Darwish in Hebrew: On the Legitimacy of Intertextuality Between Palestinians and Israelis

Abstract This article examines the growing presence of Mahmoud Darwish in contemporary Israeli poetry with the focus on how power imbalances determine the nature of literary exchanges. The influence of Hebrew literature on Darwish’s poetry has been extensively studied. Examinations of the reverse, however, have received much less attention. The reverse direction of influence opens up a discussion regarding the political and aesthetic differences between intertextuality and cultural appropriation. The article points at the limits of the theoretical discussion of intertextuality as a discourse that lacks crucial notions of cultural property, while also exposing the inadequacies of the term cultural appropriation, for its essentialism and dichotomies do not account for more complex cultural exchanges. To both contextualize and better define different types of allusions to Darwish in Hebrew, this article explores Arab Jewish and Jewish diasporic discourses.