This paper provides an overview of Israeli and Palestinian women poets’ lyrical attempts to deconstruct the patriarchy in personal and political spaces, and demonstrates how, despite sharing a pool of common symbols and writing in physical and cultural proximity, the two groups of poets create very discrete modalities of national poetry.
Poems can be an important ethnographic tool, as they convey the reality of a place over time, uncovering unique traditions, personal sentiments, and collective memories and desires. Moved by a wave of new feminism, the poetry of Israeli and Palestinian women poets is primarily preoccupied with two subjects: the patriarchy and the national homeland. In addressing the patriarchy, both Palestinian and Israeli women attempt to locate and legitimize themselves as women re women in their respective societies, exploring issues related to sexuality, aging, and role designation in social and domestic life, questioning “male” binaries and schemas. These poems—the “personal”—are where Israeli and Palestinian women poets find the most common ground, as published poetry in both Israeli and Palestinian cultures is a historically and traditionally male space. The discussion of matters important to women by women is therefore groundbreaking and an act of cultural defiance for both groups.
However, as Carol Hanisch wrote, “the personal is political”: the patriarchy and the homeland cannot be neatly separated. The Israeli and Palestinian poets take opposite tacks to deconstruct the patriarchy in the political space. For Israeli poets, questioning the legitimacy of a patriarchal homeland comes in the form of minimizing or dismissing altogether the importance of any nationalism and separating themselves from the overarching male-dominated political project. For Palestinian poets, it is the other way around: undermining patriarchal governance means wholeheartedly supporting nationalism and insisting on their participation as equals in the male-dominated political project.
