Mahmoud Darwish, Palestine’s greatest modern poet, fell in love with a Jewish Israeli woman named Tamar Ben-Ami in the early 1960s – a relationship that inspired some of the most celebrated Arabic love poetry of the twentieth century and became an enduring symbol of the impossibility of personal bonds across national divides.

Their story, confirmed by both Darwish and Ben-Ami over decades, produced the iconic poem “Rita and the Rifle,” which Marcel Khalife set to music in 1976 as an anthem heard across the Arab world. The relationship lasted roughly five years before the June 1967 war shattered it irreversibly, sending the lovers into opposing camps of a conflict that would define both their lives.

Far from a simple romance, the story exposes the enduring tension in Darwish’s work between the personal and the political, revealing how history seeps into even the most intimate human spaces. It is a haunting truth, on this Valentine’s Day, that love is never immune to the weight of time, place, and conflict.

This sensibility is perhaps best distilled in one of Darwish’s most quoted confessions on love and misreading, when he wrote: “A University degree, four books, and hundreds of articles, and I still make mistakes when reading. You wrote me ‘good morning,’ and I read it as ‘I love you.’”

The line has since become a famous passage drawn from Darwish’s prose reflections on love, language, and loss, encapsulating how intimacy under conditions of conflict warps meaning itself. It is not merely a romantic exaggeration, but a quiet admission that in a life shaped by dispossession and fracture, even ordinary words arrive charged with longing, hope, and inevitable misinterpretation.

A Communist Party rally in Shfaram, circa 1962

Mahmoud Darwish was born on March 13, 1941, in the village of al-Birwa in the Western Galilee. His family fled to Lebanon during the 1948 Nakba; their village was razed by Israeli forces. When they returned around 1949, they were classified as “present absentees” – technically citizens of a state that had destroyed their home. This status would define Darwish’s early life.

By his early twenties, he had moved to Haifa, joined the Israeli Communist Party (Rakah), and began publishing poetry in the party’s literary journal Al-Jadid and newspaper Al-Ittihad. He was already gaining notoriety: his poem “Identity Card” (“Write Down, I Am an Arab”) had landed him in prison in 1964.

The Communist Party was the only significant political space in 1960s Israel where Arabs and Jews met as relative equals. It was at a party rally in the town of Shfaram, near Haifa, around 1962, that Darwish and Tamar Ben-Ami first encountered each other. He was approximately twenty-one, reading his poems to the crowd. She was roughly sixteen, a dancer and singer performing at the event. Both were members of the communist youth movement. Ben-Ami later recalled her first impression: “He seemed like a Greek god.”

Tamar Ben-Ami was born in 1947 in Haifa to a Jewish family of Polish-Russian descent. She was studying dance with Israeli choreographers Yardena Cohen and Gertrud Kraus. In 1962, she had joined a local dance company that integrated Jewish and Arab performers – another product of the Communist Party milieu that brought the two together. According to the Batsheva Dance Company Archive, “at age sixteen she became the partner of Palestinian national poet Mahmoud Darwish.”

The relationship was conducted in secret. Ben-Ami told filmmaker Ibtisam Mara’ana decades later: “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.” The obstacles were not merely social. From 1948 to 1966, Palestinian citizens of Israel lived under military administration. Arab citizens needed permits to travel between cities. In one of the Hebrew love letters Darwish wrote to Tamar – letters she preserved for over fifty years – he described the concrete weight of these restrictions:

“I wanted to travel to you in Jerusalem, to reassure myself and calm your fears. I applied to the military governor on Wednesday afternoon to get a permit to enter Jerusalem, but my request was denied. I have always dreamed of having tea with you in the evening, of sharing happiness and joy with you.”

Her parents, alarmed by the relationship, sent her to study dance at the Jerusalem Music and Dance Academy – a deliberate separation. The physical distance compounded the political impossibility. There is no evidence they attempted to marry, and indeed marriage would have been structurally impossible: Israel has no civil marriage, and religious authorities would only marry within their own faith. A Jewish woman and an Arab Muslim man could not legally wed anywhere within the country.

June 1967 ended what the military governor could not

The relationship lasted approximately four to five years, from around 1962 to 1967. The poem “Rita and the Rifle” states “I was lost in Rita for two years / And for two years she slept on my arm,” but this likely reflects poetic compression of the most intense phase rather than a literal chronology.

