Widely the recognized as one of Israel’s great poets at the time of its founding, Uri Zvi Greenberg (1896-1981) produced verse in both Hebrew and Yiddish. Greenberg gradually moved during the 1920s and 30s from a commitment to Labor Zionism to the Revisionist Zionism of Vladimir Jabotinsky, even serving in the first Knesset as a representative of the party that would later become Likud. In the wake of the Arab riots of 1929, which left 133 dead, Greenberg wrote the short poem “Sicarii II,” which took its name from a group of radical anti-Roman zealots from the Jewish Revolt of the 1st century CE. Yisrael Medad comments on its meaning:

If there is to be a resolution to the conflict between the Jewish state and a putative Palestinian one, writes Jonathan Michanie, it won’t start with drawing lines on maps or restrictions on where Jews can build houses, but with the Palestinian Authority (PA) abandoning its official anti-Semitism. The PA can, in this regard, learn much from those Arab nations that have recently made peace with Israel: