Samih al-Qasim

Al-Qasim was born in 1939 in Zarqa, Jordan, to a father who held the rank of captain in the Jordanian army.[1] His family returned after World War II to al-Rama, their home town in the Upper Galilee, where he attended primary school; he completed secondary education in Nazareth and later studied philosophy and political economy at the Moscow Academy.[1] He is also described as born in al-Zarqa to a Palestinian family from al-Rama and as having grown up and been educated in Nazareth.[6]

Al-Qasim described his family’s origins as tracing to the Fatimid Druze and noted that relatives lived across Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon.[1] Accounts identify him as a Druze poet and as a Palestinian poet, reflecting the overlapping communal, geographic, and literary identities associated with his life and work.[1][2] He married and had four sons: Watan Muhammad, Waddah, Yasser, and Omar.[1]

Al-Qasim initially worked as a laborer and teacher in Haifa, but was later dismissed because of his poetry.[1] He moved into journalism, contributing to the magazines al-Ghad and al-Ittihad and editing Hada al-Alam from 1966.[1] He subsequently returned as an editor at the newspaper al-Ittihad, and served first as secretary and later as editor-in-chief of al-Jadid.[1] He founded the Arabesque publishing house in 1973 and headed the Popular Arts Institution in Haifa.[1] He was also a journalist and editor-in-chief of the Arab Israeli weekly Kul al-Arab, and lived in Rameh, near Safed.[2]

His political engagement developed alongside his literary work. The National Library of Israel’s account describes early Arab-nationalist leanings and says he later joined the Israeli Communist Party, Rakah, remaining a member until the late 1980s.[1] After resigning from the party, he devoted himself fully to journalism and literature.[1] A reference entry names him among the founders of the nationalist al-Ard organization, placing its founding activity in the late 1950s and early 1960s.[6]

Accounts report that al-Qasim was arrested several times and placed under house arrest in connection with his political positions and opposition to compulsory military service for Druze.[1][2] A separate entry characterizes his poetry as expressing Palestinian Arab resistance to Israeli rule and says he was imprisoned on several occasions because of it.[6] These descriptions situate his writing within the political circumstances addressed by the sources, rather than treating his public life as separate from his poetry.

Censorship became a direct issue in 1969. In March of that year, al-Qasim published The Thunderbird Will Arrive; Ilan Pappé’s account says authorities confiscated all copies and arrested him because he had not submitted parts of the collection to a censor before publication.[4] Pappé places the episode within a broader account of Palestinian poets facing house arrest or imprisonment over nationalist poetry, while also noting that their writing encompassed love poems and more general subjects.[4]

Al-Qasim was among Palestinian and Jewish writers who formed a joint authors’ union in December 1969.[4] Pappé reports that Palestinian members demanded an end to censorship of their work, exile, and administrative arrests of political activists, but struggled to secure support for those demands from their Jewish counterparts; the organization soon disappeared.[4] The short-lived effort illustrates both the possibility of cross-community literary organizing and the political disagreements that constrained it.

Al-Qasim wrote dozens of poetry books and hundreds of poems, addressing Palestinian concerns broadly and the circumstances of Palestinians in Israel particularly.[1] His early collections included Mawākib al-shams (1958), Aghānī al-durūb (1964), and Iram (1965), followed by Damī ʿalā kaffī (1967), Dukhān al-barākīn (1968), and Iskenderun fī riḥlat al-khārij wa-riḥlat al-dākhil (1970).[1]

Later collections included Qurʾān al-mawt wa-al-yāsmīn (1971), al-Mawt al-kabīr (1972), Wa-mā qatalūhu wa-mā ṣalabūhu wa-lākin shubbiha lahum (1976), Collage (1983), and ʿAjāʾib Qānā al-jadīda (2006).[1] Other listings give variant transliterations and titles, including Mawkib al-Shams (Processions of the Sun, 1958), Suqut al-Aqniya (The Fall of Masks, 1969), and Marathi Samih al-Qasim (Elegies of Samih al-Qasim, 1973).[6] The range of publication dates represented in these lists documents a career spanning from the late 1950s into the 2000s.[1][6]

Al-Qasim also wrote for the stage: Qaraqāsh is identified as a play from 1970.[7] It is discussed as an example of the trials and conflicts of the Palestinian literary community in the second half of the twentieth century.[7] The available accounts thus place his work not only within poetry but within a wider literary field shaped by political and communal pressures.

The poetry’s subject matter and style were closely linked in the National Library of Israel’s account. It describes the early poems as tending toward direct expression and says their vocabulary drew on the lived reality of his community.[1] Recurring words and themes included homeland, martyrdom, war, prison, land, revolution, suffering, victory, children, and stones; the account connects those subjects to the concerns that occupied the poet.[1]

Repetition was another prominent device, used in response to a poem’s emotional state and subject.[1] In a passage about Qana, the article discusses the repeated words “I wish” and “deluded,” including the refrain “I wish I were deluded that I am deluded.”[1] It interprets the recurrence as conveying the speaker’s horror at seeing blood and bodies and his desire that the scene be only a dream.[1] This is the article’s literary reading of the passage and its emotional effect.