The June 1967 Six-Day War was the decisive rupture. In Palestine as Metaphor, a collection of his interviews, Darwish offered his most direct reflection on why: “[The 1967 war] sharpened an incompatibility that was, until that time, unconscious.” The war forced both lovers to confront what their intimacy had allowed them to defer – that they belonged to opposing sides of a deepening conflict.

Ben-Ami’s account confirms this. She joined the Israeli Navy’s performing troupe as a singer after the war, performing patriotic songs for troops. She explained: “I had Israeli friends and I wanted to be there more. 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.” She added, with evident pain: “I blamed myself for the separation. I wasn’t strong enough to confront the hardships.”

Darwish’s reaction to learning she had joined the military was anguished. In a letter addressed to “Tamari” – his Hebrew diminutive for her – he wrote: “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.” The phrase “the criminal in you” captures the moment when the beloved became, inescapably, one of the occupiers.

In Journal of an Ordinary Grief (1973), Darwish transformed this private anguish into searing prose: “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.”

After the war, Darwish was placed under house arrest in Haifa. In 1970, he left Israel for Moscow, then Cairo, then Beirut. He would not return for twenty-six years. He later reflected: “We were both very young then. We tried to do something that was beyond our power to accomplish, at least beyond my power. I didn’t know, actually, what to do with this love, where to take it, how to protect it, if at all.”

‘Between Rita and my eyes – a rifle’

The poem that immortalized the relationship, “Rita and the Rifle” (Rita wa al-Bundaqiyya), was written in 1967, in the immediate aftermath of the war. It appeared in Darwish’s early collections and was later included in his collected early works (al-Diwan: al-a’mal al-ula, Riad El-Rayyes, 2005).

The poem opens and closes with the same devastating image: “Between Rita and my eyes / There is a rifle.” This circular structure gives the rifle – war itself – the first and last word. Between these bookends, Darwish remembers an intensely sensual love: “Rita’s name was a feast in my mouth / Rita’s body was a wedding in my blood.” Her “honey-colored eyes” recur as the poem’s central motif, representing beauty, desire, and an unattainable paradise. Memory of Rita is compared to “the way a sparrow remembers its stream” – instinctive, essential, irreplaceable. The poem ends in fairy-tale register – “Once upon a time / Oh, the silence of dusk” – before the final, brutal return: “The city swept away all the singers / And Rita / Between Rita and my eyes – / A rifle.”

As literary critic Robyn Creswell wrote in Harper’s Magazine, these poems “show how even the most intimate relations are structured, and sometimes made impossible, by forces beyond any individual’s control.” The rifle is never historicized or explained. It simply stands between them. The poem operates simultaneously as personal lament and national allegory – but its power lies in refusing to choose between the two registers.

Darwish wrote several other poems featuring Rita over a twenty-five-year span, from 1967 to approximately 1992. “Rita’s Winter” (Shita’ Rita), translated by Fady Joudah, depicts the lovers in a small house with rain falling outside – hushed intimacy when Rita sleeps, claustrophobia when she wakes. In one remarkable exchange from the Rita poems, the lovers trade impossibilities: she asks to be taken to Australia – “an elopement from history,” as Creswell puts it – and Darwish responds by asking to be taken to Jerusalem. Two impossible destinations, each for different reasons.

In what Creswell describes as one of the last Rita poems, the imagery has hardened: “She broke the day’s pottery against the window’s iron, / then lay her pistol on the draft of my poem, / threw her stockings on the chair / and as the pigeons began to coo / she walked out, barefoot, into the unknown.” The rifle of the first poem has become a pistol laid on the manuscript itself – violence resting directly on art.

Marcel Khalife’s 1976 recording of “Rita and the Rifle” – on his debut lyrical album Promises of the Storm, originally just oud and voice – transformed the poem into one of the most famous songs in the Arab world. Darwish himself wrote that Khalife’s music “eliminated the gap created by the poets between poem and song.” The song became what multiple commentators have called “an anthem for at least two generations of Arabs.”

Darwish’s long evasion and eventual confirmation

For decades, Darwish denied Rita was real. He insisted she was “just a fictional character he had created in his imagination.” This evasion was strategic – both protecting a private memory and resisting the reduction of his poetry to autobiography. He complained, as a Bidoun reviewer noted, that “even his most intimate works – his love poems, or domestic lyrics – were interpreted as political gestures.”

