From the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz of November 7, 2004, comes an article by David Zonsheine, a former commander in the Israeli Defense Force who became organizer and leader of the anti-Occupation movement within the IDF, the Courage to Refuse. Zonsheine comes by chance upon some lines from a poem of Yitzhak Laor and finds that,
Reading these lines a moment after a violent month of reserve duty, which was full of a sense of the righteousness of the way, was no easy thing. I remember that for one alarming moment I felt that I was looking at something I was forbidden to see. What this thing was I did not know, but on that same Friday afternoon I went out to look for every book by Yitzhak Laor that I could find in the shops.
Zonsheine continues,
The sense of mission with which I enlisted in the IDF was based ... on ... the painfully simple message that we shall not allow the Holocaust of the Jews of Europe to repeat itself no matter what the costs, and when the moral price became more severe, the sense of mission only increased ... I am a freedom fighter ... not an occupier, not cruel, certainly not immoral...
Something in Laor's texts spoke to me about the place inside me that had been closed and denied until then...
Here I am, 28 years old, returning home from another month of reserve duty in Gaza and suddenly asking myself questions that are beginning to penetrate even the armor of the righteousness...in which they had dressed me years ago. And Laor's strong words return to echo in my ears: "With such obedience? With such obedience? With such obedience?"
Ever since I refused to serve in the territories and the Ometz Lesarev (Courage to Refuse) movement was established, I have returned again and again to Laor's texts...
... The voice is that of a poetic persona through whose life the "situation" passes and touches everything he has, grasping and refusing to let go. The child, the wife, the hours of wakefulness alone at night, memory, the very act of writing -- everything is political. And from the other extreme, every terror attack, every act of occupation, every moral injustice -- everything is completely personal.
... This is ... a poetry that does not seek parental approval or any other approval, a poetry that liberates from the limitations of criticism of the discourse, and a poetry that ... finds the independent place that revolts and refuses.
Did Laor's poetry "work"? Did Zonsheine's commitment "work"? In either sense of the word, at any given moment, how do we measure? If we say No, does that mean we give up on poetry? On resistance? With such obedience?
"Something I was forbidden to see."
-- Excerpt from speech, "Poetry and Commitment," first presented as the plenary lecture at the 2006 Conference on Poetry and Politics, Stirling University, Scotland. W.W. Norton & Company, New York: pp. 27-30.
