In Gaza, Learning Empathy Through Israeli Poetry
GAZA CITY — One recent morning, a Palestinian professor at Islamic University in Gaza City had a question for his 70 literature undergraduates: Who had written the unsigned poem they had spent the class reading?
To the students, all women, the answer was obvious.
This was a text about Jerusalem, a city that they, as Palestinians unable to leave Gaza, had cherished but never visited. And the poem was written from the perspective of a wistful onlooker who, like them, loved but could not enter the city. It begins like this:
On a roof in the Old City laundry hanging in the late afternoon sunlight
the white sheet of a woman who is my enemy,
the towel of a man who is my enemy
Sondos Alfayoumi raised her hand. The poem was by a Palestinian, gazing from a distance, reckoned Ms. Alfayoumi, 19. “It shows a man who cannot get access to something that belongs to him,” she said. “A man working in the occupied territories.”
The class nodded in agreement. Only a Palestinian could have written such a poem, a second student said.
But the professor, Refaat Alareer, had a surprise. “The poet of this really beautiful piece is actually not a Palestinian,” he said.
There was murmuring. Someone gasped, and Ms. Alfayoumi suppressed a shocked laugh.
“He’s an Israeli poet,” Mr. Alareer continued, “called Yehuda Amichai.”
It was a moment that added nuance to two contrasting narratives: That embraced by the students, many of whom knew someone killed or injured by Israeli missiles, and whose interaction with Israel is often limited to airstrikes; and that of many Israelis, who often assume the Palestinian education system is simply an engine of incitement.
What Mr. Alareer admired about the poem, “Jerusalem,” he told his students, was the way it blurred divisions between Israelis and Palestinians and implied that “Jerusalem can be the place where we all come together.”
Mr. Alareer, 42, is not an obvious champion of Hebrew poetry. The Israeli and Egyptian blockade of Gaza has stymied his academic career, at times stopping him from studying abroad. He has relatives in Hamas, and his brother was killed during the 2014 war with Israel. And on social media, he writes furious barrages that describe Israel as a source of evil, posts that led to his Twitter account being suspended.
But in the lecture theater, Mr. Alareer has a milder approach. As part of a course for undergraduates
about international literature, he teaches work by not only Mr. Amichai, but also Tuvya Ruebner, another prominent Israeli poet.
For some students, the poet’s Israeli identity came as an epiphany. “Maybe this changed something in my mind,” Ms. Alfayoumi said. “It’s like we share things.”
Another student said she couldn’t believe an Israeli had actually written the poem.
Mr. Alareer said the meaning of any text was open to interpretation. But he hinted that she hadn’t absorbed the main point of the class.
“If you want to occupy the poem,” he said, with a flash of sarcasm, “good for you.”