The Saif House

In a comment on my post on Friedman and Goldberg’s call for murder of civilians, commenter Americanthinker asks two excellent questions:

2. Is it morally acceptable for an attacking force to mount attacks from locations overwhelming occupied by civilians? Doesn’t this invite the very risk to Gazan civilians to which you object?

3. Hamas does not distinguish between the Israeli military and the people of Israel (presumably on the basis that the Israeli people elect and support their government) and feels completely justified in firing rockets into Israeli civilian populations. Hamas quite honestly says that it wants no peace with Israel. What, if anything, would induce Hamas to agree to stop firing rockets at Israel? If your answer is that, in the minds of the Hamas leadership, resistance is always justified, then aren’t they condemning Gazan civilians to Israeli military responses? What do you think the results of a referendum would be if Gazans were asked if they wanted the rocket fire from Gaza to continue if the price would be repeated Israeli military responses? The Gazans voted for Hamas; did they also vote for war?

These questions are built on the conventional view of the conflict, which goes thus:

1- Hamas fires rockets at Israeli civilians
2- Israel attempts to retaliate to defend its civilians
3- Hamas hides among civilians
4- Civilians die

If this bore any tenuous link to reality, it could be compelling. But, unfortunately, this line of thinking is as wrong-headed as believing that cancer causes smoking. There are several clear and incontrovertible facts that do not fit with this narrative, and these are:

1- The occupation:

Israel has been occupying the Gaza Strip, and has the final sovereign rule over all its inhabitants, since 1967. Israel’s claims to have ended the occupation of Gaza in 2005 are nonsense, because since 2005 Israel has controlled Gaza from land, air and sea. It controls all access of civilians, goods, food, water, fuel and medicine. Israel controls Gaza in the same way that the US controls its Federal prisons.

2- The siege:

Since 2006 (and well before) Israel has imposed a draconian and inhuman siege against the people of Gaza. It denies them entry of food, medicine, fuel and water. Infants have died in hospital incubators as power was cut, as Israeli occupation officials prevented fuel from coming into Gaza.

3- Israeli murder:

Israel continued to attack, bomb, invade and devastate Gaza since 1967, and did not stop since 2005. These attacks started way before Hamas even existed, and are far more devastating than anything Hamas has ever mustered.

4- The cease-fire:

Even if one were to ignore all that and assume that the world started in June 2008, one would still have to place the blame for this mess on Israel, for the very simple reason that Israel was the one that violated this current cease-fire. From June onwards, Hamas did not fire any rockets at Israel, while Israel continues to starve the Palestinians. This in itself is an act of aggression that makes Israel the aggressor, but even if we ignored that, it was still Israel who violated this cease-fire in November.

These facts then turn your story on its head. Once you take them into account, believing that Hamas is the cause of this, or that the people of Gaza brought this fate onto themselves, becomes as perverse as believing that The Black Panthers were the cause of slavery and segregation.

The reality is that Israel has, for the past 42 years (fully funded and supported by America) launched an unrelenting war of aggression, murder, land-theft, siege, destruction and starvation on the Palestinian people of Gaza and the West Bank. The Palestinians have had two clear choices all along:

1- Do nothing, in which case you will be starved to death or bombed to death and have your land stolen for religiously exclusive colonies while the world watches and does nothing.
Or
2- Attempt to fight back, in which case Israel, through its hacks like Friedman and Goldberg, will portray that as a naked unprovoked act of aggression that justifies more bombing and death.

In both cases, Israel is attacking and killing Palestinians. Under the cease-fire, when Hamas wasn’t firing rockets, Israel still besieged and starved Gaza. Israel then violated the cease-fire and used Hamas’s retaliation as a pretext for further murder and starvation and sieges.

Hamas reacting by rockets is wrong, unacceptable and unjustifiable. I condemn it unequivocally and wish they would stop it. But to look at that as if it is the root of this crisis is just plain wrong. Israel has been attacking, murdering, occupying, starving and controlling the Gazans since 1967. That is the real problem. That is the real terrorism. That is what you should be angry about. And more importantly, that is what you should get your country to stop supporting.