Yet Darwish also dropped contradictory hints. In archival footage used in the 2014 documentary Write Down, I Am an Arab, he is heard saying: “Every love song that I write, they say it’s about the land, the homeland. Rita is a name…that I chose. Rita in all my poems is a Jewish woman. Am I revealing a secret?” And in Journal of an Ordinary Grief, he wrote: “I used to call her by a borrowed name, because that is more beautiful” – the closest he came in prose to explaining the pseudonym.

He finally confirmed Rita’s identity as Tamar Ben-Ami in an interview with French journalist Laure Adler, reportedly in 2007. The confirmation was quiet but definitive. In In the Presence of Absence (2006), his lyrical autobiography, Darwish reflected on love in terms many scholars read as encompassing Rita: “She and not she; she is present and absent, it is as if her presence holds my absence within her, and her absence carries the presence of details.” The passage captures Darwish’s lifelong insistence that Rita was both real and transformed – “she and not she.”

He told interviewer Helit Yeshurun in 1996: “There are conditions for love. The lover must be accepted, and not hungry. It’s true that there is no absolute equality in love, but the lover must at least feel desired. Until now the Palestinians haven’t felt accepted.” Though not explicitly about Rita, this statement articulates Darwish’s conviction that genuine love between Palestinians and Israelis required political preconditions – acceptance, equality – that did not exist. The New York Review of Books noted a formulation Darwish returned to throughout his life: “His first judge and jailer had been Jewish; but so had his first teacher and lover.”

Sporadic contact and the closed door in Paris

The relationship did not end with total silence. According to Ben-Ami’s testimony – corroborated by political scientist Mira Sucharov, who interviewed her directly – there were several later contacts.

Around 1988, approximately twenty-five years after their separation, they encountered each other in Paris. According to Ben-Ami, they agreed to spend a day together. But when the day came, Darwish refused to open his door. When she called from a public telephone, he told her to forget their romance and said she was no longer his lover, “nor ever was.” Ben-Ami recalled crying extensively afterward. This account comes solely from Tamar; Darwish never publicly commented on it.

After the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in November 1995, Darwish reached out to Tamar in compassion. And in 2000, when Education Minister Yossi Sarid’s attempt to include Darwish’s poetry in the Israeli high school curriculum triggered a near no-confidence vote, Darwish called her with wry amusement: “My poetry is so important that over it the government nearly fell?”

Tamar Ben-Ami went on to build a distinguished career in dance. After the military, she graduated from the Jerusalem Music and Dance Academy in 1967, then moved to New York to study at Alvin Ailey’s school. She taught at Kibbutzim College of Education in the late 1970s, worked as a freelance choreographer in Israel through the 1980s – winning prizes at the Shades of Dance Festival and the Gertrud Kraus Competition – and eventually moved to Berlin, where she taught at the State Ballet School until 2011. She divides her time between Berlin and Tel Aviv. She was alive as of 2014, when she appeared in the documentary reading Darwish’s Hebrew love letters aloud for the first time.

Darwish himself married twice – first the Syrian-British writer Rana Kabbani, then the Egyptian translator Hayat Heeni. Both marriages ended in divorce. He had no children. He died on August 9, 2008, in Houston, Texas, following heart surgery. He was sixty-seven.

Two audiences, two readings of the same love story

The Rita story is received very differently by Palestinian and Israeli audiences, and both receptions reveal deep tensions.

For Palestinian audiences, the poems themselves – especially through Khalife’s recording – are enormously beloved. “Rita and the Rifle” is sung and recognized across the Arab world. Yet the revelation that Rita was a real Jewish woman, not merely a symbol, produced what one commentator called “a surprise” – not that she existed, but that the woman Darwish loved was Israeli.

The humanization of an Israeli lover was uncomfortable in certain quarters. Darwish’s 1967 poem “A Soldier Dreams of White Lilies,” which humanized an Israeli soldier (later identified as historian Shlomo Sand), “received little acclaim in the Arab world, being criticized because it stood against the pervasive public narratives” about the enemy. The Rita story likely triggered similar discomfort.

