The considerations that follow arise from a discomfort.
A Frenchman of republican conviction, a secular Jew, close to the positions of the “peace camp” in Israel (or to what remains of it), a lifelong partisan of the two-state solution and, just as lifelong, allergic to the ideology of the national-religious right in Israel, I experience, on reading Mahmoud Darwish, a mixture of admiration and unease. The admiration is the one I owe to a work of the first magnitude. What remains is to elucidate the unease. Which entails rereading Darwish and reading oneself reading Darwish. An exercise in textual analysis that is also, ipso facto, a self-analysis. Which probably requires laying one’s Jewish guts on the table.
This unease cannot fail, first of all, to give rise to a kind of suspicion, which I have taken it upon myself to bring to bear preemptively against myself. Might it stem from the fact that this work comes to remind the friend of Israel that I am of disagreeable truths about Palestinian misfortune, that it casts a harsh light on the dark face of the Israeli adventure with which I declare myself in solidarity? More broadly still: might it not come to undermine the moral credit acquired by the Jews in Europe ever since the memory of the Extermination established itself there, or even the ethical respectability that Judaism itself has won?
None of this fully convinces me. On the Palestinian drama, Darwish teaches me nothing I do not already know. I take myself to be sufficiently aware not to lapse into the least naïveté: the “purity of arms,” “the most moral army in the world,” not to mention “a land without a people for a people without a land” — none of that for me… My attachment to Israel is not blind: to love a country, just like loving a person, is not to believe it innocent; it is to rejoice in its existence. Darwish makes nothing of this love waver in me. As for the worry of seeing some moral authority chipped at… I have never thought that the status of victim was a guarantee of morality, nor that Judaism was reducible to an ethics, still less that this ethics was reducible to an altruism. To presume, consequently, that my unease might be imputable to some offended Jewish susceptibility seems to me more than hazardous: insulting.
But that the discomfort I feel has to do with my Jewishness, that it brings into play an aspect — if not neurotic, at least neuralgic — of the Jew’s relation to otherness, of that there is no doubt. It stems from the fact that the reader of Darwish that I am does not feel truly welcome in this work, that I move within it like a stowaway, a fare-dodger. Other images sometimes come to me: now that of the infiltrator who listens at doors, now that of the hostage. A hostage who can sometimes, owing to the poetic talent that has enraptured him, feel himself stalked by Stockholm syndrome, but who unfailingly ends by pulling himself together. This openness to otherness I am ordinarily willing to push as far as possible: since I can be Catholic with Claudel, Protestant with Green, atheist with Sartre, a Communard with Vallès, a monarchist with Chateaubriand, I can well be Palestinian with Darwish — but why not all the way? Where, then, is the stopping point? Is he not, on the contrary, the ideal guide?
There, assuredly, lies the crux of the problem. Darwish is not just any “other.” He is the Palestinian other. Within the framework of an issue of a review whose theme is “the Jew and the Other,” the Palestinian question is a test of truth, an ordeal. It cannot be reduced to the question of the stranger or of the other man. It intersects the question of the enemy, of war; it engages a dispute that resembles no other.
Let us state the problem.
The question of the Palestinian “Other” is crucial for any modern Jewish conscience: to puff oneself up at every turn with an ethics of otherness, with a “humanism of the other man,” while shirking the chronic challenge that the condition imposed on the Palestinians constitutes for the State of Israel and for the Jewish world, would be a fraud.
But can one ignore that the Palestinian identity forged itself and gave itself a name only in the very negation of Israel’s existence — Israel having become, for a majority of Jews in the world, beyond their political differences, a cardinal element of their own lives? An originary dispute of two peoples, each forever suspected of injuring the other in the fullness of its identity. In other words, the relation grows complicated in that my relation to Palestinian otherness remains conditioned by the idea I form (or by what I know) of the Palestinian’s representation of Jewish otherness. Darwish’s political poetry is, in this sense, a touchstone: the discomfort it provokes comes to instruct me about my own limits, makes it possible to determine where the frontier lies.
Palestine Without Metaphor: The Unresolved Dispute
“In response to those who make of him the poet of the Palestinian cause, Darwish repeats […] how much the political dimension is meant to be ‘discreet, implicit, unproclaimed’ in his poetry. […] If, then, Mahmoud Darwish is a Palestinian poet, it is at once because he lends his people a voice, but also because Palestine tends to become itself a metaphor for the human condition.”[^1]
In his presentation of the poet, Jean-Michel Maulpoix alludes to the title of a book of interviews with Darwish: La Palestine comme métaphore (Palestine as Metaphor). Darwish was able to raise his people’s experience to the universal, so that the situation of the Palestinian exile enters into dialogue with all the other experiences of exile and dispossession. In this sense, Darwish is the brother in poetry of Ungaretti, of Seferis, of Jabès. This poetic greatness must be recalled.