The pathetic rockets of Hamas are nothing but a reaction to the real problem, which is Israeli oppression of Palestinians.

If you claim to be concerned about civilians and their well-being, then it strikes me as very odd that you would:
1- Ignore the occupation
2- Ignore the siege
3- Ignore Israel’s inhuman, indiscriminate and devastating carpet-bombing of Gaza
4- Ignore the fact that it was Israel that violated this cease-fire
5- Concentrate on the pathetic rockets Hamas fires, which are themselves the result of the acts of aggression by the Israeli government against the Palestinians.

Which brings me to another problematic story that America’s media has not stopped repeating: the idea that any of this is justifiable because “Hamas does not want peace.” This is a very perverse, wrong-headed and racist idea. Israel already has destroyed Palestine. Israel is the aggressor and occupier here. Israel is the result of a Zionist project whose stated aim is to destroy the livelihood of Palestinians who do not belong to the Jewish religion. Israel has ethnically cleansed more than a million Palestinians from their homes over the years, murdered tens of thousands, and made freedom and self-determination impossible for all Palestinians everywhere. Israel continues to colonize Palestinian land, occupy all of Palestinians’ lands and control all their lives. In the face of all this, I find it mind-boggling that adults will still look at this and think that the problem is what Hamas says about recognizing Israel’s “right to exist” (whatever the hell that means).

Hamas is a political resistance movement that has announced that it will accept a two-state solution over the West Bank and Gaza. The idea of Hamas “recognizing” Israel’s “right to exist” before any negotiations can start is as nonsensical as asking the NY Yankees to recognize Tanzania’s right to exist: there is absolutely no meaning to a non-state actor “recognizing” a state.

Most importantly, Israel is the one that is actually and physically destroying Palestine. Everything you accuse Hamas of wanting to do, Israel is actually doing. The problem with the American discourse on this topic is that it is not concerned at all with Israel doing all of this, but is horrified at exaggerated media reports that claim that Hamas wants to do these things.

This would be laughable—were it not so tragic. It is precisely because Americans believe this wrongheaded story that the American government supports Israel politically, economically, militarily and diplomatically. It is because of this support that Israel can do these things.

—

This Monday, January 12^th, we heard the story that Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was boasting to journalists about how he embarrassed US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rica by calling Bush and ordering him to order her to abstain from voting for a United Nations resolution which she had helped prepare.

“I said: ‘Get me President Bush on the phone,’” Olmert said in a speech in the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon. “They said he was in the middle of giving a speech in Philadelphia. I said I didn’t care: ‘I need to talk to him now.’ He got off the podium and spoke to me.”

Olmert said he argued that the United States should not vote in favor, and the president then called Rice and told her not to do so.

“She was left pretty embarrassed,” Olmert said.

This reminded me of another incident, which–amazingly enough–happened on the same date two years ago, when Condoleezza Rice went batshit crazy over some Norwegian district deciding to boycott Israeli goods.

See, the Norwegian region of Sor-Trondelag (population: 270,000) got so fed up with Israel’s apartheid in Palestine, that it decided it didn’t want any complicity in it, and that it wanted to work towards ending it using the same method employed by the global community against the apartheid regime in South Africa: boycott.

Boycotting South Africa was something that the whole world had largely gotten round to by the mid-1980’s. Except, of course, South African Apartheid’s faithful ally: Israel. Without a doubt, and by the admission of both apartheid and anti-apartheid leaders, it was the international campaign of boycott, divestments and sanctions that succeeded in ending racist rule in South Africa.

But whereas America sanctioned apartheid South Africa in the 1980’s, it today embraces faithfully apartheid Israel. In fact, it is so zealous in its defense of Israel’s right to continue to oppress Palestinians and steal their land, that it makes it an important part of its foreign policy to prevent other countries from ever sanctioning Israel.

And so Secretary Rice, on January 12, 2006, sent very stern angry letters to Norway threatening it with “serious political consequences” if Sor-Trondelag were to go ahead and stop buying whatever little crap it usually buys from Israel. The US Secretary of State actually saw that it was in the purview of her job to threaten hostility towards a perfectly peaceful, incredibly-rich, close ally and friend of the United States over some minor region’s choice of merchandise. This is probably what is referred to as an “active” foreign policy. George Washington would have been so proud.

