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This interview appeared in "Le Monde" and could also interest English speaking people. So here is a translation (sorry for the bad English and mispelling)...


From “Le Monde” 12 February 2006
Interview by Sylvain Cypel

Mahmoud Darwich : « Arabs and Muslims feel they are pushed out of History”

Is the Hamas victory in Palestine part of a more global trend, that of the progression of the Islamists in the Arab-Muslim world ?
It is an evidence : Palestine can’t be an Island in an ocean of political islamism progression. If there were free elections in the Arabo-Muslim world, the Islamists would win everywhere, it’s as simple as that ! It is a world living with a deep feeling of injustice, for which the West is hold responsible. The West’s answer, a form of imperial integrism reinforces this feeling of injustice. In such an environment, we are dealing with hurted identities.

What is the nature of this wound ?
Arabs and Muslims, confronted both with the American« universal despotism » and with local despots don’t know where they stand anymore. Further, wealth, which they can compare to their misery, is displayed on all the screens. They get the feeling to be pushed out of History. Result : they withdraw to their historical certitudes- a passeist attitude by definition. These wounds gangrene. One can see them, they are lost. Nationalism and third-worldism, socialism and communism, all have failed. Not even the superiority of law is left, since in their zone the international law isn’t applied. Israël goes away with it since so long without any consequences.

They could choose democracy …
I don’t have any easy answer to this deficit. People may need simple solutions to their disarray, which the religion is offering. Indeed, democracy isn’t simple, she suppose pluralism, complexity. I believe that, unhappily, no Arab country will escape the Islamist experience. The Arab world is no more that of the years 1950-1960. Neither America. There too, more and more people turn themselves toward the inadequated answers of religion. The manicheist way of thinking is featured by an islamophoby which is causing very violent reactions in the Muslim world.

On this point, what do you think of the issue of the Muhammad’s cartoons ?
It is a madness filling me with sadness. First the caricature of Muhammad with a bomb instead of a turban is insulting. The freedom of the press ough to be defended, but not the right to insult. One can’t offense the faith of others without consequences. In France, the press is free. But you have laws punishing the public expression of racism. In the stifling international atmosphere we are living in, we ought to respect the refusal of the Muslims to represent the Profet in a picture. At the same time, the problem is that the Arab and Muslim opinion don’t make any difference between the peoples, their diversity and their governments. She considers everything as a whole. To take pretext of a drawing in order to burn an ambassy is insane. On both sides there are forces trying to exacerbate the clash of identities. One day it will pass. It’s a transitional period. But in the meanwhile, these forces are dominant.

Will it last for a long time ?
Who knows ? Half of the humanity believed in socialism. Who would have thought that this « shining future » wouls collapse in a day after seventy years ? Nowadays, the Arab-Muslim world knows a booming expansion of islamism and will have to pay a high price for this historical phase. Everywhere disappointment and anger prevail, people are regressing. The radical islamists become more and more dominant. At the same time, I’m bemused by the general ignorance of the West toward political islamism. There are all kinds of islamists. The Salafists and the Hamas, to make an example, are very different. The Hamas is mostly a nationalist movement, based on a religious vision. But the West too, tends to see political islamism only as whole.

Now you, the poet of diversity and conviviality, you are left with the Hamas at power…
First let us acknowledge that a regime change took place very democratically. For the political customs of the palestinian society this is very positive. That said, Israël bears a major responsibility. It has installed a climate of delegitimization of the Palestinian Authority, which paved the way for the Hamas. Its politic which makes the Palestinian everyday life unlivable, added to the corruption of the Authority, has created a delterious climate. Which induced many people to think : “Why not try another way ? It can’t be worse.” The vote for Hamas was more a vote of protestation than a religious vote. Now we will have to live through that experience. But I can’t hide my fears. Some leaders of the Hamas have declared they wanted to “reorganize the society on an islamist base”. If you advocate a pluralist and secular Palestine, you can only fear for the rights of women, for the youngs and for the individual freedoms. Without forgetting the Christian component. I hope that the Hamas will compromise and respect the people who brought him to power and whose motivation, I repeat it, was mainly to protest.

How do you analyse the way the Israelian leaders look at Hamas ?
The main issue in the history of sionism is that it tried to escape to the reality of the field. He knew from the very start that his motive “One land without people for a people without land,” was wrong. There was a people on this land. So he made as if it didn’t exist or didn’t count. And this goes on. For decades, the Israelians have negated the existence of a national Palestinian movement. They stated that the PLO was only a “terrorist organization”. Eventually, they had to recognize it. Today they say : “Negotiating with the Hamas is out of question”. In the end, they will do it, like they did with the PLO.