Intertextuality, particularly religious and mythological allusion, also features in the account of his poetry.[1] Examples include Quranic language about gardens with rivers flowing beneath them and an allusion to Iram of the pillars; the article presents these as ways al-Qasim drew on religious and cultural heritage in his verse.[1] The coexistence of such allusions with contemporary political themes is part of the literary character described by the source.[1]

The Palestinian musical group al-ʿAshiqin incorporated contemporary Palestinian poetry, including al-Qasim’s, into its repertoire.[3] The group set poems by al-Qasim and other poets to slightly modified popular folk-song forms, joining contemporary themes with Palestinian musical history and practice.[3] The book places this musical use within a broader discussion of how performance could articulate Palestinian identity and resistance among Palestinians in Jordan.[3]

Musician Kamal Khalil recalled having two books from Palestine in prison: one by al-Qasim and one by Tawfiq al-Ziyad.[3] Khalil said it was a poem by al-Ziyad, rather than one by al-Qasim, that gave him strength and comfort.[3] The recollection therefore documents al-Qasim’s presence among works carried and read in prison, while making clear that the particular poem Khalil credited with sustaining him was by another poet.[3]

Al-Qasim’s poems reached audiences beyond Arabic-speaking literary circles. Many were translated into English and other languages, and The Times of Israel characterized his work as embraced across the Arab world as a symbol of steadfastness in the struggle against foreign occupation.[2] A 2009 interview described him as having spent 50 years active in poetry; al-Qasim said he had built his standing over many years and expected the Arab world to continue embracing him.[5]

One account connects his poem “Enemy of the Sun” to political circulation outside the Arab world. A handwritten copy was reportedly found among George Jackson’s belongings after Jackson was killed by San Quentin prison guards; the Black Panther Intercommunal News Service subsequently attributed the poem to Jackson in error.[8] The report recounts the mistaken attribution as part of the poem’s later history.[8]

In 1999, al-Qasim received a prize from Yasser Arafat.[9] Al-Qasim told Arafat he would criticize him if he strayed; Arafat then took a 16 mm pistol from a bodyguard’s holster, handed it to the poet, and said, “You can also correct me with this.”[9] The anecdote presents their exchange as a striking encounter between a poet’s stated willingness to criticize a political leader and Arafat’s reply.[9]

Al-Qasim’s public positions also included support for dialogue across political and communal lines. In a 2009 interview, he defended taking part in Jewish-Arab and Israeli-Palestinian dialogue as part of an effort to promote peace and end occupation, racism, and the suffering of both peoples.[5] He argued that ending the occupation and establishing peace were necessary for relations between Jews and Arabs in the country to become normal.[5] He said he had continued participating despite attacks against him and would not be deterred from “building bridges.”[5] He described himself as carrying personal responsibility for every drop of blood shed and expressed hope that Israelis and Arabs could live together in peace and mutual respect.[5]

Al-Qasim is remembered as a major Palestinian poet and as a Druze-Israeli writer whose work addressed Palestinian identity and the lives of Palestinians in Israel.[1][2] An encyclopedia article on Emile Habibi places him among “the great and prominent Palestinian writers and poets,” alongside Mahmud Darwish, Ghassan Kanafani, and Tawfiq Zayyad.[10] It discusses these writers’ secular work and humanism in relation to the search for and celebration of Palestinian identity.[10] The article says most of the group chose self-imposed exile but does not specify that al-Qasim did so.[10]

His contemporary Mahmoud Darwish was also born in a village in what later became northern Israel, according to The Times of Israel; the publication describes Darwish as widely considered one of the Arab world’s greatest poets.[2] Al-Qasim’s own literary career was rooted in the same broad Palestinian cultural landscape, but the sources distinguish their biographies and do not establish that they shared the same later circumstances.[2][10]

The circulation of al-Qasim’s poems in collections and translations contributed to their reach beyond the page.[1][2] The account of al-ʿAshiqin’s adaptations shows how his poetry entered popular folk-song forms, while Khalil’s recollection attests to the presence of his book among Palestinian writing encountered in prison.[3] The mistaken attribution of “Enemy of the Sun” to George Jackson offers a separate example of the poem’s circulation and reception in an American political context.[8]

A later educational portrayal highlights how his identity and literary setting can be represented selectively. An INSS article reports that Syrian Arabic-language textbooks for Grade 11 in 2025–2026 included al-Qasim as a Palestinian poet depicted as anti-Israel, without mentioning his Druze background or his place in Israel’s literary milieu.[11] This is the INSS article’s description of those textbooks and their framing.[11]

Al-Qasim died on August 19, 2014, aged 75, at a hospital in Safed after living with liver cancer for three years.[1][2] His death marked the end of a career that, by the 2009 interview’s account, had already encompassed five decades of poetry.[5]

Accounts of al-Qasim’s political affiliations, poetry, and repeated arrests use politically charged descriptions. One reference characterizes his writing as resistance to Israeli rule.[6] Other accounts connect his arrests and house arrest to his political positions, opposition to compulsory military service for Druze, and publication of work without submitting it for censorship.[1][4] These reports describe the circumstances and interpretations given by their respective sources; they should not be conflated into a single explanation for every arrest or restriction.

His participation in cultural dialogue also drew criticism. After al-Qasim took part in a poetry event honoring Yitzhak Rabin at the Sha'ar poetry festival, Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish criticized his participation alongside Israeli poets in an opinion article in the Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar, presenting it as evidence of “Israelization.”[5] Al-Qasim defended dialogue as part of his efforts to promote peace and oppose occupation, racism, and suffering.[5] The criticism and his response are attributed positions, not neutral descriptions of his motives or the meaning of the event.

The classification of al-Qasim’s identity has also varied by context. The INSS article says the Syrian textbooks presented him as a Palestinian poet while omitting his Druze background and his place in Israel’s literary milieu.[11] Other sources identify him as a Druze-Israeli poet, a Palestinian poet, or both.[1][2] The differing portrayals are relevant to how his public legacy is framed, but the available material does not establish that any one description exhausts his identity.