In recent years, a false narrative has spread virally on TikTok and social media claiming that Rita was a Mossad agent who infiltrated Darwish’s life. This fabrication – thoroughly debunked by multiple researchers – serves an important psychological function: it transforms the uncomfortable truth that a Palestinian poet genuinely loved a Jewish woman into a cleaner story of state betrayal. As one debunking article argued, “Rewriting Darwish’s biography to elide this fact serves only to impede any honest conversation about his life and work.”

The 2014 documentary Write Down, I Am an Arab drew sharp Palestinian criticism. A Jadaliyya reviewer accused filmmaker Ibtisam Mara’ana-Menuhin of “Israelizing” Darwish – stripping the rifle from “Rita and the Rifle,” framing Palestine’s national poet through his relationships with Israeli Jews, and having him speak more Hebrew than Arabic. The critic argued the film “unjustly appropriated Palestine’s most beloved national poet.”

For Israeli audiences, Darwish remains a charged figure. His poetry has provoked fierce right-wing hostility: Prime Minister Shamir cited his work angrily in the Knesset in 1988; PM Barak declared in 2000 that “Israel is not ready” for Darwish in schools; Defense Minister Lieberman called his poems “fuel for terror attacks” in 2016. Yet the love story specifically has found a warmer reception.

The documentary won the Audience Award at DocAviv, Israel’s premier documentary festival, suggesting Israeli audiences are receptive to the romance framing. Israeli poet Ronny Someck acknowledged Darwish as “one of the first five names that come to mind when thinking of what is ‘Palestinian.’” But as publisher Yael Lerer noted, only 2,000 to 2,500 copies of Darwish’s most popular Hebrew translation have sold in Israel – he remains “an empty symbol” to most.

The woman as metaphor for the land

The Darwish-Rita story endures because it embodies a contradiction that refuses resolution. Darwish did not use Rita merely as a political symbol, nor was the relationship merely personal. As Creswell observed, the Rita poems are “the more radically political” precisely because they show how conflict structures intimacy itself – how a rifle inserts itself between two people’s eyes without either of them choosing it.

Darwish connected his experience to the deep tradition of Arabic love poetry, where “scandal is the lifeblood” and the beloved is always from a hostile tribe. But he also inverted the convention: where Neruda uses landscape as metaphor for the woman, Darwish uses the woman as metaphor for the land. Rita becomes Palestine – beautiful, desired, separated from him by forces beyond any individual’s control.

What makes this story historically searing, beyond its literary power, is what it reveals about the structural impossibility of coexistence at the personal level. Darwish could not get a permit to have tea with the woman he loved. She could not marry him within the borders of the state where they both lived. “You are killing me, and you are keeping me from dying. That is love,” as he once wrote.

When war came, they retreated to their respective peoples – not because love failed, but because the political architecture of their world left no room for it to survive. “I didn’t know what to do with this love, where to take it,” Darwish said. The honest answer was: there was nowhere to take it. The rifle, in the end, had the last word.

Myths, fabrications, and what the evidence actually shows

Several false or unverified claims circulate widely about this story. A factual accounting requires distinguishing them clearly.

Confirmed facts: Rita was a real person – Tamar Ben-Ami – confirmed by Darwish himself and by Ben-Ami’s own public testimony. They met at a Communist Party rally around 1962. She was a Jewish Israeli dancer; he was a Palestinian Arab poet under military administration. They conducted a secret relationship of roughly four to five years. The 1967 war ended it. She joined the Israeli Navy band (not combat). He left Israel in 1970. Darwish wrote her love letters in Hebrew, which she preserved and later read in the 2014 documentary. They maintained sporadic contact in subsequent decades. The Rita poems span 1967 to approximately 1992.

Confirmed false: The claim that Rita was a Mossad agent or spy is entirely fabricated – a social media invention with no basis in any credible source. She was a teenage dancer in the communist youth movement. The claim that Darwish said “speak of her over my grave” is a misattribution – the line comes from Lebanese poet Hassib Ghalib. Various “final interview” quotes circulating online about Darwish saying “Yes. And no” about Rita appear to be fabricated by unreliable content platforms.

Single-source and unverified: The account of Darwish refusing to open his door in Paris comes solely from Ben-Ami. Darwish never publicly addressed it. Her exact birth year is inconsistently reported (1943 in one Arabic source, 1947 in the Batsheva Archive – the institutional source appears more reliable). The precise year they met varies between 1962 and 1964 across sources, though Ben-Ami’s own testimony and the Batsheva timeline favor 1962-1963.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)