Ottoman History Podcast - Palestinian Citizens of Israel and the Arab World

Episode Date: January 8, 2024

with Maha Nassar hosted by Susanna Ferguson | 1948 marks the year that Israel gained independence, and for Palestinians, an experience of mass exile known as the Nakba. The displacement of Palestinians and subsequent conflicts between Israel and its Arab neighbors had immense consequences. But how did the Palestinian Arabs who remained and make up roughly 20% of Israel's population today fit into a Middle East region defined by the "Arab-Israeli conflict?" In this podcast, we speak to Maha Nassar, whose first book Brothers Apart: Palestinian Citizens of Israel and the Arab World casts new light on a community historically marginalized both within Israel and within broader discussions of contemporary Arab history. We discuss how Palestinian citizens of Israel were cut off from friends, relatives, and compatriots after 1948, and how they used literature as means of forging new transnational connections during the era of Arab nationalism and decolonization. Through the insights born out of their paradoxical experiences, Arab-Israeli authors of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction would come to occupy a prominent place not only within both Arab and Israeli literature but also global political thought.    « Click for More »

This is the Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Susanna Ferguson. 1948 marks the year that Israel achieved independence. For Palestinians, 1948 is known as the Nakba, or catastrophe, in which roughly 750,000 Palestinians were exiled and barred from returning to their ancestral lands. More than half a century later, millions of Palestinians and their descendants remain refugees thanks to the 1948 war and subsequent conflicts, which reshaped the political and social landscape of the modern Arab world. But what about those Palestinians who remained and became citizens of the newly declared state of Israel?

How did they fit into a Middle East defined by the so-called Arab-Israeli conflict? Our guest in this episode, Dr. Maha Nassar, has studied this question and an array of other issues in the cultural and intellectual history of Palestine and the broader Arab world. Professor Nassar, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having me. It's great to be here. I thought we could start by asking you to introduce the community who animates your work, Palestinian citizens of Israel. This is not a community that's often at the center when we talk about Palestinians writ large. So who became a Palestinian citizen of Israel. This is not a community that's often at the center when we talk about Palestinians writ

large. So who became a Palestinian citizen of Israel? And what shape did this community take in the aftermath of the Nakba in 1948? I think the first thing to note is that the Palestinian citizens of Israel are an integral part of the broader Palestinian Arab people. They were very much a part of and continue to be part of the Palestinian national community, national body. And their circumstances, like so many of the Palestinians, were very much impacted by the 1948 Nekba. So we know about the 1948 Nekba as the experience of displacement where an estimated 750,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes as the state of Israel was formed in 1948. We don't hear as much about those Palestinians, around 100,000 to 150,000 or so who managed to either remain in or return to their homes and their land upon the foundation of Israel in 1948.

Right around the time, sort of at the end of 48, there are an estimated 100,000 Palestinians who are in the areas that have been declared to be part of the Israeli state. About 60,000 of them are in the Galilee in the north. About 20,000 of them are in the center. And about another 20,000 of them are in the Naqab or the Negev Desert in the south. Over the next few years, Jordan ceded some additional land adjacent to the northern West Bank to Israel known as the Little Triangle. Additional Palestinians managed to sneak in or return to their homes. So by 1952, we're looking at an estimated population of about 179,000 Palestinians who are living within the state of Israel, mostly in the north.

Now, initially, Israel didn't really want to give them citizenship, but Israel's own acceptance into the international community came at a time when there was a lot of skepticism and a lot of criticism about Israel's refusal to accept back Palestinian refugees that had been expelled. And so in fact, Israel's first bid to the UN was rejected amid these concerns. And so as part of its second bid, Israel announced to the UN and to the international community that it was extending suffrage to those Palestinians who remained within its borders. And it also made what we now know as a disingenuous promise to repatriate up to 100,000 Palestinian refugees, which of course didn't happen.

