mahmoud darwish

There were many passings to mourn in the last year but the death of Mahmoud Darwish has gained extra solemnity in the last week as Gaza is bombed to rubble. As the poet laureate of the Palestinian people and along with Edward Said one of their most eloquent spokesmen, his presence as a voice of reason and passion will be sorely absent from these ever more tragic times in his former homeland. I have always contended that the Palestinians have been a people sold short less by the Israelis and more by their own leaders. They never had a Ben Gurion, but they have also never had a Mandela or a Ghandi, which is what would have better served them. Arafat and Abbas were "rehabilitated" terrorists, while men like Habash never even got that modicum of legitimacy. (Keep in mind the Israelis funneled quite a bit of money in the eighties to both Hamas and Hezbollah, in an effort to destabilize the PLO.) The kind of senseless bloodshed that has dominated Palestinian resistance, especially sense the Second Intifada, does nothing to further their cause and only hardens the hearts of the right wing hawks in Israel. Meanwhile, Israelis in the south endure a siege mentality, never sure when crude rockets might be lobbed over from Gaza. It is sad beyond words and I truly think nothing will be done until two things occur. First, the Arab world has to recognize Israel and work together to give humanitarian and political aid to the nascent Palestinian state. Secondly, the United States has to broker real peace plans, setting aside all past prejudices and looking forward to a future beyond war, beyond terrorism, beyond the kind of tribal stone throwing that has paralyzed the collective ego of humanity and tends to remind me of the first section of "2001". Darwish, while certainly no lover of Israel, recognized the limits of violent resistance and spent much of his life attempting to "change the world through poetry" as he put it. He was among a handful of Arab intellectuals who condemned a proposed Holocaust denial conference in Lebanon in 2001, and he always dignified his fellow Arabs and Israelis as human beings, not entities. Darker times are surely ahead for the people of Palestine and Israel, but there was a ray of light offered by Darwish's pen that deserves a ceremonial remembrance in bleak days like the present ones.