Two Enemies in the Same Pit

Salman Masalha

Two Enemies in the Same Pit

One of the most difficult problems facing the Islam-based Arab societies is the absence of a culture of reckoning of conscience. In other societies reckoning of conscience is an established element of the culture and allows for self-correction, but in the Arab societies there are no such mechanisms. Religion does not provide these mechanisms, the corrupt regimes are not interested in such mechanisms and the Arab intellectuals, apart from a very few exceptions, do not provide these goods.

Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish has passed away and will not be able to address the war in Gaza now. However, before his death Darwish published, in July of 2008, a poem entitled “Scenario Prepared in Advance,” a hypothetical scenario about two enemies who find themselves in a pit. The one is the poet himself and the other is “The Enemy,” with a capital “T,” without specifying his identity as the reader can easily figure this out for himself.

And now the pit of Gaza is gaping wide open and the two enemies have fallen into it. And now the Palestinian is once again finding himself impotent in face of his self-deception. In an article published in the Ramallah-based Palestinian daily Al-Ayyam (January 10, 2009), Palestinian commentator Hani al-Masri protests that the reaction of the Palestinian public in the West Bank to the dimensions of the killing and destruction in Gaza appears wan. In his eyes, this reaction “looks more like solidarity actions that are organized elsewhere in the world and less like actions that should be coming from members of the same nation. Even the solidarity actions in other places have been larger than the solidarity that has been expressed by the public in the West Bank.”

Time after time the lament on the bitter Palestinian fate surfaces without any attempt to conduct a real reckoning of conscience. “We are weak, we are defeated … therefore forgive us our dead children,” writes Abdullah Awwad, firing the arrows of his criticism at the Palestinian leaders: “Why are Abbas and Mashal not going to Gaza?” inveighs Awwad. “A leader should be among his people. It is not the television screen that is the place for leaders … and up until now not a single one of the leaders has appeared among the fighters, among the people” (Al-Ayyam, January 8, 2009).

Palestinian author Ali al Khalili regrets that the Arabs and the Palestinians have entirely abandoned the role of the victim and have left this role to the murderer who has all the might. “The amazing thing,” writes al Khalili, is that “the world is accepting this Israel perception” (Al-Ayyam, January 8, 2009). Al-Khalili stresses that he wants to take advantage of the “Holocaust” of Gaza to restore the role of victim to the Palestinian, because in his opinion this is the role destined for the Palestinian in face of the Israeli murderers.

The only Palestinian intellectual who has written sharp criticism of Hamas is Hassan Khader. The aggressive attack on Gaza, he writes, has aims beyond one military achievement or another that Israel can obtain. Its aim is to carry out experiments with the fourth generation of weapons and to carry out experiments in new tactics of warfare. The Hamas has provided Israel with all the conditions for this attack. The Israelis know, says Khader, that God has given them the gift of ideal enemies, who produce a lot of noise and rhetoric. “The Hamas militia,” he adds, “has not kept any allies or friends, neither for the Palestinians nor for their cause. The Hamas organization has done everything possible in order to convince anyone who has not yet been convinced that in truth the Palestinians are Goliath and therefore they must be dealt with by force” (Al-Ayyam, January 6, 2009).

The poem that Darwish published before his death ends like this: “Here, in this place, murderer and dead man are in the same pit / and some other poet will have to continue this scenario / to its end.” And now, in the wake of the war in Gaza, another Palestinian poet, who is an Israeli citizen and an honorary candidate on the Hadash party list for the Knesset -- Samih al Qasim, a pretender to the title of national poet – has taken upon himself the job of finishing the scenario. In a poem entitled "Sermon for the Friday of Redemption," he writes: “I am the king of Jerusalem. Descendent of the Jebusite. Not you, Richard …/ From the Negev to the highest peaks of Galilee / Gather up your swords, gather up your shields, Richard / and start emigrating. / You are destined to wane, I am destined to wax … / The time has come to emigrate, Richard … I am the king of Jerusalem / leave me the cross / leave me the crescent / and the star of David … / If you wish, you will emigrate alive / and if you wish, you will emigrate dead” (from the Internet site of the Israeli Hadash party, January 10, 2009).

