Israeli Poets Quotes

Target killing of Palestinian leaders, including moderate ones, was not a new phenomenon in the conflict. Israel began this policy with the assassination of Ghassan Kanafani in 1972, a poet and writer, who could have led his people to reconciliation. The fact that he was targeted, a secular and leftist activist, is symbolic of the role Israel played in killing those Palestinians it ‘regretted’ later for not being there as partners for peace. In May 2001 President George Bush Jr appointed Senator George J. Mitchell as a special envoy to the Middle East conflict. Mitchell produced a report about the causes for the second Intifada. He concluded: ‘We have no basis on which to conclude that there was a deliberate plan by the PA to initiate a campaign of violence at the first opportunity; or to conclude that there was a deliberate plan by the [Government of Israel] to respond with lethal force.’13 On the other hand, he blamed Ariel Sharon for provoking unrest by visiting and violating the sacredness of the al-Aqsa mosque and the holy places of Islam. In short, even the disempowered Arafat realized that the Israeli interpretation of Oslo in 2000 meant the end of any hope for normal Palestinian life and doomed the Palestinians to more suffering in the future. This scenario was not only morally wrong in his eyes, but also would have strengthened, as he knew too well, those who regarded the armed struggle against Israel as the exclusive way to liberate Palestine.

I remembered the poem “Tourists” by Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai; Amichai describes sitting with two baskets under a Roman arch in Jerusalem. A tour guide points out the arch to his group by noting it is just above the head of the man with shopping baskets. And the poet thinks that redemption would arrive if only the tour guide would say, “You see that arch from the Roman period? It’s not important: but next to it, left and down a bit, there sits a man who’s bought fruit and vegetables for his family.

Colonizers write about flowers. I tell you about children throwing rocks at Israeli tanks seconds before becoming daisies. I want to be like those poets who care about the moon. Palestinians don’t see the moon from jail cells and prisons. It’s so beautiful, the moon. They’re so beautiful, the flowers. I pick flowers for my dead father when I’m sad. He watches Al Jazeera all day. I wish Jessica would stop texting me Happy Ramadan. I know I’m American because when I walk into a room something dies. Metaphors about death are for poets who think ghosts care about sound. When I die, I promise to haunt you forever. One day, I’ll write about the flowers like we own them.

In the 1890s and first decade of the twentieth century, Bialik, a Ukrainian Jew, published numerous poems and stories bewailing the persecution and weakness of European Jews and calling on them to take their fate in their hands—to defend themselves by force of arms, immigrate to Palestine, and there establish their own state. One of his most stirring poems was written following the Kishinev Pogrom of 1903, in which forty-nine Jews were murdered and dozens more were injured.[1] “In the City of Slaughter” condemned the murderous antisemitic mob who perpetrated the atrocities, but it also criticized the Jews themselves for their pacifism and helplessness. In one heart-wrenching scene, Bialik describes how Jewish women were gang-raped, while their husbands and brothers hid nearby, afraid to intervene. The poem compares the Jewish men to terrified mice and imagines how they quietly prayed to God to perform some miracle, which failed to materialize. The poem then tells how even after the pogrom was over, the survivors had no thought of arming themselves and instead entered Talmudic disputations about whether the raped women were now ritualistically “defiled” or whether they were still “pure.” This poem is mandatory reading in many Israeli schools today. It is also mandatory reading for anyone wishing to understand how after two millennia of being one of the most pacifist groups in history, Jews built one of the most formidable armies in the world. Not for nothing was Bialik named Israel’s national poet.[