But it would be to do the poet an injustice to confuse the universal resonance attained by his finest achievements with a depoliticization, and even a denationalization. To be sure, Darwish is not only a national poet; he reared up against all regimentation, he wanted to be also and above all a servant of poetry, and more often than not a great poet of love. But he is also that national poet; he is also and nonetheless a political poet. Palestine is not only a metaphor, and even when it becomes one, this metaphor draws its evocative power only from its mooring to a lived experience, to a people and to a land that could not be more real. He never ceased writing militant poems[^2] — even if, by disowning them or removing them from his collections, he sometimes set about minimizing their reach — and, even in his most remarkable pieces, the Palestinian political referent never lets itself be forgotten, provided one consents to identify it in the spellbinding folds and subtle detours of a figurative or oblique language.
The literary approach is not made to deconstruct or relativize the text it comments upon, nor to judge its cause, but to illuminate it. Can one reproach a poet for being (or for wanting to be) the voice of his people? Not at all. Would he thereby become less universal? Assuredly not, unless one holds a thoroughly disembodied view of the universal.
There must exist something like a poetic immunity — on the model of diplomatic immunity. It must be taken for what it is: a reading pact, a regime of interpretation. To read and comment on a poem is to accept entering its windings, taking its paths, at the risk of losing oneself a little. What is relatively easy when it is a matter of poets of the past and of old conflicts (who would trouble to subject the political poems of Agrippa d’Aubigné or Victor Hugo to a political arbitration?) becomes more complicated when it is a matter of contemporary wars, when the political content touches the reader’s sensitive points, his memory, his commitments. How far should one silence certain stirrings within oneself, bracket not so much one’s subjectivity (there is no interesting reading that is not an interested one) as one’s predilections and aversions, one’s affinities and antipathies? How far should one accept reading against oneself? To what point should one welcome the otherness of a writer, and feel welcomed within it?
To read a communist poet when one’s memory or one’s flesh bears the wounds of Stalinism, to read a Zionist poet when one is an Arab, to read a Palestinian poet when one is a Zionist: nothing goes without saying, but the experience is worth undertaking, and one should even turn this discomfort to account. To read a poet of the opposing camp does not imply that one reads less well than a supposedly more neutral reader — and besides, it is hard to see who could claim to be neutral in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is perhaps to see something else, or to see otherwise.
The reading of Darwish, it must be admitted, is not stingy with these subjectively tangled situations. As a limiting case, Darwish’s poems on the deaths of Palestinian children expose one to the risks of a criticism that would amount to a macabre comparative accounting, to the sterile confrontation of two martyrologies: a poem on “five little girls” — Palestinian, fallen under Israeli bullets — rather than on the twenty-two schoolchildren of Ma’alot? On Mohammed al-Durrah, rather than on the newborn shot dead by a Palestinian sniper, or the little girl whose head Samir Kuntar smashed against a rock? And so each, in this trench warfare, thinks only of his own dead, dresses only his own wounds. Poetry, it will be said, makes it possible precisely to escape these tribal contractions and to rise above the fray. Up to a certain point only. For Darwish — a militant of the PLO, a companion of Arafat and of George Habash, laureate of the “Lenin Peace Prize” in 1982 — is in the fray, not above it; he is one of those who, in his camp, pull the struggle upward, but it remains a struggle; he means to address everyone, even the Israelis, but he addresses his own first. The poet evokes his dead. That is his right, perhaps his duty; it is fair game, as the saying goes, but it remains of war.
Darwish’s political poetry is elaborated against the background of a primary interpretation of the situation, of the event, of the historical condition. That it does not confine itself to these political circumstances, that it never limits itself to them, does not mean that it does not find in them its originary site and that it does not remain there with an indefectible constancy.
This originary political site can be read in what was, as early as 1964, a kind of birth certificate of the poet, which at once won him the flattering but cumbersome status of spokesman for the Arab protest — not yet called “Palestinian”[^3]:
“Record! / I am an Arab / You have stolen the vineyards of my forefathers / And the land I used to till / I and all my children together: You have left us nothing but / These rocks / For the survival of my grandchildren / But your government is going to seize them too / … so they say! / SO / Record! / At the head of the first page / That I bear no hatred for men / That I assail no one, but that / If I am hungry / I eat the flesh of my Usurper / Beware! Beware! Beware! Of my fury!”
This poem-tract — barely a poem, by its own author’s admission — holds in nuce the essence of a vision that would remain, on the whole, unchanged[^4]. It rests on the postulate that the Arab land was stolen by usurpers. This monumental injustice, a collective trauma awaiting verbalization, finds its expression in this cry; it is accompanied by a demand for justice that, unsatisfied, turns into impotent rage, into cannibal violence, into a murderous drive. Hence the percussive force of the poem, its mobilizing power. What Darwish perceived as an aesthetic insufficiency stemmed perhaps from the fact that, having sprung too directly from a rage that the poetic labor had not had time to rework and transmute, the violence of this “Identity Card” exhibited, almost obscenely, the fundamental parameters of the originary resentment.