And so given this tenuousness and given the widespread criticism in the international community at that time, and given Palestinians' own push to be allowed to return back home and attempts to return home, Israel was very eager, their leaders were very eager to present Israel to the world as a thriving democracy, complete with a content Arab minority, in order to stave off pressure to take refugees back in. And so this allowed them to resist return and also to try to shake off the label of them as being a colonizing country by saying, no, no, we are a multicultural Jewish state with a content Arab minority. And here, look, we have these Arabs. They never called them Palestinians. They only called them Arabs. Hey, look, we have this

Arab minority. We've given them citizenship. Look how happy they are. And in 1953, they passed the citizenship law that formally gave citizenship to the Palestinians, most Palestinians living within Israel, not all. That was a lower category than what they called the national category. And that's how they were able to bring Palestinians in as citizens, but not give them full rights as compared to Jewish Israelis. So what were some of the differences between the citizenship that Jewish Israelis enjoyed and the kind of citizenship Palestinians were offered? So the most important difference was the legal regime. Jewish Israelis were subject to civil law,

that, as the name would indicate, accorded them basic civil rights, an ability to defend themselves if they are accused of a crime, an ability to move freely within the state. Palestinians, on the other hand, were placed under military law, martial law, not unlike the kinds of military governance that rules the West Bank and ruled the Gaza Strip in many ways up until today. But that military occupation style of rule meant that the Palestinian citizens, the residents and then citizens, needed passes and permits in order to be able to go from one part of the country to another, even from their homeland to their place of work, for example. There were military governors assigned to different districts that had

Palestinian populations in them. And again, not unlike what we see in the occupied territories, in them. And again, not unlike what we see in the occupied territories, those military governors could issue work permits and revoke work permits. They could allow people to pass or not. They could throw people in jail without trial. So the military regime, which lasted until 1966, was the main difference. And it impacted every aspect of Palestinians' lives in Israel. Were there attempts by Palestinians or Jewish Israelis to change that legal structure by legislative means? Or was that always kind of assumed to be a non-starter because they were a minority population? So the Israeli Communist Party was the main vehicle for legislative push towards greater equality. Israel didn't allow for any kind of anti-Zionist or Arab nationalist party to take

form or gain legitimacy. People tried and it didn't work. So the Communist Party, which identified as non-Zionist, but not anti-Zionist, and had Arabs and Jews as equal members, that was the main vehicle. And Israel was reluctant to shut it down because of its backing from the Soviet Union. And in the 1950s and 60s, Israel was seeking rapprochement with the Soviet Union. And so that was the main vehicle. But they, I think, never topped maybe five or six seats in the Knesset out of 120. They were never in the ruling coalition either. And so, yes, they called for a revocation of the military law and military rule, but it was always from the oppositional benches and never

gained real salience, again, until 1966. So given these conditions of really different political and legal rights, I'm curious how Palestinian citizens of Israel began to organize politically in the late 1940s and early 1950s. So what were some of the major questions or issues that they took up in that period, either in political activism or cultural and intellectual production. So the first thing to note is that the majority of Palestine's urban inhabitants, the majority of the urban Palestinian Arabs were targeted for expulsion in the early stages of the 1948 Nakba, Yaffa, Haifa, West Jerusalem. These were all areas that were targeted by Zionist militias.

And those societies also formed the economic and intellectual core of Palestinian society. And so because most of that intelligentsia and most of the capital was forced out, the community that was left was primarily rural and primarily far away from the urban centers. And so in those first few years, it was really just a matter of reconstituting some semblance of a society because all of the major social and political institutions had been decimated as a result of the Nakba. The first few years was a matter of survival, and it was also a kind of attempt to gauge Israel's actions against its words. In other words, from its very founding in 1948, Israel was saying, we're a democratic society, we recognize minority rights, Arab rights

as a minority, etc. And so you had Palestinians testing that claim. So they would go to the courts, and they would publish critical opinion pieces, and they would demand family reunification. They basically demanded that Israel do what it says it is, which is a democratic state. And time and time again, in those first five or six years, their hopes were dashed. Because time and again, Israel said, we don't care if you can show us your land deed, we're confiscating your land. We don't care if you can show that you fall into the category of family reunification, we're not allowing you to bring in your spouse. So time and again, Palestinians were testing Israeli claims of democracy. And So time and again, Palestinians were testing Israeli claims of

democracy. And time and time again, they were being shown in their faces that that wasn't going to be the case. So by the early to mid 50s, they start trying to organize more politically. And again, the Communist Party was the main place for that, where that was taking place. And it was also taking place at a time, if we broaden the lens a little bit and think about the broader Arab world in the 1950s, mid-50s, we're thinking about mass mobilization. We're thinking about a rise in the press. We're thinking about more explicit anti-Western colonialism, more explicit condemnations of the British and the French and their machinations in the region. We can think also about things like the Algerian War of Independence, the