In contrast to this bogus rhetoric, Hassan Khader’s words shine like a lighthouse: “It is an irony of fate that the bogus Goliath is threatening the real Goliath … and declaring that Israel’s end is near while the real Goliath is battering the Palestinians, bombing them and weeping,” Khader summed up (Al-Ayyam, January 6, 2009).

In a poem that Darwish published following the violent takeover of the Gaza Strip by Hamas, he refers to Palestinian self-deception: “How we lied when we said that we are exceptional … Believing your own lies is worse than lying to others,” he wrote (Al-Hayyat, June 17, 2007).

As I write these words, the bloody game is still being played. It appears that both the players and the audience here in this place are continuing to demand more action in the unfinished tragedy. Therefore, in order to finish the bad scenario that is being written by bad people here where we are, this place needs above all a wise and courageous director to put an end to the Israeli-Palestinian blood wedding. And since there aren’t any wise playwrights and directors here where we are, the director must come from outside this place, in the form of heavy international pressure to end the Israeli occupation and to establish a Palestinian state on all the territories that have been occupied since 1967 and to push the Palestinian and Arab side to a genuine internalization of the recognition of the state of Israel. If not, almost certainly this tragic play will embark on another world tour of bloody performances.

Jerusalem, January 12, 2009

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Published in German: 14. Januar 2009, Neue Zürcher Zeitung

Published in: Middle East Transparent, English, Arabic

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On the One Hand, on the Other Hand

Salman Masalha

ON THE ONE HAND, ON THE OTHER HAND

These things must be said in an unvarnished way. The situation that has developed in this land that stretches from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River – call it the land of Israel if you like, or call it Palestine or any other name that crosses your lips – is above all a man-made tragedy, though the heavens have touched upon it.

On the one hand, the Hamas organization, sadly, is not fighting the Israeli occupation. Anyone who claims otherwise must first of all bring proofs from the mouths of spokesman for the Hamas organization itself. As long as the claimant does not define the boundaries of the occupation and reinforce his claim with quotations from the mouth of Hamas that it is fighting “this occupation,” anything he says will be tantamount to vanity of vanities, to put it mildly.

The Hamas organization in Palestine, like Osama bin Laden and the Taliban people who fought the Soviet occupation in Afghanistan with the encouragement and support of the United States, was born with the aid of the Israeli occupier and is tantamount to a Golem that has risen up and turned on its creator. For many years Hamas enjoyed the support of the leaders of the Israeli occupation, who wanted to create a counterweight to the Palestine Liberation Organization, which was waging the Palestinian struggle for national liberation. This attempt was made following the attempt – the previous failure – by the leaders of the occupation who were nourished by a mistaken Orientalist conception that had several years earlier pushed for the creation of the Village Associations in the occupied territories to constitute a counterweight to the urban leadership, which had taken the PLO path.

The Hamas organization, in that it is deeply immersed in the Islamic ideology, first and foremost endangers Palestinian nationalism, and this for the simple reason that it entirely negates this nationalism, as it does any other Arab nationalism. From the perspective of Hamas and its Islamic ideology, Palestine is nothing but an occupied stretch of land that belongs to the Muslim nation that aspires to restore its ancient glory in the form of the great Islamic caliphate of which Palestine constitutes but a tiny province. The Hamas organization has drawn encouragement not only from the success of the Khomeinist revolution that has taken root in Iran, but also from the “Jewish Hamas” that has emerged in Israel in the wake of the deepening of the Israeli occupation in the Palestinian territories after the war of June, 1967.

On the other hand, all of the moves that Israel and its many governments have made here in the past decades have been aimed at continuing the Israeli occupation, deepening it and perpetuating it in order to thwart the possibility of the establishment of a Palestinian state in the territories. It should be noted that even the peace agreement that Israel was compelled to sign with Egypt was signed in the end with gritted teeth on the part of the Israeli right that believes in occupations. Even the peace agreement with Egypt was made, inter alia, in order to neutralize the largest Arab country for the sake of the continuation of the occupation of the Palestinian territories. “The Palestinian Autonomy” that was included in that agreement revealed Israel’s real intentions, for in the autonomy plan, as Menachem Begin made clear in 1979, the reference was to autonomy of persons and not to autonomy of territory. In other words, the Palestinian inhabitants would administer their own affairs but they would not have the right to administer the territory. For indeed, the territory, according to the “Jewish Hamas,” is sacred Jewish land that no government has the right to relinquish. And thus, the occupation grew deeper and the Jewish settlements expanded and multiplied.