Resentment. There is a subject and a word that seem absent from the criticism. As if they risked staining the poet’s honor. Yet one would have to be naïve to imagine that great literature is necessarily a stranger to the sad passions. One cannot at once invoke “Arab humiliation” at every turn and wish that, through some mysterious alchemy, the poetry of the great Palestinian writer had been spared by resentment. It seems, on the contrary, altogether flagrant, to anyone who reads the two great emblematic authors of the Palestinian cause, Edward Said and Mahmoud Darwish, that the immense and meritorious effort that was theirs will have been to elaborate a vision of the world freed from it — an immense effort, but never completely brought to fruition. And the name of Israel was, for the one as for the other, if not the sole, at least the gnawing object of their resentment.
Deceptive Otherness and Constrained Hospitality
Even carefully expurgated of its most overtly militant poems, the anthology La Terre nous est étroite (The Earth Is Too Narrow for Us) shows the remarkable permanence of these fundamentals, of this horizon of political interpretation, of this stubborn refusal to grant the Israeli fact the least legitimacy of right. The rich poetic palette of Darwish’s work inflects these parameters only imperceptibly.
Thus with that moving figure of the Jewish lover who runs through the collection Tamar[^5] — Rita or Shulamit in the poems, in real life — she who, braving the family prohibitions (“I abandoned my mother in the psalms, cursing the world and your people”[^6]), believed she could keep her love far from the clash of arms (“And war is not my trade, and I am myself.”)… After the Six-Day War, Rita does not have the strength to join her lover, to “cross the river,” the Rubicon of identities, the Jordan of exile. But for Darwish, Palestinians and Israelis are not the Capulets and the Montagues of an absurd drama: no parity here between a people of victims and a country whose flag is a “meadow of bloodied lips.”[^7] The truth is that the young woman cannot bear the window of darkness that her Arab lover has opened for her onto his “murderous homeland”: “They became lovers. / But the windows he opened / At the end of the night… were terrifying […] / Words that ensnared you, / Words that, if you adhered to them, / Turned you away from cherished myths, / Tore you apart with shame.” And the beautiful Jewess finds her salvation only through her return — defeat of love, flight from truth — into the Israeli bosom: “Then came Shimon who protected her from her old love / And from the renunciation of her own…”
Contrary to appearances, the two poems that venture to stage Israeli soldiers with a human face — a gesture whose boldness in the Arab context must be underscored — in no way modify this ideological given. The first marked a milestone in the history of Darwish’s poetry: “A Soldier Who Dreamed of White Lilies” reports the encounter and dialogue with an Israeli serviceman in the aftermath of the Six-Day War (a legible but, as so often, implicit backdrop). A sketch of a normalization with the Zionist entity? Not at all. The soldier who “dreamed of white lilies / Of an olive branch”[^8] is the man who feels himself “bound to this land only by an editorial… an inflamed speech,” the one who has not breathed in “the grass, the roots, and the branches” of a country that can never be a fleshly homeland, at most one whose love is inculcated by “the way of a rifle,” by “festivals returned from ancient vestiges, the silence of an antique statue, of indeterminate era and origin” — in other words, historical fables. The pacifist soldier will have found himself, against his will, transformed into a “machine spitting red fire,” forced to describe the corpse of one of his innocent victims to his Arab friend, abhorring this country where one savors an “instant of mad victory… fascist.” Desertion and exile remain the only response: a rendezvous with “Mahmoud” in “a distant city”… A false dialogue, then, which is in fact the poet’s conversation with an Israeli double of himself, a mirror of his political detestations: the presentable Israeli will repudiate his criminal homeland in order to espouse the truth of the other[^9]. Peace is conceived in the precise terms that were those of Arafat’s great speech at the UN in 1974 (where one finds again the “olive branch”… coupled with a “rifle”), a speech to which Darwish lent rather more than a hand and which is an unnuanced indictment of the whole Jewish national project… The recognition at issue will thus be neither political nor historical: it touches only the intersubjective and human aspect. That was already a great deal, and perhaps the maximum one could expect of a militant-poet in a time of distress…
What of it when a promise of peace comes to light, in the wake of the Oslo Accords (toward which, moreover, Darwish, like Edward Said, had not stinted his criticisms)? Written in 1995, the narrative poem “When He Withdraws”[^10] evokes the neighborly relation between an Israeli soldier (called “the enemy”) and a Palestinian[^11]: the former occupies, with his daughter, the house that was the latter’s, in what seems to have become a garrison town; the latter lives, nearby, in a poor hovel where, regularly, the Jewish soldier invites himself for tea and to “rest from the rifle.” “Why does he visit the victim every evening?” — if not to relieve his conscience in what seems to be an unconsummated ritual of expiation, the sketch of an unformulated repentance, the symptom of an unavowable shame. The Israeli depicted declares that he makes war without hatred, quotes lines from Yeats by way of an apology (“I do not love those whom I defend / Just as I bear no adversity [sic][^12] toward those whom I fight”); he prizes the Arab “songs” and “proverbs,” but eludes the iniquity of a political domination beneath hollow moral injunctions and fatalistic maxims (“The war will last […] But let us be good. He asked us to be good here”), and covers his guilt in a “hurried cough,” the embarrassed cough of one who, in spite of himself, remains the armed occupier… This invader with a human face embodies, in Darwish’s eyes, the “beautiful soul” in the Hegelian sense — in this instance the leftist Israeli in his contradictions and his dilemmas… But what do these scruples weigh against the irrefragable reality of a despoliation?
