by Tamir Sorek
(Stanford University Press, £20.99)
THIS is an unusual biography of Tawfiq Zayyad, not least because it is about a Palestinian communist and is written by a US-based, Jewish-Israeli social scientist.
The renowned Palestinian poet and activist was a leading member of the Israeli Communist Party for over four decades and was elected mayor of Nazareth before becoming a member of the Israeli Knesset, serving for 18 years. He died in 1994 at the age of 85.
The book s author Tamir Sorek openly questions his right as an Israeli Jew and non-communist to write such a biography. But his admiration and respect for Zayyad, even though he never met him, is unquestionable and he was given full access to Zayyad’s family and comrades and exhaustively mined many archival sources.
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Feb. 2, 2021
“The Optimist: A Social Biography of Tawfiq Zayyad,” by Tamir Sorek, Stanford University Press, 2020; 264 pps., $26
Tawfiq Zayyad (1929-1994) was a leader, a prominent Palestinian national poet, a communist, a native son and mayor of Nazareth and a member of Knesset for almost 20 years. The first-ever biography of Zayyad, by Tamir Sorek – an Israeli sociologist who teaches in the history department of Penn State University in the United States – tells a fascinating life story, from the series of arrests and detentions of Zayyad as a youth, through his long term as mayor and as a member of Israel’s Parliament who led the Arab public in Israel to engage in political partnership with the Zionist left.
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.
Tawfīq Zayyād accompanied by Amal and Rābʿa Murqus, the daughters of Nimer Murqus in Rāas an-Nāqūra. Photo from the Digital Archive of the Palestinian Museum.
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.