nationalization of the Suez Canal. So as folks in Arabic-speaking countries are becoming more explicit in their calls for national independence and an end to Western colonialism. Similarly, we start to see Palestinians inside the state of Israel also becoming more explicit in their calls for not just equal rights, because that's proven to be a dead end, although they continue to push for equal rights, but also tapping into this larger discourse of decolonization and liberation. And that's perhaps even despite what you describe in the book as a broader condition of isolation, right, that they are able to make those connections and sort of think with those regional frameworks,

despite the fact that it's actually quite hard in this moment for them to engage with Arabic speaking audiences and groups elsewhere, as well as the Arab press. Could you talk a little bit more about how they managed that, how they managed to build those pathways to this world of kind of Arab regional anti-colonial thought. Well, that's one of the big things that I found in my research and one of the major themes, actually, of the book itself. So in addition to being placed under military rule, it's important to also grapple with the extent to which these Palestinian citizens of Israel were isolated, both within the state of Israel and these different regions, the north, the center,

and the south, even within villages and among villages. So isolated within their country, and then even more so isolated from the rest of the Arab world. So they were not allowed to travel to any Arab countries. Arab states had a boycott on Israel anyway. Once in a while, a few of them were able to meet with their Arab counterparts at conferences in Europe. And so given their physical and geographic isolation and inability to travel, and given that this is before social media, this is before the internet and all of that. And so the circulation of texts, physical paper, magazines, journals, poetry collections become the means of overcoming this isolation and resisting this isolation. And so it took form in a few different ways.

One was through the sneaking or not even sneaking, but bringing over text, sometimes surreptitiously, sometimes not. Was this something that the Israeli state was trying to prevent? The circulation, I mean, of Arabic language material. So it happened in a few different ways. And understanding the different pathways can kind of give you a sense of what's going on. So one pathway was Iraqi Jewish intellectuals who come to Israel in the early 50s, many of them very keyed into the Arab nationalist and anti-colonial discourses of Iraq of the sort of early late 40s, early 50s, and the free verse movement of poetry that Iraqis were at the forefront of, Iraqi poets.

So you have people like Sasson Someh and Samiz Mikhail, who are bringing their poetry collections from Iraq to Israel, and then sharing them, because they joined the Israeli Communist Party, sharing them with the Palestinian members of that party, and publishing in their local literary journals, things like that. So if you are a member of the Israeli Communist Party, you might see it in the party press or your friend might loan you his collection and then you take very good care of it because it's very precious. But you read, sometimes you might copy down poems or verses so that you can keep a copy

for yourself. And you can imagine the time and the effort it takes to hand copy poems and essays and things like that. And then they would return it to the owner. And so in that way, it would be circulated around. So that's one way. A second way was ironically through the Oriental Studies Library at Hebrew University. So Hebrew University has a big Oriental Studies department, and so they would import magazines, journals, poetry collections. And so in the late 50s, early 60s, students who were studying at Hebrew University, even if they're studying law or science or something else, they would go to the library and check out the books within the library and again, kind of hand copy. And when I interviewed poets and cultural producers, you could see in their eyes how precious even the act of hand

copying poetry was for them. And they took it very seriously. And it was a labor of love for them that they were doing, even leaving their schoolwork and other things aside. So that was a second pathway. A third pathway was through friends abroad who would mail them publications. They have a friend in Europe who would have a subscription to say an Egyptian magazine. So the Egyptian magazine would get sent to Europe via subscription and then put in an envelope and then mailed to Sayyid Ashad Hussein, who's living in Israel. So that would be a third pathway. The catch is that Israel didn't ban Arabic publications or publications from the Arab world, but they criminalized Palestinians having possession of them. So Rashid Hussein, for example, recalls about how his apartment was raided once by the Israeli police, not for anything that he did wrong, not for any contraband, except the contraband

they were looking for were Lebanese and Egyptian magazines. So they confiscated them all up. And he laments in an essay describing the incident, he laments that their only crime was that they were Arabic and being published in the Arab world. And Rashid Hossein, who was a poet and an intellectual in his own right, he spends his first night in jail in Israel because he has Arabic magazines and newspapers.

