Tawfiq zayyad biography of michael

Tawfiq Zayyad (1929–94) was a renowned Palestinian poet and a committed communist activist. For four decades, he was a dominant figure in political life in Israel, as a local council member, mayor of Nazareth, and member of the Israeli parliament. Zayyad personified the collective struggle of the Palestinian citizens of Israel, challenging the military government following the creation of the state of Israel, leading the 1976 nationwide strike against land confiscation, and tirelessly protesting Israeli military occupation after 1967. With this book, Tamir Sorek offers the first biography of this charismatic figure.

Zayyad's life was one of balance and contradiction—between his revolutionary writings as Palestinian patriotic poet and his pragmatic political work in the Israeli public sphere. He was uncompromising in his protest of injustices against the Palestinian people, but always committed to a universalist vision of Arab-Jewish brotherhood. It was this combination of traits that made Zayyad an exceptional leader—and makes his biography larger than the man himself to offer a compelling story about Palestinians and the state of Israel.

On December 20 Mondoweiss published Hatim Kanaaneh’s review of my book The Optimist: A Social Biography of Tawfiq Zayyad. While I welcome any criticism that sheds a different light on a text I wrote, this review baldly misrepresented the book’s contents and mischaracterized my own approach. Kanaaneh makes a sweeping argument that I fall short in ridding myself “of the ‘Jewish Israeli’ tribal prejudices and inimical presumptions about all things Palestinian.”  Needless to say, for a scholar who has dedicated his academic career to studying various aspects of Palestinian history, society, culture, and politics, this is an offensive allegation that should not go unchallenged.

The book itself aims to portray the fascinating life of Tawfiq Zayyad (1929–94), a renowned Palestinian poet, a committed Communist activist, and a charismatic political leader. For four decades, Zayyad personified the collective struggle of the Palestinian citizens of Israel, and a scholarly biography of him has been long overdue. For five years I collected, piece by piece, fragments of information from the Arabic and Hebrew press, several archives, including materials housed in the official Tawfiq Zayyad Institute in Nazareth, and interviews with dozens of family members, friends, and acquaintances, as well as with political partners and rivals. I enjoyed the trust of Zayyad’s family and close friends who shared with me invaluable personal documents. Together these sources enabled me to portray Zayyad both as an influential political leader, but also as a human being with weaknesses. 

To be sure, there are inevitable gaps in the history, some of which I discuss in the book. Kanaaneh’s only concern, though, was with the legitimacy of a Jewish-Israeli scholar to tell Zayyad’s story (“What did I expect from him, anyhow, I ask myself?”). From this departure point he seems to scan the text looking for evidence of my presumed biases and prejudices, but the ex

Tawfiq Zayyad (1929-94) was a renowned Palestinian poet and a committed communist activist. For four decades, he was a dominant figure in political life in Israel, as a local council member, mayor of Nazareth, and member of the Israeli parliament. Zayyad personified the collective struggle of the Palestinian citizens of Israel, challenging the military government following the creation of the state of Israel, leading the 1976 nationwide strike against land confiscation, and tirelessly protesting Israeli military occupation after 1967. With this book, Tamir Sorek offers the first biography of this charismatic figure.

Zayyad's life was one of balance and contradiction--between his revolutionary writings as Palestinian patriotic poet and his pragmatic political work in the Israeli public sphere. He was uncompromising in his protest of injustices against the Palestinian people, but always committed to a universalist vision of Arab-Jewish brotherhood. It was this combination of traits that made Zayyad an exceptional leader--and makes his biography larger than the man himself to offer a compelling story about Palestinians and the state of Israel.

Unlike the author of this academic biography who never met the Palestinian leader Tawfiq Zayyad and only knew of him through the mainly Zionist Hebrew press, I knew Tawfiq Zayyad and respected him since the Nakba. At that life-changing juncture, he was nearly twice my age of eleven years, someone with literary promise, revolutionary bend of mind, daring, Palestinian nationalism, communist convictions and a booming voice to back it all up in his speeches. Yet this rising star was approachable even to me and my agemates. His harsh-edged voice was difficult to ignore especially with the-then-recent addition of loudspeakers.

In 1954, despite the iron fist of the Military Government that Israel had imposed on us, its Palestinian citizens, my eighth-grade classmates in Arrabeh, my home village in Galilee, led by my communist cousin, Tawfiq Kanaaneh, launched a remarkable and successful strike to protest the Head Tax that was levied from us but not from our Jewish majority co-citizens. Despite the years-long military government’s revenge against the families of its pupil leaders, the strike spread to other Arab schools and led to the abolition of that apartheid tax.

Recently, reminiscing with my cousin Tawfiq, he mentioned another successful strike from that era, one I had completely forgotten, possibly because it was limited to local peasants in Galilee. Traditionally, in early winter, agricultural laborers from our less-landed households had sought employment as olive pickers in the fields of more-landed farmers, often in other Galilee villages. With the Nakba’s ethnic cleansing of over 500 Palestinian communities from the region that became Israel to refugee camps in neighboring Arab countries, the Israeli military government officials granted contracts to tend many abandoned productive olive groves to favored local bosses and collaborators. Contrary to the standard traditional practice o