An obvious political parable, the poem is a meditation on constrained hospitality in a situation of domination, the hospitality of the weak toward the strong, of the victim toward the oppressor: “When He Withdraws” is the Palestinian Silence of the Sea, and this Israeli soldier — humanist and enamored of the culture of the vanquished — resembles Vercors’s Francophile German officer. He is welcomed, but one keeps silent — even if it means addressing to him a mute discourse that he will decipher. In other circumstances, one might have fraternized and even sung with him: “Were it not for the revolver, the flute would have joined with the flute”; but it is war: an armistice is not peace so long as the iniquity endures. At a time when it was still permitted to hope for the advent of a Palestinian state in the territories of 1967, Darwish continues tirelessly to twist the poetic knife in the wound of 1948, in what remains in his eyes the primordial usurpation. This persistent asymmetry between the two parties forbids the peace of the brave, which, in any case, could not be the recognition of two competing legitimacies — which remains the ideological bedrock of the Israeli peace camp — but at best the victim’s forgiveness, provided the violence ceases and the crime is acknowledged. In the meantime, since the creation of Israel has disrupted all the rules of hospitality and turned the legitimate inhabitants into undesirable strangers, the Israeli host who invites himself unilaterally to tea will remain the hostis, “the enemy,” who unduly occupies the native’s house.
A bitter irony of history, according to Darwish: the oppressor was a victim, and continues to see himself as one: “Do not blame the victim. / We ask: Who is it? / He answers: A blood that the night never dries.” Thus, by an additional curse, the Palestinians would find themselves dispossessed even of the right to denounce their oppressor; “victims of the victims” (according to Edward Said’s famous phrase, which furnished the dominant interpretive schema of the conflict), they would be condemned to silence, condemned to inhabit precarious refuges, exiled on their own land, doomed to inhabit or to haunt, like specters, the conscience of the new occupants, when they have one: “Walk softly on our shadow in the fields of oats […] / Remember that the horse fears airplanes / And greet us over there, if you find the time.” Darwish’s poetry means to be an effort to recover a speech and, beyond it, an identity that would be struck with prohibition.
The Colonial Paradigm: Poetry and Ideology
No one would think of reducing Darwish’s poetry to its political engagement, but it would have taken the poet a consummate art of mental dissociation for the militant he remained all his life to build his work on the wounded memory of Palestine without his ideological paradigms affecting its substance. If his work transcends the political substrate and the empirical territory in which his speech originates, it is not without use to spot how this originary position continues to determine it. That is why the poems more or less disowned by their author are not mere remnants, but documents.
Thus with that occasional poem, written during the First Intifada, “Passers-by Among Passing Words,” which gave rise to a resounding scandal in the Israeli Landerneau. The words of the scandal?
“You who pass among the passing words / pile up your illusions in an abandoned pit, and leave / […] We have what does not please you here, leave / We have what is not yours: a homeland that bleeds, a people that bleeds […] You who pass among the passing words / it is time you left […] / that you died wherever you please, but do not die among us […] So, get out of our land / out of our terra firma, out of our sea / out of our wheat, our salt, our wound / out of everything, get out / out of the recollections of memory / O you who pass among the passing words.”
From the affair that ensued[^13], no one came out the greater. Neither those Israelis — starting with the Prime Minister, Yitzhak Shamir — who, with signal foolishness, thought it wise to wage a campaign against a poem, nor Darwish’s defenders (and Darwish himself), who, against the evidence, strove to make people believe that the poem was merely a protest against the colonization of the “occupied territories.” A distinction undetectable in a text that knowingly leaves open the question of the borders of a Palestine that, as we have seen, never stopped, for the poet, at the arbitrariness of an armistice line.