But Karma, it seems, is a bitch and Rice was soon to get her cosmic retribution in the form of Ehud Olmert bragging to the world about how he had the President of The Free World call and boss her around in her own job.

—

Joe Scarborough chose the wrong time to repeat the bullshit pro-Israel propaganda line on the Camp David negotiations. He had Zbigniew Brzezinski on, and he is one of the very few people in America who are knowledgeable enough to actually know what went on, and brave enough to say it on live TV.

Let us remember here that Scarborough’s “stunningly superficial” understanding of the conflict is verbatim the completely nonsensical, dishonest and racist understanding that Dennis Ross propagated with his propaganda account of the Camp David negotiations.  Norman Finkelstein had previously and comprehensively shown exactly why Ross is so full of shit.
–

Yesterday, Osama Bin Ladin was not the only fundamentalist calling for murder of civilians as a means to achieving political ends.  He had good company on The NY Times Op-Ed page in Tom Friedman and Jeffrey Goldberg. Glenn Greenwald reads the NY Times so I don’t have to:

Tom Friedman, one of the nation’s leading propagandists for the Iraq War and a vigorous supporter of all of Israel’s wars, has a column today in The New York Times explaining and praising the Israeli attack on Gaza.  For the sake of robust and diverse debate (for which our Liberal Media is so well known), Friedman’s column today appears alongside an Op-Ed from The Atlantic‘s Jeffrey Goldberg, one of the nation’s leading (and most deceitful) propagandists for the Iraq War and a vigorous supporter of all of Israel’s wars, who explains that Hamas is incorrigibly hateful and radical and cannot be negotiated with.  One can hardly imagine a more compelling exhibit demonstrating the complete lack of accountability in the “journalism” profession — at least for those who are loyal establishment spokespeople who reflexively cheer on wars — than a leading Op-Ed page presenting these two war advocates, of all people, as experts, of all things, on the joys and glories of the latest Middle East war.

In any event, Friedman’s column today is uncharacteristically and refreshingly honest.  He explains that the 2006 Israeli invasion and bombing of Lebanon was, contrary to conventional wisdom, a great success.  To make this case, Friedman acknowledges that the deaths of innocent Lebanese civilians was not an unfortunate and undesirable by-product of that war, but rather, was a vital aspect of the Israeli strategy — the centerpiece, actually, of teaching Lebanese civilians a lesson they would not soon forget:

…

The war strategy which Friedman is heralding — what he explicitly describes with euphemism-free candor as “exacting enough pain on civilians” in order to teach them a lesson — is about as definitive of a war crime as it gets.  It also happens to be the classic, textbook definition of “terrorism.”

Jeffrey Goldberg (an Israeli military officer who boasts of torturing Palestinians) is then given space to call for more Palestinian murder, making Friedman (and Bin Ladin) look reasonable in comparison.

FAIR asks us to wonder what would be the reaction if a Muslim newspaper wrote such a report advocating the murder of Israeli or American civilians to achieve their political goals.  I can guess: the NYT would write a feature about how this illustrates how the average Arab is a bloodthirsty savage, how there is no good journalism in the Arab World, and how those barbarians need to be bombed and invaded in order to civilize them.

The NYT has really outdone itself with its horrific coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza.  They continue to insist Hamas violated the six-month cease-fire even though their own reporting (and the Israeli Shabak) clearly demonstrates that it was Israel who did. Even CNN has come to admit this, but not the NYT.  Ethan Bronner continues to hit new lows for NYT’s Mideast reporting (which is no mean feat).  Bronner has been far more favorable to Israel than its Foreign Ministry spokesmen, and his cold-blooded indifference to the murder of civilians now verges on schadenfreude.

It is impossible to overestimate just how depraved, criminal and wrong the NYT’s coverage of Palestine/Israel is.  Perhaps this report by If Americans Knew might shed some light, as would this study by Pat O’Connor.  Jerome Slater has found that Israeli newspapers are far better in their reporting of the conflict than the NYT (which, let’s remember, isn’t saying much.) But all of this barely scratches the surface of the constant barrage of Israeli propaganda masquerading as “reporting” and the opinion and editorial pieces that have become nothing but an elaborate and carefully constructed campaign to make the murder of Palestinian civilians popular and convince Americans to continue to bankroll it and support it diplomatically.