So I say all of this to kind of indicate both the power and the strength of texts, Arabic textual material and the circulation of texts, but also to indicate that the Israeli state also saw them as a threat, so much so that they would raid a poet's home and confiscate them. And I think that's really powerful as we continue to live in a moment where the circulation of poetry, of essays, of thought, you know, within and beyond Palestine remains extremely politically essential, I think. So we talked a little bit about how this community of Palestinians in Israel engaged with the broader Arab region through print. I'm curious if you could talk about how they related to intellectuals and politicians from the broader Arab region through print. I'm curious if you could talk about how they related to intellectuals and politicians from the broader Arab world and how Arab states

thought about or didn't this community. So I think didn't is the operable word here. Arab states largely ignored Palestinian citizens of Israel. In the 50s, they weren't really on the radar at all, certainly not in the early and mid-1950s. And in the late 50s, in 1958 to be exact, as part of Israel's 10th anniversary, they did this kind of Hasbara extravaganza with publications and photo essays and all kinds of things to try to show to the world that their Arab minority, again, always Arab, was happy and content and was being modernized. There's a really interesting kind of paternalistic modernizing discourse where the Israeli state would present itself to the Palestinian citizens of Israel and the world as like, you are benighted

and backwards, and so we're going to uplift you. So the 1958 discourse was very much around that kind of theme. And so I think a lot of Arab states and Arab intellectuals, for lack of access to alternative narratives, they kind of bought into it, or the very least didn't weren't aware of the pushback that was happening inside israel and so in the late 50s and early 60s i find really disappointing recounts of disappointment in encounters between palestinian citizens of israel and arab and their arab counterparts because of the level of ignorance about them, or the assumption that they are indeed a happy minority in the Israeli state, or sometimes questions of like, why didn't you leave? Why would you stay in a Jewish state?

When the whole discourse for them since 1948 has been a push for Palestinian refugees to return. And so they would ask their Arab interlocutors, why would you want me to leave when you're telling everyone that the goal is return? And then stumped for an answer, they'd say, oh, okay, I guess you're right. So that was the case for much of the 50s and first half of the 60s even. After 1967, though, things change really dramatically. Because what happens is, even a little prior to 1967, Palestinians in the diaspora, Ghassan Kanafani in particular gets a lot of credit for this, starts to let people know that, hey, there are these Palestinians inside Israel. They are pushing back against the state. And in fact, they're producing very defiant lines of

poetry. And then once the 67 war happens, there's a huge spike in interest in the Palestinian citizens of Israel. And that's where they come to be better known in the Arab world. So maybe this is a moment where we could turn to the work of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish and think about some of his poetry as a kind of moving force in some of the transformations that you're discussing. Would you be willing to read Darwish's I Am an Arab? transformations that you're discussing. Would you be willing to read Darwish's I Am an Arab? I'd love to. Let me say a few words about Darwish himself, because I think he's now known as the iconic Palestinian national poet. I think a lot of people don't know, though, he grew up inside the state of Israel. I was about to say he grew up as a citizen of Israel, but he actually wasn't

a citizen of Israel. He was one of the internally displaced who did not get citizenship. So remember I said in 1953, Israel extended citizenship to most of the Palestinians living there. But those who weren't counted as part of the census in 1948, there was a hastily convened consensus, census rather, weren't counted. So Darwish was born in Palestine pre-48. His family flees to Lebanon during the 48 war and then sneaks back in a few years later. But because they weren't part of that census, they don't get citizenship. So Darwish has very memorable experiences of being both a Palestinian refugee, as well as being a Palestinian going through the Israeli school system and the Israeli society, but also as being an internal refugee and as being undocumented. And so he has to live in the shadows of the society that is already alienating towards him.

of the society that is already alienating towards him. There's a story, a very poignant story that he tells in an interview. Because he's undocumented, essentially, the family and the community is worried that if the Israeli state apparatus sees him and gets a hold of him, they're going to expel his whole family back across to Lebanon. So he tells a story about being a seven-year-old in school when a school supervisor comes to do inspections, like an inspector comes who's an employee of the state. And so the principal hides seven-year-old Darwish in his closet in the principal's office so that the inspector doesn't catch him and risk expulsion. So as I think about that, I imagined what it would be like for a seven-year-old boy to be hiding in a closet, knowing that if he's caught, his entire world,

his family's entire world would be upended. And so I think those experiences and his formative years as being a Palestinian and then a refugee and then an internal refugee. And then eventually as an adult, he manages to get citizenship. Those multiple positionalities, I think, gave him insight into the Palestinian experience in ways that allowed him to speak to so many different perspectives. It's discovered in the 50s that he has a penchant for poetry a talent for writing poetry he talks about how when he was in the eighth grade he is invited to give a poem in in school and so he does and he says something kind of plaintive about how he longs to be free and why his jewish classmates aren't are free and he's not and so forth.