And just as the Palestinian Hamas is inimical to the Palestinian “national” interest, so the “Jewish Hamas” is inimical to the Israeli “national” interest. And thus, in the context of the conflict the two emerging “new nations” have gradually sunk into national-religious quicksand. And the deeper they sink into the land of Israel quagmire and into the Palestine quagmire, the more those who claim exclusivity over the swamp, as well as those who are sinking in it, fight each other and drown more and more people under their trampling feet.

In order to rescue the dwellers in this swamp of quicksand from the fate that is known and expected for both sides, there is a need to move on to a process of drying out the swamp instead of one side passing its water on the other, and that at a time when both of them are splashing around in a swamp that is sodden with blood in any case. Although the drying process is not easy because it requires a change in consciousness, a change in the culture that created the swamp that is devouring its inhabitants, there is no other way of getting out of the mud in which both sides are floundering. Neither the graves of Jewish patriarchs nor the graves of Arab patriarchs should be the aspirations of Jews and Arabs, for whoever sanctifies graves of patriarchs will end up interring sons in them. Many sons, from both sides, have already been swallowed up by this swamp and the mouth is still gaping open.

I am not a believer in nationalism of any sort. To my mind, nationalism is a serious illness of the human race and when it is mixes with religion that sanctifies graves it becomes a malignant and contagious disease, and this is the reality that has developed in this land before our very eyes.

Therefore, this land of quicksand needs courageous leadership, both on the Israeli side and on the Palestinian side. This land needs a courageous Israeli leadership that will act in a serious way, without stuttering or winking, to end the Israeli occupation in all the territories that were occupied in 1967. Yes, including Palestinian East Jerusalem. This land of quicksand equally needs a courageous Palestinian leadership that will also act seriously, without stuttering or winking, to end the occupation of 1967 and speak courageously and frankly to its people in order to bring about reciprocal recognition between Israel and Palestine as two independent states with all that this entails in international law. The moment each of the two peoples, in the two independent states, builds a secular and democratic state on its own side, in any case the border between them will be of no significance. Until then, we will be waiting for two “Messiahs,” an Israeli Ataturk and a Palestinian Ataturk. Until then, both sides will have to realize that there is no greater land of Israel and there is no greater Palestine. Period.

Everyone in whose heart the love of this entire land, with all its landscapes, sites and inhabitants, is deeply planted must partition it into a smaller Israel and a smaller Palestine. Precisely in this case, it is the splitting that will preserve the whole. For if not, this will not be a land of the living, neither for Jews nor for Arabs, neither for Israelis nor for Palestinians. For if not, only death will have a flourishing country here.

Jerusalem, January 5, 2009

Translated from the Hebrew by V. Eden

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The article in Middle East Transparent.

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The Little Girl from Gaza

Salman Masalha

The Little Girl from Gaza

The little girl from Gaza
builds nests
of sea feathers.
The man who stands by the wall
hides in his eyes a necklace
strung of memory leaves.

When the street runs
beneath untamed steps,
the nests cracks
open with legends.
Boys scamper
in the dusk colors.
They gather the muffled voice
from the desert sands.

 At evening,
the necklace scatters the beads
from the eyes, and moisten
the seapath.
Night
dispatches the smile
into exile.
The poet's soul
is spent in words.


Translated by Vivian Eden

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From: Rish al-Bahr (Sea Feathers), Zaman Publications, Jerusalem 1999.

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The Language Angels Speak

Salman Masalha

The Language Angels Speak

Presumably like all kids around the world, I was once asked an immortal question: What would you like to be when you grow up? Quite bizarre and abnormal in the circumstances and conditions I was born to, and unlike other children who have dreamed of becoming doctors, advocates, engineers etc., my answer always was: I want to be a poet. Those who might think in terms like self-achievement of a little child will soon find out that they were completely wrong. As it became clear to me later, being a poet is not a self-achievement in any way. After all it seems to me now a kind of punishment rather than a joyful experience. Nevertheless, the world of poetry is a kind of prison world in which residency is still worthy.

