to sit in a cauldron of boiling excrement as well.
May the world rise AGAINST that spirit, and smite the evil ideology of Zionism and its New World Order practitioners to their rightful subordinate place.
"Do not think that I came to bring peace on the earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.” — Jesus of Nazareth
Amen.
Aw, I was thinking more along the lines of "turn the other cheek" as compared to "eye for eye, tooth for tooth"….
Duly noted Jesus had no family, kids, grandkids, etc and knew he was destined not to survive…
How about Uri Avnery compared to, say, Duddy Krawitz?
A man is not a man without any land…run Sammy, run
An occupied territory without people — for a people without land. Huh?
"I too, like Hitler, believe in the power of the blood idea", Chaim Nachman Bialik.
Comparing Darwish to Bialik is offensive for Bialik was a through and through murderous genocidal ethnic fundamentalist or ethnic Ashkenazi Nazi to be precise.
His poem "The City of Slaughter" is a lie that conceals a real history of Jewish radical violence and criminality.
Darwish was forced to confront murderous genocidal interlopers and thieves.
Bialik was a shill for rapaciousness and greed.
Petroleum: Driving Force in Zionism addresses a small part of the suppressed story of Eastern European Jews and the Zionist movement.
The kumbaya, why can’t we all get along meme always sounds good, but doesn’t account for a determined network of war-profiteering warmongers who are disproportionately attracted to Zionism, whether out of misplaced tribal loyalties or as a useful means of advancing their atheistic, materialist agenda–and often both. A strong affinity for Zionism may well be God’s means of sorting out good from evil; it certainly appears to be history’s.
Turn the other eye.
And in that spirit let me say I'm real tired of people maligning "Kumbaya" who haven't been near massed National Guardsmen with armed weapons, who haven't been spit at or on by racists flanking a vulnerable parade of huddled civil rights marchers, who haven't had beer bottles chucked at them by yobs because they were carrying peace signs.
The meme of disdainfully ridiculing "Kumbaya" was begun and popularized by swine, to serve their own bigoted and fascist purposes, because the people who sang it threatened the status quo, and the status quo was diseased and violent. And still is.
It's like the way "conspiracy theory" became a kind of wink-wink-nudge devaluation, only worse really because the heart of the song's presence is innocent, and the people who sang it compassionate.
Laughing at innocence and compassion is not a defensible act.
.
'Eight years ago, then Minister of Education Yossi Sarid tried to include two poems of Darwish in the Israeli school curriculum. This caused a furor, and the Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, decided that "the Israeli public is not ready for this". This meant, in reality, that "the Israeli public is not ready for peace." ' — Uri Avnery
An alternative interpretation is that "the Israeli public is not ready for cultural integration." Or more baldly stated, "Children of the Tribe of Israel don't have to study no n*gg*r poetry."
Yet another example of what Phil called the "Jewish color bar." America chose to cross this bridge forty years ago; insular Israel thought it could soldier on as the world's last apartheid society.
"Poets are the marshals of the struggle between the memories, between the myths, between the traumas." Beautifully stated!
Yes, if only the corrupt status quo left-liberals who have been running Washington for the last 20 years right along with the Neocons (all of them staunch Zionist supporters) had really internalized the desire for peace they publicly profess in order to get elected, maybe Kumbaya wouldn't be such an object of ridicule. But because, like the Dems who were elected in 2006 to get America out of Iraq but quickly folded at the first sign of right-wing resistance, so many of the Kumbaya-criers on the left are nothing more than doormats, peace poseurs, and dupes of the sweet talking Neolibs, Kumbaya has become a running joke, an object for ridicule and a code word for hypocrite.
Of course, the origins of Kumbaya are explicitly Christian, but that's another acknowledgement you'll never get out of the Left, either. It's too busy insisting that any Christians who stand up to organized Jewry are fascists. How convenient for the warmongers in organized Jewry’s midst. Just another example of how the left-liberal establishment and its useful idiots absorb oppositional thunder in order to insulate the oligarchy.
But hey, they look cool, and at least profess to want peace in a hipster kind of way, even if its all superficial and motivated by vanity.
Anyone serious about peace knows you’ve got to run straight over the Judeofascists and their N.W.O. partners in order to get there. Everything else is just talk, conceit and play-acting.
Ed, I think if you stopped fuming long enough you'd see we have mostly common ground, alignment and attitude.
As far as motive and all, what I'm saying is the cliche was originated to blunt the power of essentially nice, non-violent people. It became okay to ridicule them, sort of like back in the 80's or was it the 90's it suddenly became okay to ridicule Phil Collins. Became almost a necessity.
These things seem to arise spontaneously but I don't think so.
Once the song's become a marker for a certain kind of squishy liberal, anybody who's down on them has it as part of the arsenal. Which means macho activists on both sides of the whatever line.
But it was handed out by the pigs, and using it is a kind of complicitous act.
Otherwise we're pretty much on the same side.
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