At the start of 2023, the state of Israel installed a new government. This new ultranationalist religious cabinet included Itamar Ben-Gvir, a lawyer who had already established himself as a committed defender of far-right Jewish settlers.

Ben-Gvir, of the Religious Zionism faction, is a follower of the racist terrorist Meir Kahane and the mass murderer Baruch Goldstein (Goldstein carried out an armed attack on a room used as a mosque at the Cave of the Patriarchs in 1994, killing 29 worshippers and wounding 125.) Kahane believed vehemently that “Democracy and Judaism are not the same thing.”

The new Netanyahu cabinet, with the Religious Zionism faction as its prop, appears determined to prove that such is the case. Ben-Gvir has been handed control of policing in the occupied territories. Religious Zionism’s leader, Bezalel Smotrich, now heads the Civil Administration in the occupied territories.  

Thus, the life of Palestinians, already a life policed and administered by force of arms, is now controlled and determined by the settler far-right. The success of the Israeli far-right comes about at the same time as, and is a consequence of, the collapse of any meaningful Israeli left-whether secular or Zionist.

This success of the Israeli far right, though, should come as no surprise. In April 2021 Human Rights Watch released a 213-page report, “A Threshold Crossed”, which determined that Israeli authorities were  committing the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution. This finding was based on their documentation of an overarching government policy to maintain the domination by Jewish Israelis over Palestinians, coupled with grave abuses committed against Palestinians living in the occupied territory, including East Jerusalem.

Across Israel and the occupied territory, Human Rights Watch found that Israeli authorities have pursued an intent to privilege Jewish Israelis at the expense of Palestinians. They have done so by undertaking policies aimed at mitigating what they openly describe as the “demographic threat” Palestinians pose and maximizing the land available for Jewish communities, while concentrating most Palestinians in dense enclaves. The settler-colonial project which the state of Israel represents is stymied by this “demographic threat”-which is really the stalemate produced by ongoing Palestinian resistance.

The logic of Israel ‘s apartheid policies, and the focus on the demographic threat, was acknowledged by Moshe Dayan in 1956 when he stated:

A generation of settlement are we, and without the steel helmet and the maw of the cannon we shall not plant a tree, nor build a house. Our children shall not have lives to live if we do not dig shelters; and without the barbed wire fence and the machine gun, we shall not pave a path nor drill for water. - Times of Israel 28 April 2016. 

Dayan later stated, “Fundamentally a Palestinian state is an antithesis of the state of Israel: that is to say, the two are incompatible.” Thus, for all the lip service paid, post-the Oslo Accords, to a two state solution to the “Palestinian problem”, the logic of the settler-colonial project can only be towards a form of militarised apartheid – and a functioning democracy is ultimately an obstacle to that-such that the election of a far-right cabinet  and the ongoing erosion of democratic norms ultimately affecting the democratic norms of both Palestinian and Israeli society was the only logical end point. Depressing times, then.

Rising to meet the challenge

The publication by Smokestack Books of Tawfiq Zayyad’s poems is a reminder of a more hopeful period and provides a useful and inspiring demonstration of how the language of poetry can rise to meet the challenge of its times. Zayyad, born in 1929, in Mandatory Palestine, was a communist activist known as Abu el-Amin (‘The Trustworthy One’).

He was elected as mayor of Nazareth in 1975, and was co-author of a report on the torture of Palestinian prisoners which was the evidence base for the 1987 UN General Assembly "Report of the Special Committee To Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Population of the Occupied Territories", wherein the UN first fully acknowledged the torture and indefinite detention without trial which underpinned Israel’s penal policy in relation to the Palestinians. Zayyad was a member of Maki, the Israeli Communist Party, which sought to organise both Hebrew and Arab workers across national lines.

