Politics and Policy Archive

Welcome to Politics and Policy where you will find the latest thoughts and reflections by CLAL faculty and associates on the important political and public policy questions facing us as Jews and as Americans living in the ever more interdependent global village of today. Every other week you will find a new article on this page.

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When Words Collide: Lessons in Pluralism from a Palestinian Poet

By Brad Hirschfield

Several weeks ago Prime Minister Barak's government almost fell after the Israeli Ministry of Education announced plans to include the work of a Palestinian nationalist poet in the standard Israeli high school curriculum.

Critics of the move to teach the work of the Galilee-born Mahmoud Darwish describe him, according to The New York Times, as an "anti-Zionist and an Israel-hater who calls for the destruction of the Zionist entity." The lines often cited by his Israeli critics are from the 1987 poem "Those Who Pass Between Fleeting Words": "It is time for you to be gone/Live wherever you like, but do not live among us…" (You can judge for yourself: A number of Darwish's poems, including "Those Who Pass…," are on line at the Web-site of the Palestine Information Center)

Some may be surprised that I, as a religious Zionist, support the Education Ministry's decision to teach Darwish's poetry. In fact, I believe that the free exchange of ideas, including those with which I disagree, is a crucial principle in building a society that enhances the human dignity that lives at the center of my Jewish identity. To that end, including Darwish's work in the standard Israeli curriculum would be a very "Jewish" act.

I understand that for many people this may seem rather odd. How can I call the inclusion of anti-Zionist poetry in the Israeli high school curriculum "very Jewish"? Jewish acts, after all, ought to defend existing Jewish institutions and practices, not the voices of those who would tear down these institutions. And yet, does not the Torah also bid us to give ear to the stranger, to place ourselves in the place of the other man, to give the man who claims we have wronged him a fair hearing?

In the same New York Times article, Darwish says that his poems are suffering collateral damage from a battle between Israel's right and left. Moreover, he describes a climate for public discourse in Israel that demands agreement before dialogue may begin.

"In Israel they start from the point of saying that you have to love them and then they may be ready to talk to you and know you," he tells The Times.

In truth, the same observation could be made about the Jewish community in the United States. Here too we often engage others in dialogue on the condition that they already agree with us. Whether in Israel or among American Jews, the outcome is the same, i.e., increasingly narrow conversations which at best become irrelevant and at worst turn ugly in their expression of fear and loathing of others.

While such preconditions may be necessary in times of weakness, operating out of such fear in times of strength is deeply misguided. Real strength invites precisely those with whom one disagrees most into the conversation. Real strength possesses the self-confidence to be open to the truths of many competing ideas.

At the same time, I wonder if Darwish is not engaging in exactly the practices that he bemoans when he sees the problem as the Israelis' inability to read his works "in an innocent way."-that is, "seeing the beauty of the poetry and the aesthetic side of it," rather than politics.

A poet of Darwish's stature must be able to accept his role, in this region of profound and important disagreements, as a generator of both problems and solutions, whose poetry has the potential both to heal and to hurt. If not, then all he provides is another accusing voice in a land that goes begging for honest dialogue.