But what is really shocking for me is not that this rag would sink to these lows, it is that sane and intelligent adults actually still read it and take it seriously. Even people who realize how depraved their coverage is will continue to read it because it is ‘The Paper of Record’, and “you have to read the NYT”.  The real perverse thing here is that it is precisely because of people who continue to “have to read the NYT” that the NYT continues to be treated as “The Paper of Record” and that gives it complete license to print all the racist criminal hysteria it pleases, knowing it has a pliant readership who’ll believe whatever it prints, and will never stop reading it.

There is no way around it: if you read the NYT on the Middle East, you cannot be treated as a serious person. And more importantly, you need to realize that it is precisely because you continue to read the NYT no matter what it prints that it can get away with turning itself into a massive propaganda campaign to promote mass murder.
—

Anyone who doubts that this Zionist mass-murder is purely about self-defense should listen to these intelligent and thoughtful arguments for it

—

Yesterday, I wrote about the AP’s silly discounting of pro-Palestine protestors for 3QD and concluded with my take on Israel’s media and PR campaign:

Israel’s PR machine has been laying the groundwork for this bout of mass murder with months and months of hard work that saw a fully pliant media accept Israel’s narrative and echo it completely and unquestioningly. Shiko Behar has already incontrovertibly documented—twice—how the mainstream media’s mantra that Hamas broke the cease-fire is a load of nonsense. This has obviously spilled over even into the reporting of global solidarity with the Palestinians.

But the internet is here. And things are different this time round. Israeli PR has come ridiculously close to fooling all the people all the time, but there is absolutely no way it can succeed. It is worth noting that even with all of American media competing over who can be more pro-Israel than Israel’s Foreign Ministry, pro-Palestine demonstrations nationwide are dwarfing their pro-Israel counter-parts in numbers and fervor. In cities across the country, people are seeing these massive demonstrations, and also seeing how little media coverage they are getting. People are also witnessing gruesome scenes of murder in Gaza and are astounded at a media bending over backward to justify these deaths away. And the internet continues to provide a searing light of truth into this darkness as websites such as Electronic Intifada, Al-Jazeera, and Anti-War.com are gaining credibility and readership by the minute, and blogs, Youtube and Facebook become more and more important.

This ridiculous and calculated giant PR campaign, like all ridiculous and calculated giant schemes, is producing massive negative unintended consequences: a growing realization everywhere that everything reported by mainstream media on Israel is a load of crap. Israel may well be abusing and stretching its PR machine to the point of uselessness.

Today, Haaretz seems to agree with me, arguing “Gaza op causing long-term harm to Israel’s image”.

Interestingly enough, the Hebrew version of the same article goes as far as confirming my observation about how few pro-Israel demonstrators there were in New York.  It is unclear why this observation did not make it into the English version.
—

Here is video proof of what I wrote in my previous post:

The Associated Press is full of crap.

Note that in this footage the camera cannot show both the beginning and the end of the demonstration. Even at this height, the demo was too long to be caught in one frame. Also note that all the crowd that appears around the 00:20 mark is different from the crowd that appears at the 1:10 mark, since the first crowd had two giant Palestinian flags spread on top of it and the second group doesn’t. These are two ends of the demonstrations, not the same crowd pictured again.

I was at the front of the march when we turned on 58th street. I stopped on the sidewalk to chat with police and to examine the crowd. It took the back of the demo some 20-30 minutes to get to the corner of 58th after the front had reached it.

The crowd really was massive.

I spoke to Karen Matthews (the AP writer who wrote their story) today, who claimed there were only dozens when she left. Apparently she left before the rally started, and she didn’t expect that the numbers would grow. This is quite remarkable incompetence, even by the standards of the American media.

Now the AP have stopped talking to me or anyone calling them, and seem to have decided to ignore this.

Please continue to call them on +1-212-621-1670, email them on info@ap.org and email Karen Matthews at kmatthews@ap.org

At the very least, we have an obligation to make their next few days miserable with phone calls and emails so they think twice before pulling off such a hoax again.