And he gets called in and kind of warned that this kind of poetry is unacceptable, that this kind of poetry would be deemed as incitement. So he backs off and does romantic poetry and sort of nature and whatnot. But then when he's around 17, 18, he turns back to political poetry. And he recites a poem at a poetry festival. His first one that I saw in the poetry festival, it was called Sister. And it was about him and his sister. And the poem concludes with him saying that we will return. So what does it mean for a Palestinian in Israel to say that, to invoke him and his sister to say we will return or we are returning? Again, it speaks to the universality of the Palestinian experience as it's being expressed

by Darwish, even though in theory he is not part, he's often not seen as or he his position wouldn't have been seen as part of the palestinian experience because he's in israel well it also invites us to think much more broadly about the question of return right and what what actually that concept contains and could contain so absolutely and i think it's worth noting that even a lot of the Palestinians who did get Israeli citizenship were themselves displaced from their native towns and villages and neighborhoods in cities. So they might live in one part of the city.

So a lot of the residents of Haifa, for example, the Palestinian Arab residents of Haifa, even those who managed to stay in Haifa, they were shunted into one dilapidated neighborhood within Haifa called Waid al-Nisnas, which still lacks adequate municipal support and so forth. So the ghettoization, the isolation of Palestinians, even those who remained within their country, is part of the broader Palestinian experience that again, as you said, speaks to the universality of the Palestinian experience, regardless of their citizenship status or their geographic location. So turning back to Record I Am an Arab, so this poem was recited in 1961. So Deroesh is about 20 years old at the time. And it's at a time when the Israeli state is having a huge push to confiscate more land in the Galilee that would be for the

sole use of Jewish Israelis. This is part of a much larger pattern. Again, something that we see a lot of in the occupied territories, the confiscation of Palestinian-owned land for the use of Israeli settlers. And so this was a poem that was recited at a protest, and that's something else to note. So I know I'm leaving your listeners in suspense, but I do want to say one more thing about this poetry before I recite the poem, which is that poetry also played an integral role in protest. So it wasn't just poetry that was being read in a book or copied in a library, but a lot of the most famous poetry that was being produced at this time was being declaimed and recited out loud at poetry festivals, at protests. It was meant to be heard,

it was meant to be experienced orally, and not just written or read on a page. And so this poem, Record I Am an Arab, comes at a time of protest when Palestinian citizens of Israel are protesting the confiscation of land in the Galilee in an effort to create what the Israelis were calling the Judaization of the Galilee. So this is Darwish's 1963 poem called Identity Card, and it would become one of the most often recited poems among Palestinians in Israel and then eventually among the Palestinians as a whole. And even if you go today on YouTube or elsewhere, you'll find recordings of Darwish himself reciting the poem, as well as others. It often will be a cover on songs and things like that. So thinking about this in the context of a protest and thinking about it too in the broader development

of free verse poetry. So those of you who are, those of your listeners who follow Arabic literature, you're going to notice this isn't the highly stylized abiyat of classical poetry or even neoclassical poetry. It's going to be in free verse that's very quick to comprehend and to memorize. And I'll just read it in English. But again, it's very easily found online. The Arabic is called Bitaqat Hawiyah in Arabic or Sajjil an-Arabi after the first line. Record I am an Arab and my identity card is number 50,000. I have eight children, and the ninth is coming after a summer. Will you be angry?

My father descends from the family of the plow, not from a privileged class. And my grandfather was a farmer, neither well-bred nor well-born. grandfather was a farmer, neither well-bred nor well-born. He teaches me the pride of the sun before teaching me how to read. Record I am an Arab, and I am a name without a surname, and my address, I am from an isolated, forgotten village, and all of its men work in the field and the quarry. They like communism. Therefore, record at the top of the first page, I do not hate people, nor do I encroach, but if I become hungry, the usurperous flesh will be my food. Beware, beware of my hunger and my anger. So there's a lot going on with this poem. There's that sense of defiance, that defiance against the soldier or the policeman at the checkpoint.