Poetry is a prison within the chaos of letters, signs, words, lines and all possibilities that language with its generosity provides for us. In this sense the role of a poet is comparable with the role of the First Creator who has set an order in the universe from within the wide and huge disorder. Poetry itself has no sense of time nor sense of place nor sense of nationality. In its very essence poetry holds all times, inhabits all places, experience all lives and talks to all nations at once. The language of poetry is the language of human experience despite color, sex and tongues. It is a meta-language that goes beyond the tongues scattered from Babel in the four directions of the wind. The language of poetry is the first sense of divine creation and the first spark of eternity. Furthermore, poetry is the tool with which poets compete with the work that was done by God. It competes with God for it tries to reshape His unfinished clumsy work. Optimists might say, He did not finish the job for reasons of unknown divine generosity, with the aim of leaving some space for the taste of living to the Earthly people. Pessimists, on the other hand, and surely they include poets and others who belong to different disciplines of the arts, will say: He didn’t do His work properly as it should be done.

In the beginning there were words in chaos, and darkness covered the cell of the primal prison. In a moment of will, the poet emerged from the darkness and collected all signs and letters and put them on paper. He picked up some of them and set them in the order: L. I. G. H. T. Then all off a sudden there was light. With this light he could see all words of all languages in their chaos. And that was the first day. That was the first poem.

With this light the real poet can see all meanings that potentially exist in languages. He can form the word of love and let others love their way. He can reshape the smell of existence and give some hope to the increasing miserable ones on Earth. He can speak out about death and beyond similes and metaphors aims to show the hidden meaning of life. With its few lines, poetry enables us to communicate with other peoples and reveal other cultures. It enables us to make wings of words and fly into other spheres and stop in other lands for language is the one and only promised homeland for a poet. Now, that time has passed and I am not a naive kid anymore, I have figured out another thing: Poetry is a supreme inner-net, a supreme maze that never lets you reach any end. Within this eternal maze the poet will exist until the Day of Judgment, when he is supposed to present his provocative alternative work in front of the first sole reader whom he competed with initially and all the way long. If the world was created and was put in focus by the light of poetry in on first day, no doubt this light will last until the end of days. Now, I have nothing but another wish: I wish I could live then in order to watch that last fight, that last light.

Finally, despite a Muslim tradition in which we are told that the inhabitants of the Garden of Eden speak the Arabic language, and despite the fact that it is the language angels speak, I can testify, from personal experience, that Arabic is the tongue in Hell as well.

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The Poem

Salman Masalha

THE POEM

Empty the sea of its fish.
Bring clouds back to the river.
Wipe from the infant’s lips
the weight of pregnant women.
Branches of grief shade all.
And legends are sorrows
milked from widows’ breasts.
When prophets depart
do not report the loss.
And never never say
that hope hides in
the poem.


Translated by Vivian Eden with the author

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The Song

Salman Masalha

THE SONG

The Arab’s Speech

Every time I say I’m hungry
a military genius hands me a fishing pole
and sends me to catch some fish in the desert,
but I hook only scales.
And as I don’t drink sand,
I can’t pass my water. Moreover
I suffer from constipation.
And as I am hungry, and truly love life,
I eat my toes, because I so regret
I agreed to go out fishing
in murky sands.


The Jew’s Speech

Every time I say I’m hungry
a political genius sends me to drink
the sea water. Then I pass,
with my water, a fish without scales.
I am unable to dish it up on my table.
It’s strictly banned by religious law.
And as I am hungry, and truly love life,
I throw it back into the sea, where it dies of thirst
for I drank up all its water first.
I laugh out of sorrow, as in my current state
I can’t even die
of laughter.


The Silent Majority’s Speech

Death to the hungry!
Death to the hungry!


The Fish’s Speech

Silence is boring!
Silence is boring!
If you don’t stop,
I won’t talk
and I won’t pass water
any more.