Below the fold are some pictures of the demonstration, all taken by Noel Winkler:

Read the rest of this entry »

By now, anyone who has followed the Israeli genocide on Palestinians will be accustomed to the absurd reality that the life of a Palestinian is worth about 100th to 1000th the life of an Israeli, depending on the news outfit. “Respectable” media outlets like the Guardian and the BBC will give every one hundred dead Palestinians the same space they give to one dead Israeli, whereas crappy propaganda outfits like the NY Post, Israeli Foreign Ministry, NY Times and CNN will give every 1000 Palestinians the same space they give one Israeli. This has been normalized.

But today, this racist arithmetic was taken to absurd levels by the morons who work for the Associated Press who decided that it also applies to demonstrators in New York.

I was part of a demonstration today that had thousands and thousands of people show up and protest the Israeli mass-murder of Palestinians.

I personally spoke to the chief policeman at the demo and asked him for a crowd estimate. He said 20,000 was a reasonable estimate, though he would not confirm that this would be the police’s final and official estimate. Since he is the one who will be issuing the crowd estimate, it’s safe to assume his estimate would’ve definitely exceeded 15,000. It certainly could not go as low, as… I don’t know… 150.

So imagine my surprise when I come home, turn on my computer, and find this article by the cretins who work for the AP, claiming that there were 150 people in the demonstration.

Karen Matthews is at best an illiterate and innumerate moron who would be unqualified to hold a job counting the number of brain cells she has.

I have called the geniuses at AP all night to try to get them to change this article, and it’s pretty amazing how they’ve managed to not change it.

Please email Karen Matthews on kmatthews@ap.org

And call AP on 212-621-1670, 347-322-9736 and 212-621-1993 and tell them exactly what you feel about how their morals are perfectly proportional to their arithmetic skills.

Naji Al-Ali

We have on this earth what makes life worth living
Mahmoud Darwish, 1986

We have on this earth what makes life worth living:
April’s hesitation
The aroma of bread at dawn
A woman’s opinion of men
The works of Aeschylus
The beginning of love
Grass on a stone
Mothers living on a flute’s sigh
and,
The invaders’ fear of memories

We have on this earth what makes life worth living:
The final days of September
A woman leaving forty in full blossom
The hour of sunlight in prison
A cloud reflecting a swarm of creatures
The peoples’ applause for those who face death with a smile
And,
The tyrants’ fear of songs.

We have on this earth what makes life worth living:
On this earth, the lady of earth,
Mother of all beginnings
Mother of all ends.
She was called… Palestine.
Her name later became… Palestine.

My Lady, because you are my Lady, I deserve life.

على هذه الأرض ما يستحق الحياة
محمود درويش, ١٩٨٦

على هذه الأرض ما يستحق الحياة : تردّد إبريل ، رائحة الخبز في الفجر ، آراء امرأةٍ في الرجال
كتابات أسخيليوس ، أول الحب ، عشبٌ على حجر
أمهاتٌ تقفن على خيط ناي ، و خوف الغزاة من الذكريات …

على هذه الأرض ما يستحق الحياة : نهاية أيلول ، سيدةٌ تترك الأربعين بكامل مشمشها
ساعة الشمس في السجن ، غيمٌ يقلّد سرباً من الكائنات ، هتافات شعب لمن يصعدون إلى حتفهم باسمين، و خوف الطغاة من الأغنيات …

على هذه الأرض ما يستحق الحياة :
على هذه الأرض سيدة الأرض ، أم البدايات ، أم النهايات ،
كانت تسمى فلسطين ، صارت تسمى فلسطين ،
سيدتي أستحق لأنك سيدتي ، أستحق الحياة…

This was originally published in 3QuarksDaily.com

It is impossible for me to express what I feel about the passing of Mahmoud Darwish. Like many Palestinians, I had grown up reading his poetry in order to express how I feel about whatever significant events happen to Palestinians. I turned to his writings to understand the periods of Palestine’s history that happened before I was born. If ever anyone in history deserved the title of a Poet Laureate, it was indeed Darwish, who spoke the mind of his people in a way I doubt anyone has ever been able to do for any other people. Today, I wake up missing my voice. The real travesty of Darwish’s death is that it revealed to me that he is no longer there to eloquently express to me how I feel about such travesties.

