No, Mahmoud Darwish Didn’t Fall in Love with a Mossad Agent
Mahmoud Darwish is considered by many to be Palestine’s most eminent poet. While famous during his lifetime for his landmark political activism and literature, today it is his love poems that have brought a new generation of fans to his work.
On TikTok especially, a common format has been something akin to the following “when he calls you cute but Mahmoud Darwish said ‘they asked “do you love her to death? i said “speak of her over my grave and watch how she brings me back to life.’” while the poster does their best to look attractive behind the wall of text. (This quote is also misattributed and appears to come from Lebanese poet Hassib Ghalib.)
However, concomitant with this revival is a persistent rumor about the subject of these quotes.
Tiktok: a girl in a red hoodie makes a funny face while overlaid text reads: “me trying to explain that while mahmoud darwish’s quotes were cute and romantic we also have to remember who he wrote them about…😗✌️”
“It wasn’t even that she’s Jewish or in the ADF she was a literal spy in the MOSSAD 😭 what excuse is there” reads one of the top comments.
Elsewhere, the story is told slightly differently. “The poet Mahmoud Darwish and his Israeli girlfriend, Rita” a Facebook caption reads. “When he discovered that she was working in the Israeli intelligence mossad He said Perhaps it was not important to you but it is my heart,,Rita”
Another more common version goes as follows, often with this exact wording: “When it was discovered that she was working for the Israeli Mossad intelligence, he said : ‘I felt like my homeland was occupied again.’”
On another video perpetuating the story, with nearly 29 thousand likes, one person commented that “After finding out who she was I can’t believe bro still loved her, my feelings would’ve dissolved like a gcse science experiment fam.”
This claim, widely shared, reworded, and filtered into the mainstream, is false.
Mahmoud Darwish did not date a Mossad agent. He did, however, in the 1960s, date a Jewish woman named Tamar Ben-Ami. The name Rita, which is often cited in these posts, is the pseudonym Darwish used to refer to her in his poetry.
The story of their love was chronicled in the 2014 documentary Write Down, I Am An Arab, wherein director Ibtisam Mara’ana tracked down Ben-Ami and interviewed her about her romance with Darwish.
According to Ben-Ami, the two met at a Communist Party of Israel rally in 1962. In the town of Shfaram, near Haifa, he read poems for the event while she, a singer and a dancer, performed music. He was 22 and she was 16 ½.
Quickly, Darwish became infatuated with Ben-Ami and, while they wrote and saw each other often, neither was eager to publicize their union. “I kept our relationship a secret. I didn’t open it up. I think it was because of Communism, because he was an Arab, I was a Jew,” said Ben-Ami.
Over time, as Darwish became increasingly prominent for works such as 1964’s Identity Card, for which he was jailed, and for his work as an editor and translator of the Communist Party Newspaper, the tension at the heart of he and Ben-Ami’s relationship grew untenable. “[The 1967 war] sharpened an incompatibility that was, until that time, unconscious,” he recalls in “Palestine as Metaphor.”
“I had Israeli friends and I wanted to be there more,” Ben-Ami told Mara’ana. “I felt that I had moved too much to one side because my identity, who I was, was impaired, or not expressed because I was young and I was busy with school and I didn’t have time to think, to be.”
“I blamed myself for the separation. I wasn’t strong enough to confront the hardships,” she added.
In 1967, after the 6-day war, Ben-Ami joined the Israeli Navy as part of the naval band, singing songs with lyrics such as “the whole country is in the reserves, only in Israel.”
Upon discovering this, Darwish wrote her the following:
“Tamari, this week I thought of you often. My thoughts made me feel bad. I could see only the criminal in you. I was forced to forget the sweet, beautiful aspects. Do those aspects exist? I hope they do.”
After the 1967 war, Darwish was put under house arrest in Haifa. In 1971, he left Palestine for Cairo, Beirut, Moscow, and Paris, never to return. He would write later, in Journal of an Ordinary Grief, about his relationship with Ben-Ami.
“I thought of her: ‘What is she doing now?’ She may be in Nablus, or another city, carrying a light rifle as one of the conquerors, and perhaps at this moment giving orders to some men to raise their arms or kneel on the ground. Or perhaps she is in charge of the interrogation and torture of an Arab girl her age, and as beautiful as she used to be.”
However, while Ben-Ami’s choice to join the IDF was, of course, an act of personal and political betrayal to Darwish, it was not the state-sanctioned deception depicted in these posts. Rewriting Darwish’s biography to elide this fact serves only to impede any honest conversation about his life and work.
The truth — that activists with privilege will often align themselves with hegemony given sufficient time and pressure — is much more revelatory of issues within political movements. And, while this reality is much less sensational, it matters because it is all the more commonplace and all the more consequential.
After her time in the IDF, Tamar Ben-Ami moved to Berlin to work as a choreographer, where she lives to this day.