The Poet’s Speech

Enough! When
will this song end?

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Translated from Arabic by Vivian Eden with the author

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Published in: Modern Poetry in Translation, third series, No. 14 (Polyphony), ed. David & Helen Constantine, Short Run Press, Exeter 2010

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In Haifa by the Sea

Salman Masalha

In Haifa by the Sea

(In memory of Emile Habiby)


In Haifa, by the sea, the smells of salt
rise from the earth. And the sun
hanging from a tree unravels wind.
In a row of trees bathed in stone
men, women and silence have been
planted. Tenants in an apartment
block called homeland.
Jews whose voices I haven't heard,
Arabs whose meaning I haven't understood.
And other such melodies I couldn't
identify in the moment that went silent.


There in Haifa, by the sea,
he had them all. Poet, exile
in the wind, seeking the past
in a question blessed with answers.
Pulling words out of the sea and
throwing them back to the waves
that, like Messiah, will return eternally.
A poet has returned to a poem he never wrote
in the night of captivity, and hasn't yet returned
to the place that he drew as a child in a cloud.


There in Haifa, by the sea, at the end
of the summer that broke on the treetop,
a moon unfurled. I return to the
silence I had split with my lips.
I return to the words asleep inside
the paper. Moist clods of earth
and a salty path have forever wrapped
the fisherman's pole. Little
words lay down to rest, and a poem
went silent there in Haifa, by
the sea.


Translated from the Hebrew by Vivian Eden
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Published in: Haaretz Books, November 2008

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This poem is from, "In Place" (Am Oved, 2004). It is performed by singer Micha Shitrit on his album “Shilhei Kayitz.”
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Patches of Color

Salman Masalha

PATCHES OF COLOR

On the wall that leans inward,
which I built of words that pecked
my path, I have drawn neither windows nor
door. And all this, for fear that undesirable
air will infiltrate my home. And I
am not as young as I was. But I hung
in their stead frames I had saved
from the days of my childhood. And I painted
in green the hands of a woman disguised
in mountain black. A white cloud,
with no storm in its wings, landed beside her
and played with the tail of a bird embroidered
on a floral scarf. The nurse who cares
for the old man feathers the nest in the faded
blue, and when the sun ignites flames
in my fragile dream plumes,
windows gape in the ceiling.
And a bird that was brooding
in my disputing heart flies
to the center of the sky
and lands at the opening
of the pit that is mined.


Translated by Vivian Eden

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published in Haaretz, English Edition.

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Honor Killing

Salman Masalha

HONOR KILLING

There is not a single Arab locale in Israel or abroad that has not experienced murders in the context of what is known as “family honor.” Weak-minded Arab intellectuals try to minimize the important of these deeds with various claims, including the comparison of “family honor” killing with the crime passionel, murder provoked by romantic love or jealousy, which have always been known to human society. I will return to the matter of “romance” later.

No one has tried to investigate this appalling phenomenon in Arab society among Muslims, Druze and Christians. All too often we hear about such murders and we say nothing. But the nothing in the mouths of the Arab intellectuals turns into blood. The rivers of blood will continue to flow as long as many strata of Arab society, from the clerics who are trained in “Thou shalt not kill” to the intellectuals of the various communities, do not gather their courage and speak out resoundingy in their societies.

There is no basis in religion or canon law for these murders. Neither Islam nor its Druze offshoot permits horrible murder of this sort, and neither does Christianity, certainly (nor Judaism). Nonetheless these murders have always occurred in Arab society. How is it possible that at the end of the 20th century Arab public figures and elected office-holders like mayors and municipal council members, or newspaper editors and poets, dare not full-throatedly condemn this appalling phenomenon? (“It is uncomfortable” for them to denounce it, they say.) And how is it possible that there are Arab journalists and “intellectuals” who decry “rebelliousness” when they discuss the latest incident in Daliat al Carmel and who see a woman’s freedom of choice as “social and moral rebellion?” In face of these forces of darkness, there are a few bright spots, such as Muhammad Naffa and Knesset Member Saleh Salim, both of Hadash, who have clearly condemned the murder and also the tough editorial on the issue in the newspaper Al-Ittihad.