An often underemphasized aspect of Darwish’s life is how he truly lived every single episode of modern Palestinian history, and lived in all the significant locations and periods of Palestinian life. He was born in 1942 in Al-Birweh, Galilee, before the Zionist ethnic cleansing of Palestine that made him a refugee in Lebanon in 1948. His father decided to return his family to Palestine in 1949, risking murder by Zionist militias that had murdered countless Palestinians who attempted to “escape home”. Somehow, Darwish succeeded in returning, and thus lived the years of his youth as a second-class Israeli citizen. He would then leave to study in the Soviet Union in the early 1970’s, joining the growing Palestinian Diaspora in Europe. His political activism lead to Israel stripping him of his second-class citizenship, and thus returned him to the ranks of Palestinian refugees and the Diaspora. He would then live in Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon, getting to savor the experience of the homeless Palestinians wandering across the Arab World.

Darwish witnessed the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon—one of the pivotal points of his life, his poetry and of Palestinian history—and left with the Palestinian resistance on the boats headed to Tunisia. From then on, he lived the quintessential Palestinian nomadic life; the whole world was home for this stateless nomad. In 1995, he finally returned to Palestine with the PLO’s signing of the Oslo Accords, and attempted to build his life there. He again witnessed another brutal Israeli siege of Palestinians, this time in Ramallah in 2002, which inspired his powerful poetry collection, ‘Haalat ‘Hisaar (A State of Siege). Since the 1980’s Darwish had serious heart problems, and had a very close encounter with death in 1998 after heart surgery, an experience that inspired his monumental work, Jidaariyyah (Mural).

Throughout all these episodes of Palestinian history, Darwish was there, the voice of the voiceless Palestinians to the world. His peerless poetry and striking emotion were enormously successful in drawing world attention to the plight of Palestinians, galvanizing Palestinian to their cause, and rallying millions of Arabs around the cause. All the countless millions spent on PR campaigns by the Israeli Foreign Ministry were never a match to any of Darwish’s powerful poems.

For me, the most striking and admirable thing about Darwish’s poetry is how it remained so resolutely humanist and universalist in its message. Never did Darwish succumb to cheap nationalism and chauvinism; never did he resort to vilification of his oppressors or the usual jingoism so common in political art and literature. Never did he forget that his oppressor too is human, just like him. The magnanimity, forgiveness and humanism he exhibited in his work remain the ultimate credit to this great author.

Throughout ethnic cleansing, living as a second-class citizen, being placed under house arrest, having his second-class citizenship revoked, being chased and hounded from one exile to another, being bombed in almost each of these exiles and living under countless sieges, Darwish’s humanism never succumbed. One of his most popular poems, Rita, spoke of his love for a Jewish Israeli woman by that name; and about the absurdity of wars coming between lovers. This poem was made into a popular song by Lebanese musician Marcel Khalife.

In his powerful 2002 poem, A State of Siege, written during the Israeli siege of Ramallah, after talking of the sixth sense that allows him to skillfully escape shells, Darwish takes time to address the very Israeli soldiers shelling his neighborhood:

You, standing at the doorsteps, come in
And drink with us our Arabic coffee
For you may feel that you are human like us;

…

To the killer: If you had left the fetus thirty days,
Things would’ve been different:
The occupation may end, and the toddler may not remember the time of the siege,
and he would grow up a healthy boy,
and study the Ancient history of Asia,
in the same college as one of your daughters.
And they may fall in love.
And they may have a daughter (who would be Jewish by birth).
What have you done now?
Your daughter is now a widow,
and your granddaughter is now orphaned?
What have you done to your scattered family,
And how could you have slain three pigeons with the one bullet?

