Live Poets’ Society Irks Some Israelis

It should come as no surprise that here in the Holy Land, even something as esoteric as a poetry festival will spark debate. The arts are not exempt from the controversy and discord that are the spice of local life.

After all, Jerusalem is the place where newly elected legislators who are also ultra-Orthodox Jews will walk out of the inauguration of parliament rather than hear the voices of a girls’ choir. Strict Jewish law equates the voice of a woman with nudity, making it, thus, a sin.

And so the fifth biennial International Poets Festival ran into trouble from its beginning stanza a week ago. Within the quaint stone walls of Jerusalem’s Khan Theater, poets from Israel and nine other countries came together to read from their works in what one organizer called a “polyphony of voices.”

But Palestinian poets invited to participate refused to attend. So did a group of well-known Israeli poets.

The opening date was a problem: It coincided with the anniversary of the start of the 1967 Six-Day War, when Israel conquered the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem--a devastating day from the point of view of official Palestinian history.

Then there was the matter of holding the festival in Jerusalem in the first place. Palestinians claim East Jerusalem as their capital, while most Israelis claim an undivided Jerusalem as their “eternal” capital. The Palestinian poets wanted an official nod to the Palestinian claim included in the festival’s programs.

For the Israelis, their protest was part political, part aesthetic. And maybe a little ego.

It is wrong, the Israelis argued, for socially responsible poets to perform in a city that, they charge, discriminates harshly against Arabs and tries to evict Arabs by revoking their identity cards and demolishing their houses.

Lending their names and prestige to a festival sponsored in part by the Israeli government would make them partners in providing a “fig leaf” to a state trying to sanitize its image, said poets Aharon Shabtai and Yitzhak Laor.

“It was like this in the Soviet Union,” said Shabtai, 60. “They need festivals and poets and intellectuals to make an image that this is a cultured place, a democratic city in a democratic state.”

Shabtai, who defines his politics as decidedly left, participated in past festivals when he was “less sensitive.” Three years of a stagnant peace process have caused him to harden his beliefs and lose hope.

On top of it all, Shabtai and Laor said, the festival was too conservative and lacked creativity. Organizers were keen to rebut that; nevertheless, the charge harked back to a long-standing rivalry between Jerusalem, an ancient, biblical, mythical city, and Tel Aviv, Israel’s hip, vibrant, young city on the Mediterranean.

“Tel Aviv is the future; Jerusalem is chauvinistic, provincial and clerical,” proclaimed Shabtai, from, of course, his home in Tel Aviv. “We in Tel Aviv are more avant-garde, wild, rebellious, sexual. We are radicals and wild men.”

Other participants in the festival were having none of this.

“It’s silly,” said Shirley Kaufman, a San Francisco-born poet and 25-year resident of Jerusalem, whose reading was featured in a program titled “The Multi-Cultural Voice.”

“The best Hebrew-writing poets are probably in Tel Aviv,” she said. “And there are marvelous Arabic-writing poets in the Galilee, other poets who live on a kibbutz. . . . Who is to say that any one city is the center?”

The $250,000 festival went ahead despite the controversy, and perhaps flourished because of it. Former Prime Minister Shimon Peres used an opening-night appearance to declare his support for a Palestinian state and lament the absence of the Palestinian poets. Attendance soared beyond expectations, with 5,000 tickets sold by closing night.