There's the class dynamic. By 1963, Darwish is a member of the Israeli Communist Party. There's a very strong materialist and class dimension to a lot of his writings at this time. There is that repetition of record, I am an Arab, which is, I think, in many ways, an attempt to push back against Israel's modernizing discourse that seeks to say, these Arabs are benighted, they are passive, they are victims, they need the state to uplift them. He's saying, no, I'm an Arab. It's something I'm proud of. It's something that ties me to the land. So there's a claim of indigeneity with that as well. My ancestors working the land. So there's a lot going on there. Yeah.

It's interesting, though, in light of what you said earlier, that he doesn't say, I am a Palestinian. And I wonder what you make of that or... So that's another really interesting dimension of all of this. I think one Arab rolls off the tongue a little more easily in a poem. But he also, within a couple of years, so his next poetry collection is Aashiqum in Palestine, collection is Aashiqu min Falistine, a lover from Palestine, which is very Palestinian. And he speaks of Palestine and Palestinian-ness as a beloved that he's longing for. So I think two things are happening here. I think one is that we're seeing, even in that short period from 1963 with Record I Am an Arab to 1965 with A Lover from Palestine, we're seeing a couple of things. One is a transition from Qawmi al-Arabiya or Pan-Arab nationalism becoming the dominant

framework for decolonization and liberation. That was the dominant of the late 50s and early 60s. And then we start to see kind of across the Palestinian political landscape, we see wotania-falestinia, right? Nation-state patriotism or nationalism becoming the dominant framework. And so his poems are representing those two zeitgeists in many ways, which again links him to the broader Palestinian discursive frameworks that are developing. So I think that's part of what's happening. I think also part of what's happening is that by the time we get to 1965, we're seeing, for example, the early iterations of a Palestinian national movement, Palestinian national charter. The PLO is going to be founded a year later. So the shift towards a firmer articulation of identity and liberation

being put through a Palestinian lens or Palestinian framework is very much happening. It's important to note that both of these things that are happening before the 67 war. And I think that's going to be important to think about as well. resonating as a claim on a broader politics of pan-Arab solidarity from which Palestinian citizens of Israel were often left out. And so that's one way that you're helping me to see the poem. So maybe we could talk then about the 1967 moment and what sort of what changes in that moment for this community and its relationships to the state and also to the Israeli state and also its broader regional relationships? Immediately, the 1967 war does two things. One is that it lifts up the physical barriers between Palestinian citizens of Israel and

those in the occupied territories, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip. And so for the first time in 19 years, Palestinian citizens of Israel are able to enter into spaces where Arabic is being spoken around them, where the street signs and shop signs are all in Arabic. And so many of them talk about it being this really momentous occasion whereby that isolation that they had felt for so long is at least partially lifted. A lot of families that were also separated were able to reconnect and regather. So that's happening as well. So on a very personal, on a very intimate level, the 1967 war, for all of its horrors and the occupation and everything sort of geopolitically, becomes this moment of

reconnection. But the second thing that it also does is that both the Israeli state and the Palestinian citizens of Israel recognize this community, for better or for worse, as more firmly part of the Palestinian people. And so that means, for example, on the one hand, on the eve of the night of June 4th, early morning of June 5th, Israel conducts a mass arrest campaign, preemptively arresting Palestinian political producers and cultural producers as a preemptive attempt to try to isolate them, essentially, as they're launching the attack on June 5th. And you start to see these recurrent kinds of waves of arrests and imprisonment, house

arrests, town arrests, curfews, things like that. So the push on, particularly Mahmoud Darwish and his colleague, Samih al-Qasim, they face it particularly acutely. And that crackdown is in part also because of the fact that they're becoming more famous in the Arab world. So those poems, I mentioned Ghassan Kanafani earlier. So the poems that Ghassan Kanafani was acquiring, and to this day, I don't know exactly how he was acquiring them prior to 1967.