With elegance, and as was his wont, Darwish finally disavowed this “poem-banner” for strictly aesthetic reasons: “I was annoyed for one reason only: Shamir had caught me in the very act of a weak text”[^14]. The text is no less enlightening, in that it throws wide open the floodgates of an eradicating fury, of a dream of annihilation. It conceals no political program, but releases a reparative fantasy: that of the definitive disappearance of the unnamed (and unnameable) invader, to whom each reader will give the name and the extension he pleases. Poetry is the place where that other voice makes itself heard — the voice of a collective anger and resentment that does not deal in nuance, that situates itself on another plane of reality, one that no politics, precisely, could contain.
There is something irreconcilable. And the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is its paradigmatic test, by the poet’s own admission: if the Palestinian can resign himself to the partition of Palestine, he will never bring himself to cease holding Palestine to be his undivided homeland. The compromise to which politics may constrain will not translate into an abdication of convictions. Thus, replying to an Israeli poetess who was wondering about his perception of the Oslo Accords, Darwish declared, with a frankness that does him honor, far from any political wooden tongue and any poetic silken tongue:
“For the Palestinian, this country is not Eretz Israel. It is Palestine. A foreign body is a foreign body. […] We are in a peace process; each must change his version of his history, but do not bristle if every Palestinian is convinced that Palestine belongs to him. […]. Do not tremble to learn that he thinks Palestine is his. […] You are foreigners in his eyes. How many years ago did you arrive? You have been there, whereas he cannot count the years of his presence in this country. And he is not even sure whether it was you or not who were there.”[^15]
There is, between “Passers-by Among Passing Words” of 1988 and “The ‘Red Indian’s’ Penultimate Speech to the White Man”[^16] of 1992, only the political distance between a fantasy of revenge and an admission of defeat, and the poetic distance between a raging lampoon written any old how and a bravura piece of the highest order. The imaginary fundamentals remain unchanged. A “Trojan poet”[^17] who bears the vision of history’s vanquished, Darwish casts himself in the harangue or sermon of the chief of an Amerindian tribe addressing the white colonist who comes to confiscate his land[^18]. Darwish makes himself the messenger of other “radical losers”[^19]. But, beneath the tragedy of the American Indians, there can still and always be read the Palestinian threnody. Everything calls for the analogy (a topical one, moreover) between “red men” and Palestinians, between Americans and Israelis — thieves of land, drunk on their military superiority, despising the peoples they dominate, ignorant of the cultures their war machines devastate. The procedure of displacement does not even seek to hide itself; everything can be read in transparency, beginning with the conquerors’ theologico-political alibi:
“Do not bury God in books that promised you a land that covers ours. […] And you lack a defeat in the wars […] One day you will lack Euripides, and the poems of Canaan and of the Babylonians, and the songs of Solomon to Shulamit […] And you will lack a truce with our ghosts in the barren nights, a less inflamed sun, a less full moon, so that the crime may appear less feted on your screens. So take all your time for the putting to death of God.”[^20]
Even more than a discourse on political violence and colonial predation, this text is a masterly reactivation — in the manner of a Pablo Neruda — of a myth of autochthony, to be taken in the almost etymological sense of the term. The red man is the son of his land, knows its secrets, respects its mysteries: he is the guardian of a nature now prey to the ravaging and metallic avidity of the stranger. Indigenous innocence, consubstantiality of the Indian man and the ancestral land violated by the stranger. And he adds, raising the stakes: “This land is our mother, holy, stone by stone, and this land is a cabin for gods who lived with us […]. And we were the first.” And for whoever consents to play the analogical game, the Zionist conquerors appear as foreign to Palestine as the European conquerors of the New World were.
A solemn and crepuscular diatribe — for, unlike the Palestinian of the First Intifada, the Indian chief knows that he can no longer hope for the colonists’ departure — the poem enunciates the conditions of a true peace that reveals itself in reality ethically unthinkable, because this peace between victim and executioner can only be a surrender, and perhaps ontologically impossible, because it presupposes the assent of the dead: “Do not dictate to us the commandments of the new god, god of iron, and do not demand of the dead a pact of peace. […] There was my people. There my people died. […] Take the land of my mother by the sword, but I will not sign the pact between the victim and his murderer.” The stolen land will be forever haunted by the memory of the vanquished — and the peace that, nolens volens, closes the peroration is not a promise, but a tenuous hope: “There are dead who slumber in rooms you will build. Dead who visit their past in the places you demolish. Dead who pass over the bridges you will construct. […]. So leave, O guests of the place, a few free seats for the hosts, that they may read you the conditions of peace with the departed.”
To transform the enemy into a “loyal adversary,” in René Char’s phrase? Perhaps. But the dispute seems to remain inexpiable, and the name the enemy bears, “Israel,” remains for Darwish forever an assumed name, a fraud, an unpronounceable name, for there will always be “beneath Israel, Palestine.”[^21] The power of this poetry comes in part from this intransigence.
It is on this point that my goodwill comes up against a wall. It stems from the fact that Darwish’s vision of history is built on the twofold base of an axiom and a silence. The axiom is explicit, as we have seen: it is the idea that nothing will ever justify the creation of Israel, that the Jews who came to Palestine had no business there, that no fleshly bond attaches them to this land; that they are invaders and intruders there. Hence their assimilation to all the other conquerors and colonizers (Europeans in the Americas, Germans in Europe…). Hence too the absence of any distinction between the episodes of 1948 and of 1967. Not a single line of this poetry seems to take into account the possibility of a deep bond of the Jews to the land of Israel, to its stones, to its landscape. The very names of Israel and Judea are as absent from Darwish’s poetic — and even biblical — map as they are from the Palestinian charters. There exist only Palestine and “Canaan” — a name whose virtue is to efface the conquest, to restore a state of precolonial innocence, prior to the theologico-political appropriation of Zionism. The only authentic love of the Palestinian homeland can be only that of the autochthones, implicitly Arab; all the rest is but an “absurd arrival in a legend”[^22], mythologies artificially resurrected in the service of a colonial conquest. Whatever he himself and his eulogists may say, the just struggle against the “erasure” of Palestine by Zionism, far from escaping ideology, lapses in its turn into a fundamental irredentism by making the Israelis mere invaders. Even tempered by sincere declarations in favor of a Palestinian-ness open to otherness, and by a poetic practice that carries a plural heritage in which the Hebrew writings have their part, the exclusively anticolonialist prism through which Darwish interprets Zionism fundamentally forbids him to take the measure of its historical and affective depth — and, in passing, perhaps, to understand the humiliating reiteration of the Arab routs in the face of an enemy who had as many good reasons to believe himself at home as those who wanted to throw him into the sea.
Here one touches on what constitutes the second pillar — an invisible one — of Darwish’s vision, but which sustains the whole imaginary edifice. It is the absolute silence that covers the Arab responsibility in the Palestinian catastrophe. The Nakba was inscribed within the framework of a war launched by the coalesced Arab armies in the very aftermath of Israel’s birth. A war to the death launched by the Arab states, whose objective was an ethnic cleansing of Palestine… of its Jews. Decontextualized, absolutized, mythified, the Palestinian exile becomes Israel’s inexpiable “original sin,” and the Nakba the mirror equivalent of the Shoah.
Let me be clearly understood. A historian has the right to think that the Arab wars were inevitable; an anti-Zionist historian even has the right to believe them justified. And a poet, for his part, has the right not to be a historian, to confine himself to his lived experience or to forge a collective narrative. The problem arises when readers and critics no longer content themselves with probing, with the requisite empathy, the subjective experience of a poet, but, through an effect of stupefaction, relay without examination the imaginary distortions of History that his work produces.
Thus with this disconcerting paragraph of contextualization aimed at candidates for the agrégation in 2016:
After the UN resolution establishing a partition plan for Palestine to allow the creation of Israel in 1947, an armed conflict breaks out between the Zionist forces and the neighboring Arab countries. On May 14, 1948, Israel declares its independence, over a territory more extensive than the one assigned to it by the international resolution. From these lands conquered in the course of the war, 700,000 people are then evacuated, who flee or are expelled: for the Palestinians, this is the nakba, the “catastrophe.” Mahmoud Darwish’s village is razed and his family must take refuge in Lebanon.
For the record, one distinguishes two phases in the history of the conflict that presided over the creation of Israel, here confusedly amalgamated: the civil war triggered by the insurrection of the Arab-Palestinian population in the aftermath of the UN vote on the partition of Mandatory Palestine into two states, Arab and Jewish (November 30, 1947); then the attack on Israel by a coalition of five armies in the aftermath of its declaration of independence (May 15, 1948). The pronominal turn of the pedagogical summary (“a conflict breaks out”!) accomplishes the feat of spiriting away, in favor of a mechanical and impersonal correlation, the Arab decision to nip the State of Israel in the bud. Yet the facts are stubborn. Neither the first extension of the Israeli borders nor the drama of the refugees is intelligible outside the context of the Arab refusal, of a war to the death that ended only in July 1949 and that the Jews had the bad taste to win[^23]. Could the project of annihilating Israel — not of giving the refugees a homeland — which governed all the Arab policies for decades (one need only think of the “three noes of Khartoum” in 1970) have counted for so little in the genesis and perpetuation of the Palestinian misfortunes[^24]?