What could drive them to negotiate ?
Reality ! The sun, as the saying goes, is more powerfull than the wings of the crows covering the horizon. To turn down the Hamas, is negating the result of a free election. It’s useless. In the end reality is always stronger than denial. When the Intifada broke out, the Israelians declared that they “had no partner”. Yet only Yasser Arafat could have been able to convince the people to make concessions. But they were set to reduce him to nothing. When Mahmoud Abbas succeeded him, they courted him with the Americans. But politically, they didn’t negotiate anything. Thus they discredited him in the eyes of his people as well. They always believe that they can carry on an unilateral politic. Result : they are left with the Hamas in front of them.
At first it will serve as a justification of their unilateralism. But if they try to keep their blocks of colonies and to leave us “generously” with some bantoustans, it means that they don’t want peace. And it won’t work. Not until reality imposes itself in their minds : the only way is to end to the occupation completely.

You believe that the Israelians don’t want peace ?
The problem is that they want neither a bi-national state, nor an independant Palestine. When all the states fo the Arab Ligue, in 2002, proposed a withdrawal to the borders of 1967, in exchange of a general recognition of Israël, they acted as if this proposal didn’t exist. Today, on the land of the Palestinian mandate, there are two realities : the Jewish Israelian one and the Arab Palestinian one. None can eradicate the other. The only solution is that both parties recognize this double reality. Then, that each one writes her history as she wants !
History only interests the historians and the novelists. Myself, I’m interested in the present. But it is drowning in the tragedy.
The Israelian society didn’t take the measure of the historical concession which the spoliated Palestinians made her. Nor was she conscious of the importance, for the victime, to see the agressor recognizes the wrongs he caused. The Israelians use to say that the Palestinians “never miss the occasion to miss an occasion”. The reality is the other way around. After Oslo they had an exceptional occasion. The PLO and the entire Arab world had got it that the Palestinians didn’t have anything else to “concede” than their recognition and that they, the Israeli, in counterpart oughted to withdraw from the territories without bargaining and to admit the existence of a Palestinian state. Now it will be much less easier for Israel to succeed with the Hamas. A wealthy man enjoying the misery of his neighbour is an idiot, because he will never feel safe. Security for Israel will only come when its neighbour can live decently and with dignity.

You have accepted to give a political interview, yet you seem reluctant to talk about these issues.
Because I’m living in perplexity. I don’t refuse to speak about politic, but I refuse all certitudes under the present troubled circonstances. I’m not sure of my own vision. The complexity, I can integrate it in my work as a poet. Any poet, or even any writer of the third-world who could pretend that “the society or the politic doesn’t interest me” would be a bastard. I’m not such a bastard. For a Palestinian politic is existential. But poesy is more sly, she allows the circulation between different probabilities. She is based on metaphere, on rythm and on the will to see through the appearances. But poets aren’t leading the world. And happily : the disorder they are introducing ni the world could be worse than that of the politicians.

What is there behind appearances ?
The life, hence teh dreams and illusions. Who can live without the hope taht the world will get better and more beautiful ? Poetry can’t exist without the illusion that a change is possible. She humanise a story and a language common to all humans. She transgress borders. In the end, her only real enemy is hate.

In your book recently issued in French, “Don’t excuse yourself” you writes : “I’m what I’ll be tomorrow”, a surprising verse coming from a poet who refuses immutability...
On the contrary. The present is stiffling and tears identities apart. It’s why I will only find my true self tomorrow, when I’ll be able to say and write something else. Identity isn’t an heritage, but a creation. She makes us and we make her continually. And we will only know her tomorrow. My identity is multiple, diverse. Today I’m absent, tomorrow I’ll be present. I’m trying to bring up hope like one brings up a child. In order to be what I want and not what the others want me to be.


Mahmoud Darwich, 63 years old was born in France near Saint-Jean d’Acre. Today he lives between Ramallah and Amman. A figure of Palestinian poetry, he has, between else, published the following books, all in French and at Actes Sud : Au dernier soir sur cette terre, Une mémoire pour l'oubli, Murale et, and last january : Ne t'excuse pas.

Interview by Sylvain Cypel
February the 12th, 2006

posted by Christiane @ 9:33 AM