Tamir Sorek has written a superb biography of Tawfiq Zayyad—the charismatic Palestinian and Israeli poet-politician, long-time Mayor of Nazareth, and Member of Knesset. Though he died, in an automobile accident, before he could achieve all he might have, Zayyad came closer than any other political leader to embodying the interests, passions, frustrations, and longings of the Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel.
Sorek's portrayal of Zayyad is wonderfully epitomized by the book's title—The Optimist—a clever reference to Emile Habibi's novel of Arab life in Israel, The Secret Life of Saeed: The Pessoptimist. Editor of Al-Ittihad (the Communist Party's Arabic newspaper), a member of parliament, and an “Israel Prize” winner for literature, Habibi was an early patron of Zayyad. However, their long friendship ended in a bitter personal conflict, attributable in great measure, as Sorek shows, to Zayyad's inability to separate ideology and politics from personal relations. Indeed, Zayyad's vehement style, his passionate rhetoric, and his conviction that a just future would be achieved, contrasted sharply with Habibi's sardonic wit, and the ironic weltschmerz that saturated his post-modern take on the circumstances of oppression and loss that dominated the life of Arabs in Israel. Emblematic of the predicament of Palestinian citizens of Israel, Saʿed, the hero of Habibi's novel, found himself inescapably tangled within a Kafkasque masquerade of phony opportunities leading only to doom—a world in which no surprises could be positive.
In sharp contrast, Zayyad believed in the power of Palestinians, and even, in a way, in Israel. He condemned Arab aggression as responsible for the 1948 war and always insisted that the road to success for Palestinians was through comradeship and alliances with Jewish democratic forces. His optimism was based on a kind of secular teleology in which all good things go together—equality of the sexes, peace, self-determination for every nation, and economic prosperity for all. In this belief in a satisfying end of history, Sorek shows how Zayyad combined expectations embedded in the two projects for thinking about and transforming the social world that were most influential in the mid- to late 20th century: modernization and Marxism.
Like so many ambitious Arabs in Israel, Zayyad took advantage of the Communist Party's ties to the Soviet Union to gain the training and employment opportunities unavailable to them in the Jewish state. But much more than most, Zayyad was a true believer, who never forgot his ecstatic first visit to Lenin's tomb. Intellectually, one might say Zayyad was a dinosaur—a kind of socialist fundamentalist, who believed, with a full faith, in the progress that modernization and Marxism would bring to bend history toward justice and liberate Palestinians from the oppression that had befallen them.
From a Marxian perspective, Zayyad came to his beliefs honestly—organically, in Gramscian terms. While most Arab leaders of the Communist Party, such as Habibi, Tawfiq Tubi and Emile Tuma, were Christians from elite families, Zayyad's parents were poor Muslims. Zayyad himself suffered as a laborer exploited by the military government that ruled over Arabs in Israel from 1948 to 1966. He turned to labor organizing, poetry, and political activity. His efforts brought him quickly to the attention of the authorities. This resulted in numerous arrests, including a traumatizing beating by police in Tiberias during which he was, as he later put it, crucified. “They forcefully tied my arms and legs to the window like a cross, and increased their beating, and I was bleeding until I lost consciousness. They continued for two or three hours, and each time I lost consciousness they splashed water on me” (p. 39).
Indeed, despite his adamant and even provocative secularism, his immersion in the culture of the masses from whose ranks he emerged led him naturally to draw on religious imagery and idioms—both Christian and Muslim. His vernacular vocabulary, his public passion, his refusal to raise his standard of living above that of a poorly paid party worker, and his poetry and speeches that pulled no punches in their depiction of the injustices committed against his community, provided the Jewish and Christian old-guard of Rakah with just the figure it needed to demonstrate the party's connection to the Arab Muslim masses whose votes kept the party in the Knesset.
Much of Sorek's book is devoted to distinguishing the fundamental commitments that drove Zayyad's ambitions and career, and to the attachments and ideas he was willing to adjust in the face of unexpected changes. At the core of Zayyad's struggle was a fierce and unwavering belief in communism and its official promise that equality and an end to poverty, in Israel as elsewhere, could be achieved once the laboring classes and democratic forces became aware of the reality of oppression and injustice. They would then put aside chauvinist versions of their national attachments and cooperate to end all forms of discrimination—whether economic, national, or gender based.
Zayyad was also a strong Arab and Palestinian nationalist. His most famous poem, the popular Palestinian anthem, Unadikum (I Call upon You), is a celebration of popular solidarity against “the invader,” no matter what the odds. Along with virtually all Arabs in Israel in the mid-1950s, Zayyad loved Nasser, and learned from him how to connect politics to the masses through earthy and direct language. But when Nasser turned on the Soviet Union and on Communist parties in Egypt, Syria, and Iraq, Zayyad rejected Nasser and Nasserism.
His years of study and work in Moscow and Prague had an enormous impact on him. The end of Communism as an attractive and organized international force were painful blows. But as a proud Palestinian, Zayyad could and did still defend the Israeli Communist party. After all, as he emphasized in his enthusiastic embrace of the Oslo peace process, the PLO and the Labor Party under Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres were doing nothing so much as adopting the program of the two-state solution that had been the historic basis of the Communist Party's platform. Needling the Zionists with one of their own favorite biblical quotes, Zaayad frequently cited Psalms 118:22, “The stone which the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone.”
An important theme in the book is the extent to which the complexity of the circumstances of Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel, combined with the honesty and consistency of Zayyad's commitments, made him a target for purer, simpler, or less forthright politicians—from all sides. He was attacked as idolatrous by Muslims horrified by his glorification of Lenin; as vicious and traitorous by Jewish-Zionist politicians for the honor he gave to Arab fighters and his stinging attacks on mistreatment of Arabs, land expropriation, and aggressive Israeli policies; and as insufficiently committed to Palestinian nationalism by those who objected to his insistence on cooperation with Israeli Jews and his stalwart support for both the communist party and socialist ideology. Inside the party, he was often criticized and even punished for the explicitness, bitterness, and timing of denunciations of Israeli policies and politicians perceived as damaging the party's standing or electoral prospects.
In July 1994, Zayyad died speeding on the Jericho-Jerusalem highway. We cannot know for certain how he would have reacted to the failure of Camp David, the second Intifada, and the collapse of the two-state solution project that followed. But based on Sorek's argument, there is strong reason to believe he would have adapted to the one-state reality as he did to the failure of Nasserist Arabism and the end of the Soviet Union, by falling back on his most basic commitments—to equality, socialist solidarity, and democracy. In that context the most potent and relevant of Zayyad's messages is his call for alliances among all those committed to these values—whether Jews or Arabs, men or women, or inhabitants of the country living inside of or across the 1949 armistice lines. The imperative for Zayyad, as Sorek shows, was (and, presumably, would be) to organize and mobilize against conditions and policies of oppression by taking advantage of every non-violent opportunity for struggle.
