In their respective poems, “Karnei Ḥittin” and “Imraʾā jamīla fī Sadūm,” Israeli author Dahlia Ravikovitch and Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish both invoke Arab nationalism and memory in their Hebrew and Arabic works. Specifically, the writers spotlight Hittin, or the site of a famous hillside battle near the Sea of Galilee, where the lauded Arab figure Salaḥ al-dīn thwarted the invading Crusader forces in 1187. In the wake of the Arabs’ devastating defeat after the 1967 War, the authors’ reference to the twelfth century victory accents how they both limn a shared and mutually identifiable motif — capable of being translated between Arabic and Hebrew poetics. However, while Ravikovitch summons this lineage to undermine Zionist historiography and the Jews’ ascendency and influence in the region, Darwish instances Hittin to emphasize the Jews’ and Palestinians’ common heritage during their joint resistance against the Crusaders. Through an analysis of comparative Palestinian and Israeli poetics, this paper will explore how the authors conjure similar tropes to reveal the ways in which contemporary divisions reflect colonial ideologies and campaigns, rather than a primordial conflict. Thus, as both Darwish and Ravikovitch demonstrate, these rifts do not portend an everlasting, timeless phenomenon, but they must be contextualized in the modern period. Like the Crusaders, the Israelis may experience a fleeting period of ascendency, the ability to wield power over the indigenous population in the same region that the Crusaders once conquered and ruled centuries ago. However, as Ravikovitch eerily intimates, the past is bound to repeat itself, and if the Israelis fail to regard the lessons from this history, they too, will confront the same calamitous fate as the Christian armies. While Darwish’s evocation of Hittin only plays a minor role in the Arabic poem, he nevertheless underscores how both communities can recognize Salaḥ al-dīn as a heroic figure, in order to consider their collective memory and potentialities for a shared future. As scholar Amir Eshel espouses in Poetic Thinking Today, literary verses have “the capacity as imaginative artifacts to bring new, at times profound, insight into the worlds we inhabit and shape.” Even though the political situation following the 1967 War was increasingly fraught and imbalanced in Israel/Palestine, this paper showcases how Hittin becomes a site of translation — enabling the authors to envisage an alternative to the conditions of violence that punctuate the present — and contemplate a more hopeful outlook in the years to come.