As we mourn the tragedies unfolding in Gaza, I am eager to recommend the works of Mahmoud Darwish. Born in 1941 in the Western Galilee, Darwish--considered the national poet of Palestine--writes on love, war, and occupation in styles that evoke nostalgia, yearning, pride, uncertainty, sadness, and a breadth of other emotions. There's no one more qualified to capture such profound sentiments than Darwish, who fled with his family from Palestine to Lebanon during the Nakba. The Nakba, "catastrophe" in Arabic, refers to the mass displacement and land dispossession that Zionist militias (and later, the Israeli army) inflicted upon Palestinians in achievement of Israeli statehood in 1948. During this period, an estimated quarter of a million Palestinians were forced to leave their homes and about 500 Palestinian villages were destroyed. Although the Nakba is often conceptualized as a discrete historical event, it is increasingly described as an ongoing process embodied by Israeli apartheid and violence.
One of the reasons I love Darwish is that he believed in the coexistence of Palestinians and Jews, and recognized that each was not the opposite side of a spectrum--rather, both Palestinians and Jews have elements of each other within themselves. And perhaps that it is something more revolutionary than his most political of writing--the idea that our identities are not as unmoving and solidified as nationalisms might have us believe. Netanyahu and his acolytes would surely shudder at such a thought, ensnared in they are in Manichaean, Orientalist thinking that cultivates an "Us versus Them" mentality. But to people who are more global, more empathetic, more peace-loving, this idea will resonate deeply and intuitively. All human groups are merely blends of each other, drawing on shared histories and cultures, and nationalism is but a cheap attempt to demarcate differences and justify exclusion, discrimination, and oppression.
For a great article on Darwish, check out this piece in the New York Times from 2001. It's old, and published seven years before Darwish's death, but it beautifully captures Darwish's philosophy and approach to poetry.
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