Zayyad is a very different poet to Mahmoud Darwish, widely seen as Palestine’s “national poet.” In a sense his work is cruder – it makes no effort to hide behind metaphor. For him dispossession is dispossession pure and simple. It is a brutal act done to further colonial aims. It is not cloaked in symbolism about lost Edens, as with Darwish, say, or Salem Jubran. It should be noted that Aida Bamia’s translation of these poems is somewhat rough and ready – which serves the poetry well on one level by allowing the rage at its heart to stand out – but seems occasionally misjudged (I doubt Zayyad would have described his gaolers as “pesky”  as her translation of “Evening Chat in Prison” has it.)

What stands out, though, is that this is a poetry written from a life of resistance, and that the language used is intended to be part of the process of resistance, not a means to prettify it or mystify it. In “Bitter Sugar”, for instance, Zayyad states that he writes “for the destitute” and all of the poems here demonstrate that same fidelity – the task is to exemplify the anger at dispossession in language that aims to be as harsh as the necessary struggle which Zayyad committed himself to. “And I bloody my usurper’s face/With poems sharp like knives.” Elsewhere, in “Behind Bars”, he says that “My poems pour/The cup of humiliation over your troops/And rub their faces in the mud.”

Bitter Sugar

Answer me,
Palestine, I call your wound drenching with salt.
I call it, screaming : let me melt away in it, then pour me.
I am your son, the tragedy left me here,
My neck under your knife.
I live on the rustle of nostalgia,
In my olive groves.
I write bittersweet poems for the paupers,
I write for the destitute.
I dip my pen deep in my heart,
In my veins.
I eat the hard steel wall,
I drink the October wind,
And I bloody my usurper’s face
With poems sharp like knives.
If the wreckage breaks my back,
I would replace it with a case
Made from the rocks of Hitteen.

Zayyad’s poem “Unadikum” (“I Shake Your Hand”) was set to music in the early 1980s. In 2021, it was adopted as a spontaneously chanted anthem by Palestinian demonstrators; “I did not disparage my homeland/Neither did I yield/I confronted my gaolers, alone, naked and barefoot.” It is difficult to imagine a time when such chants and such resistance will not yet again resonate in the face of militarised repression – but it helps to remember that the poem embodies a history of resistance across decades , in the face of brutality and betrayal, and was written by a man who was committed to a secular, revolutionary solution to the Palestinian struggle.

I Shake Your Hand

I implore you,
I shake your hands,
I kiss the ground on which you tread,
And I say: I will redeem you.
I offer you my eyesight,
The warmth of my heart I give you.
The tragedy I endure is my share of your plight.
I appeal to you,
I shake your hands.
I did not disparage my homeland,
Neither did I yield.
I confronted my gaolers, alone, naked, and barefoot.
My hand was bleeding,
Yet, I did not give up.
I maintained the grass over my forefathers’ tombs.
I implore you; I shake your hands!

That revolutionary tradition is not entirely defeated. In 2011 Israel was racked by large-scale strikes – social workers, doctors, railway workers against privatization  of education, health, and welfare services, and for public housing and for larger social-sector budgets. Among the slogans raised were “Tahrir Square is here in this town” and against “Mubarak, Assad, Netanyahu”. If Israeli workers can, at least momentarily, recognise common cause with the Arab spring, nothing is then entirely lost. Zayyad’s goal was “To recuperate the future from the darkness of greed/Lest it be bought and sold”. (“Evening Chat in Prison”).

However bleak the times, however popular Netanyahu’s government of bigots may seem, it’s worth remembering that the success of Likud in building a coalition with the far right in the Knesset ought to at least put to death any remaining illusions – for the fragments of the Israeli left seeking to reorganise – that there can be any parliamentary solution to any of the political problems it faces or that adherence to left-Zionism is anything other than a slow train to the same destination.

Zayyad’s poetry tells of another possibility, a conception of justice through revolt: “Whoever robs the right of others by force/How can he protect his right when the scale tilts?”. Zayyad’s blunt, angry poetry also suggests that what so often now passes for a political poetry that seeks to cover over its politics and have it dancing behind the words, just out of view. is of no real value to us either politically or aesthetically.

 We Are Here To Stay: Poems by Tawfiq Zayyad, translated by Aida Bamia, Smokestack Books 2023, ISBN 9781739772260, is available here.