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….
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 – in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, in Israel, in
the refugee camps and throughout the Diaspora. He belonged to all of
them. The refugees could identify with him because he was a refugee,
Israel's Palestinian citizens could identify with him because he was
one of them, and so could the inhabitants of the occupied Palestinian
territories, because he was a fighter against the occupation….
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.