When I conducted interviews and I asked people and I say, hey, how did Ghassan Kanafani get Mahmoud Darwish's identity card in 1966? And people didn't want to tell me. So that is, I think that's telling in and of itself. But somehow it gets out into the Arab world. And so people are recognizing that there are these poets, they come to be known as resistance poets who are inside Israel, who have been actively resisting the dominant narrative and the dominant framework since the beginning. And so in this moment of profound Arab sadness and disappointment and self-flagellation, they turn to these resistance poets who are not self-flagellating

and are not bemoaning and are not crying and saying, hey, what inspiration can we get from you? And so there's this moment when they become much more a part of the Palestinian, they get folded into the Palestinian national movement and part of a larger Palestinian cultural resistance that emerges. So to close our conversation, I'd like to ask, what is it like to be researching and writing about this history right now? And for our listeners, I'll note that we're recording in December of 2023, more than two months into the Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip that followed the Hamas attacks on October 7th. And we recently had historian Rashid Khalidi on the program who noted that

for Palestinian and Israeli civilians, this is the bloodiest moment since 1948. Over 20,000 Palestinians in Gaza have lost their lives. So I'm wondering, how does the history that you've helped us to understand today resonate into this present? Or I guess, how could we engage this present differently, knowing something about the story that you've told? So the first thing I think that we can learn, the first thing that I think about when I think about how my research helps me think about the present moment is that we really need to move away from this conflict paradigm that dominates so much of the discussion around Israeli-Palestinian relations. This is not a war between two equal sides. This is not an ethno-national conflict. This is settler colonialism and resistance. And the fact that Palestinian citizens of Israel themselves saw it as such, I think, so they were seeing it as settler colonialism and resistance outside of a conflict paradigm. I think that's worth taking a look at. The second bit of it is the role of cultural resistance. So resistance is talked about,

it's a word that's bandied about a lot, often in the context of armed resistance. But there's also a project of cultural resistance that Palestinians have been engaged with since 1948. And it's a refusal to accept the Israeli colonial paradigm and the Western imperial paradigm that, again, posits this as an ethno-national conflict, which it's not, but also posits Palestinians as either passive victims or as villains. And Palestinians are saying, no, we have political agency. We have legitimate and indigenous claims on our land, and we will not be removed from it, and we will not be erased from it. And so the role that cultural resistance has played in helping Palestinians maintain those ties and those worldviews and that

that smooth that that persistence, I think, is a second part piece of it. I think a third piece of it kind of related to that is that a lot of people would say, OK, well, that's poems. It's, you know, so what? It's or today people might say, OK, it's, you know, songs, so what? Social media posts, so what? But I think that we can't discount the power of these cultural, these expressions of cultural resistance because they do play a role. They play a role. There is, I see, I saw, or I see as I look back to the past, a through line between a poem like Record I Am an Arab with mobilization on the ground, with efforts to change the

political balance of power to actual changes in material realities. That the link between the second and the third, the mass protest to changing the balance of power, it has a mixed record in the 20th century in the Arab world And there are parts when it hasn't, but the attempt to keep trying, I think is very much a part of it. I also think that if cultural production were useless or meaningless or had no impact, we wouldn't see the Israeli state targeting cultural producers so much. Whether it's in the 50s, trying to co-opt them, whether it's in the 60s, putting them under arrest, or whether it was just last week with the killing of Rifat Al-Arir, the Gaza poet and the Palestinian poet and English professor in Gaza.

Gaza poet and the Palestinian poet and English professor in Gaza. So these things do make a difference. And I think that that discursive contestation is one that's very important to keep in mind. And then the last thing I'll say about relevance is that the terms of the discourse, the discursive framings themselves, are quite consistent. When Mahmoud Darwish's first public poem is about my sister and I returning, and then today we see a powerful kind of pan-Arab song called Raj'een, We Are Returning, which is a song dedicated to the people of Gaza, we see consistency there. We see patterns there. I think what's different now is that there's a larger, more well-connected global community that's willing to listen to these Palestinian discourses. They have access to Palestinian cultural resistance, but the core of it has been there all along.

resistance, but the core of it has been there all along. I think that's a wonderful note to close on and to think about the ingenuity and creativity and determination of Palestinians, both citizens of Israel and elsewhere, in framing their own stories and indeed fostering this kind of both continuity and effectiveness, I think, of cultural production. So, I think, of cultural production. So Maha, I want to thank you so much for being with us today. It's been a real pleasure to talk a little bit about your research. Thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate it. For those who want to find out more, there is a bibliography on our website,

as well as a number of recommended episodes related to this topic. That's all for now. Until next time, take care. you