[DEBATE] : Joseph Mas'ad vs. Mahmoud Darwish

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

On 7/13/07, Ran Greenstein <rangreen at sn.apc.org> wrote:
> He is not a political analyst but a commentator on the culture of power and violence that is
> common to many political factions in the region. Blaming the US does not help Palestinians
> deal with their own internal issues

It's surely the case that colonialism and imperialism never could work
without divisions of their targets, and that certainly applies in the
current Fatah-Hamas conflict.  But the converse is also probably true:
Fatah might have simply waited till the next election (for Fatah's
defeat was as much due to its own internal division as to Hamas'
relative popularity among poorer Palestinians, the former of which it
could have fixed) if it had not been persuaded by Tel Aviv,
Washington, and other powers involved that it could come back into
power by siding with them.

As for poets and politics, many of Darwish's poems are occasional
political poems, and the one to which Joseph Mas'ad responded is among
them.  No one pays attention to poets' political commentary in the USA
(where I live now) or Japan (where I come from), but in the Middle
East a number of them (among whom are Darwish) have credibility that
much of the Arabic press (many of them owned or censored by the
governments allied with Washington) lack.
-- 
Yoshie