Darwish’s last poem, published a few weeks before his death, tells the fascinating tale of falling into one hole with one’s enemy. Darwish explores the dynamic of enemies facing a common plight; how the past is remembered and yet forgotten when they cooperate to murder a snake; how instinct triumphs over ideology and how a common plight makes the concept of enmity absurd. In a pretty accurate description of the current plight of Palestinians and Israelis, and in a very ominous phrase indicating that Darwish felt his impending death, he concludes:

He said: Would you negotiate with me now?
I said: For what would you negotiate me now,
in this grave-hole?
He said: On my share and your share of this common grave
I said: What use is it?
Time has passed us,
Our fate is an exception to the rule
Here lie a murderer and the murdered, sleeping in one hole
And it remains for another poet to take this scenario to its end!

But for me, the most memorable of Darwish’s work will always remain his seminal poem, Madeeh Al-Thill Al-‘Aaly (In Priase of the High Shadow). The poem was written on the deck of one of the ships carrying Darwish, along with thousands of Palestinian fighters, from Beirut to Tunisia after Israel’s barbaric destruction of Lebanon in 1982. Darwish recounts the daily realities of living under shelling and under siege in Beirut, the deafening silence of the rest of the world towards the plight of the Palestinians and Lebanese, and the harrowing details of the Sabra and Shatila massacre. Acerbic, witty, and powerful, Darwish skewers everyone from the Israeli government murdering civilians while pretending to be the victim (“You stole our tears, wolf”), to the American government (“The Plague”) giving every child a cluster bomb toy as a gift, to the Arab governments (“the bastard nations”) who refrain from doing anything to help their Palestinian brethren, and instead resort to pathetic anti-Semitic rhetoric to deflect attention away from their ineptitude.

Yet through it all, and as dark as the plight becomes, Darwish never loses sight of the humanism at the heart of his cause and at the heart of the Palestinian struggle. He continuously disparages nationalism and mocks its silliness. The ending of the poem, in particular, serves as a sort of Palestinian anti-Zionist humanist manifesto. In it, Darwish addresses the Palestinian fighter with powerful rhetorical questions, asking him about the true nature of his cause, and what he is really after. Mocking the trappings of nationalism and statehood, Darwish—in no uncertain terms—asserts that the cause has always been about humans, about freedom from oppression, about the revolution against persecution, about the lofty ideals of liberty, and most definitely not about petty nationalism and the toys of statehood:

It is for you to be, or not to be,
It is for you to create, or not to create.
All existential questions, behind your shadow, are a farce,
And the universe is your small notebook, and you are its creator.
So write in it the paradise of genesis,
Or do not write it,
You, you are the question.
What do you want?
As you march from a legend, to a legend?
A flag?
What good have flags ever done?
Have they ever protected a city from the shrapnel of a bomb?
What do you want?
A newspaper?
Would the papers ever hatch a bird, or weave a grain?
What do you want?
Police?
Do the police know where the small earth will get impregnated from the coming winds?
What do you want?
Sovereignty over ashes?
While you are the master of our soul; the master of our ever-changing existence?
So leave,
For the place is not yours, nor are the garbage thrones.
You are the freedom of creation,
You are the creator of the roads,
And you are the anti-thesis of this era.
And leave,
Poor, like a prayer,
Barefoot, like a river in the path of rocks,
And delayed, like a clove.
…
You, you are the question.
So leave to yourself,
For you are larger than people’s countries,
Larger than the space of the guillotine.
So leave to yourself,
Resigned to the wisdom of your heart,
Shrugging off the big cities, and the drawn sky,
And building an earth under your hand’s palm–a tent, an idea, or a grain.
So head to Golgotha,
And climb with me,
To return to the homeless soul its beginning.
What do you want?
For you are the master of our soul,
The master of our ever-changing existence.
You are the master of the ember,
The master of the flame.
How large the revolution,
How narrow the journey,
How grand the idea,
How small the state!

Darwish’s legacy will live on as eternally as his ultimate triumph against his oppressors: he never let them succeed in making him dehumanize them. In spite of living through the full gamut of Zionist oppression and the Palestinian plight, in spite of all the murders, the sieges, the shelling, the racism and the oppression, Zionism never succeeded in turning Darwish into a racist, and never succeeded in making Darwish hate his fellow human. His humanism shone through as his ultimate triumph, and the ultimate insult to the chauvinist, parochial, racist, and criminal Zionist project to which he was the quintessential antithesis.

——