But again: What is the source of these immoral traditions? To answer this question it is necessary to examine the vague concept known as “Arab honor” from another perspective. Ever since it came into the world, back in the period before Islam, Arab society has been a tribal society. The tribe is the only political unit the value of which supersedes any other value – such as homeland or country or any other social system. The honor of the tribe supersedes a person’s value as an individual and therefore the attitude towards the individual’s life is dubious.

Islamic ideology declared war on, among other things, the Arab tribal tradition but its success in this was limited to a brief period. Resurgent tribalism wiped out all of the cultural achievements of Islam in the Middle Ages. The Arab society of today continues to conduct itself according to purely tribal criteria and every Arab village constitutes a kind of microcosm of the Arab world as a whole.

In a tribal society the human being, the individual, is not the supreme value and this is also true in a society based on religious monotheism. In both instances there are entities that are above the human being. In the one case it is the tribe, with all its values, and in the other it is God. Between the two of them the individual loses his honor and in may cases also his life.

And this is is not only a tribal society. It is a male tribal society, with all this implies. In such a society there are weak links. The first weak link is the individual, but the woman is an even weaker link. When the ideologies – tribalism and monotheism together – deny human beings, individuals, their existence as autonomous entities who act in accordance with universal human values, the individual finds himself – or herself –deprived of human dignity.

And because Arab society is a male tribal society, it denies the Arab male his dignity and honor as an individual and leaves him only one escape route, a route by means of which he tries to seek his lost honor in the weakest link of all, which is the Arab woman. More precisely, his honor and dignity lie between the legs of his daughter, his wife and even his mother, who want to be free individuals in control of their own selves and their own bodies.

In these murders there is indeed an element of the romantic crime passionel, but no one has dared to discuss this point publicly as it really is. It works like this: The tribe – social or religious – constitutes a kind of small national unit. Its primary value is to marry within the tribe and preferably – within the most proximate link, with a cousin. When inter-clan marriages take place, this is perceived as the establishment of relations between two nations (and therefore commerce in brides exists among different clans). However, marriages to other clans take place only in the absence of an alternative.

The male is the property of the tribe, and the woman is the property of the male, and in the profoundest way: She is the property of her brother, her father, her son. When an Arab man rises up and murders his daughter – or his sister, or his mother – he is giving expression to his “romantic” jealously in this way. He is jealous – because she has freed herself from his hands, she has betrayed him. The Arab male, in the depths of his soul, wants to maintain his romantic connection with the woman who is related to him. However, since the social taboos are so strong, he directs his property – his mother, his sister, his daughter – to the male who is closest to him. Only in this context is it possible to understand the frequency of marriages between relatives in Arab society.

In order to exit this bloody social cycle it is necessary to establish the human being, the individual, as the primary concern of Arab society. It is necessary to restore to the Arab male his personal honor and dignity as an individual – it is the denial of this that has made him a potential murderer. It is necessary to re-educate Arab society in all its tribes and branches, and this is the first thing that needs to be done by Arab public figures, academics and intellectuals if they truly aim to build a modern society with universal values. Their silence or their professions of understanding for “honor killings” makes them complicit in grave crimes. My place is not with them.

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Translated from Hebrew by Vivian Eden
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Published in Haaretz Magazine, October 27, 1995


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In the Dark Room

Salman Masalha

In the Dark Room

In the dark room, you see things
you can't see in the lit room.
The alien light that comes from afar
slips into the yard like a shadow
fatigued by the darkness. A black
bird on the windowsill
suckles honey in the fog.
I bear a blessing from the Book
Of Secrets. I reveal the story
of the Vale of Tears. The man
who swam in shallow water
gathers goldfish from
the puddles and protects them
from the thieves for the child
who drowned wetly in a teardrop.
In the dark room you remember
things you had forgotten
in foreign lands. In the darkness
that rises from the longings
for the boy who is not, there is
a back room, filled with a grown
child's memories. Sealed like
a past that never knew a present.
Packed, like a life,
with a surfeit of death.


Translated by Vivian Eden

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Published in: The Guardian, Books, May 17, 2008

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