It is not to confuse literature and history, but to work at delimiting their respective territories, to examine on what mytho-poetic reconfiguration of the historical data a work as eminently political as Darwish’s is elaborated. And it is not to outrage the autonomy of a great poet to conjecture that the narrative pattern of the Palestinian drama conveyed by his work may have been ideologically overdetermined[^25]. The fact remains that, under the pen of Darwish and his hagiographers, the complicated Orient simplifies itself into a scandal of “great replacement”: it is the story of a population persecuted in Europe that is granted, by way of compensation, a land of Palestine from which it cruelly drives out the legitimate occupants[^26]. The whole thing under a false biblical flag.
In the same collective volume (otherwise rich in analyses and information), a howler so enormous that it can only be a revealing slip comes still further to load the indictment against Israel. Thus, it is written that the collection La Terre nous est étroite “tells over the names of Palestinian places: Jaffa, Jericho, Jerusalem, Nazareth, Mount Carmel, Hittin, Sodom, Haifa, Ramla, Acre… because their utterance, forbidden by the newcomers who renamed the space, makes them exist.” Now, in this strange list, all the places mentioned as “Palestinian places” still exist (save one) and have kept their names; these names are for the most part inscribed in the biblical and talmudic texts; only Hittin is the name of an Arab village wiped off the map, victim of Israeli reprisals after the massacre of Jews at Tiberias during the 1948 war.
Here again, the accompanying discourse tends dangerously to amplify tropisms and topoi already present in Darwish’s poetry — and, beyond it, in Palestinian political culture: in this instance the anachronistic Palestinianization of ancient history — the homologue of the a posteriori Islamization of the biblical prophets and patriarchs. The fashionable theme, from 1967 on, of the Palestinian “Christ”[^27] goes in this direction. When, for Yasser Arafat, Jesus is the “first fedayee” or, for Darwish, the first “Palestinian martyr,” the discourse goes beyond the banal acculturation of a universal Christian symbol: to the confines of an insidious revisionism, of a substitute political theology, of a colonization of time, of a historical annexationism.
I come back, then, to the most delicate point, to the very source of my unease before what this work arouses. This unease has less to do with the nature of its poetry than with the aura that accompanies it and the myths in which it implicitly invites me to commune; it has less to do with the deconstruction of the Zionist myths than with the mirror-construction of a Palestinian myth complacently sustained by the critical exegesis; it has to do not so much with the fact that this poetry exposes crimes of Israel as with the fact that the very existence of Israel is seen in it as a crime. This work welcomes me only on condition that I divest myself entirely of my attachment to this country, or hold its existence or its survival to be perfectly incidental: such is the price of Darwish’s poetic hospitality. A universalism minus one.
Non possumus. To carry to its term the introspection to which this work compels me, I am forced to confess that I feel no sympathy for the Palestinian cause. By “Palestinian cause” I mean here not the struggle for Palestinian national rights — which must be supported — but the ideological, cultural, and militant apparatus that, founded on the rejection of everything Israel represents, has made of this State the “bad object” of international politics, and of the struggle against Zionism the mother of all battles. If the occasions to be scandalized by Israeli policy are unfortunately not lacking, it remains that the project of a Jewish state never found its justification in the will to annihilate another people: Zionism remains in its essence a project of collective affirmation turned toward life. By the force of things, the Palestinian cause was natively built on an aim of destruction, and the self-consciousness of the Palestinian people issued from the misfortune it imputes to the realization of another national project — an inaugural trauma, an obsessive point of fixation, an indigestible advent. The Palestinian’s existence was in the blind spot of the Zionist project; the hatred of Israel remains the dark core of the Palestinian cause. Laid bare in Mahmoud Darwish’s occasional texts, this originary resentment remains most of the time covered over — but imperfectly — by the spells of a verb that is figurative, bewitching, sometimes oblique to the point of hermeticism. There is no need, however, to dig long beneath the poetic dunes for the unbreakable bedrock of negation to surface: such is its greatness, there is my limit.
Darwish is doubtless the noblest expression of this Palestinian cause, of which he was able to make a poetry universally addressed. But this cause keeps a bottom of night. And just as the poet repeated to whoever would hear it that he aspired to peace but could never love Israel — who would reproach him for it? — I salute Darwish’s work — but it remains impossible for me to love it. I cannot pretend to ignore that, had his cause prevailed, Israel would have been wiped off the map. I cannot make that a detail.
The discomfort I feel on reading this intractable poet does not prevent me from bowing before his talent, but it indicates to me, at the very least, where I stand.
NOTES: [^1]: Jean-Michel Maulpoix, “Le chant de la Palestine,” Europe, 95th year, no. 1053-1054, January–February 2017, p. 103. [^2]: “If a national poet is a representative, well then, I represent no one. I am not responsible for the way my texts are read. But the collective voice is present in my personal voice whether I want it or not.” (La Palestine comme métaphore, p. 133]. [^3]: “As a minority, we were treated as Arabs on the part of the Israelis, and it was on this principle that they rejected and oppressed us. […] And it is from there that I wrote […] ‘Record: I am an Arab’ and not ‘Record: I am a Palestinian.’ There was a country whose name was Palestine, but no Palestinian project nor any Palestinian entity. […]”. (Europe, p. 55) It is precisely in those years that Palestine begins to emerge as a cause in its own right (creation of the PLO in 1964, appearance of the notion of “Palestinian people” in political discourse around the time of the 1967 war). [^4]: “My problem does not reside in the poem. […] Its political charge is not a burden to me.” (Europe, 55) [^5]: Let us note in passing how irritating it is to hear this liaison sometimes adduced as proof that Darwish could not have been an antisemite! On the one hand, because the accusation of antisemitism against Darwish has, until further notice, no foundation; on the other hand, because the idea that a love affair with a Jewish woman would exonerate one from all suspicion of antisemitism is inept. [^6]: “Rita’s Winter” [1992], in La Terre nous est étroite et autres poèmes, trans. Elias Sanbar, Poésie/Gallimard, pp. 303-310. [^7]: “By the Light of a Rifle” [1970], ibid., pp. 47-53. [^8]: “A Soldier Who Dreamed of White Lilies” [1967], ibid., pp. 26-29. [^9]: Irony of history: the Israeli who served as the model for “A Soldier Who Dreamed of White Lilies” is none other than Shlomo Sand, who would, many years later, put all his vindictiveness into “deconstructing” Israel’s legitimacy, making of the “Jewish people” an invention of modernity and of the Palestinian people the true heir of the ancient Hebrews… [^10]: “When He Withdraws” [1995], ibid., pp. 364-366. [^11]: In this poem, as so often, neither the place names nor the demonyms are mentioned: it is up to the reader to reconstruct the implicit setting. The distinction will then be drawn between those who consider the perception of the underlying historical referent essential to interpretation and those who hold the effacement itself to be essential, identifying it with universalization. [^12]: An impropriety due to the translator; the word adversité (adversity) seems here to be confused with hostility or animosity. [^13]: See Palestine, mon pays. L’affaire du poème (collective), Minuit, 1988. [^14]: La Palestine comme métaphore, Actes Sud, 2002, p. 165. [^15]: Cited in Europe, op. cit., pp. 207-208. [^16]: “The ‘Red Indian’s’ Penultimate Speech to the White Man” [1992], La Terre nous est étroite, op. cit., pp. 286-294. [^17]: This is how Mahmoud Darwish liked to designate himself. [^18]: The poem is freely inspired by a speech delivered at Seattle in 1854 by the chief of the Duwamish, addressed to Governor Isaac M. Stevens, who had come to buy land from him. [^19]: A notion borrowed from Hans Magnus Enzensberger. [^20]: “The ‘Red Indian’s’ Penultimate Speech…”, op. cit., p. 289. It would be worth studying, in Darwish’s poetry, the recurrence of this deicidal theme applied to the Israelis. Thus the Israeli soldier who declares: “Jericho! You are in dream and in waking, two antonyms / And between the one and the other, I tore up my Bible and made Christ suffer” (“By the Light of a Rifle,” p. 49). [^21]: To borrow the title of an essay by a Jewish revolutionary militant of the PLO, Ilan Halévi. Likewise, without stinting his admiration for the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, the Palestinian poet was not afraid to write: “It happens that I wonder, reading him, whether the land he names Israel is the same as the Palestine in my poetry. He describes it brilliantly, but it is another country that hides mine.” (Europe, 31) [^22]: Cf. also: “They plow our childhood and cast their weapons in legends” (“Sirhan Drinks His Coffee in the Cafeteria” [1972], in La Terre…, p. 71). [^23]: The occultation of the Arab aggression is detectable in Yasser Arafat’s historical speech at the UN in 1974: “Despite the partition resolution that granted the colonialists 54% of the land of Palestine, the latter were displeased with this decision and began a terrorist war against the Arab civilian population. They occupied 81% of the whole land of Palestine, thereby uprooting one million Arabs.” [^24]: Poems in the form of a parable, such as “I Am Joseph, O My Father” [1986] (La Terre…, p. 225) and “He Embraces His Murderer” [1986] (ibid., p. 219), lend themselves to several readings, but one of them remains the protest against the abandonment of the Palestinian cause by the Arab brothers. [^25]: “Amichai is a poet who skillfully hides his ideology. […]. He nonetheless remains an ideological poet.” These remarks could be applied word for word to his own poetic production. [^26]: “A homeland that has changed its inhabitants, and the stars are rubble” (“Sirhan Drinks His Coffee in the Cafeteria,” La Terre nous est étroite, p. 66). [^27]: See, for example, Léon Poliakov, De Moscou à Beyrouth. Essai sur la désinformation, Calmann-Lévy, 2014, chapter III.