Israel/Palestine

His poems are overflowing with longing for his conquered homeland. Some are poems about a national struggle for freedom and there are quite a few about love. Darwish became the eloquent artistic voice of the Palestinian people. The late Yossi Sarid, (Meretz) when he was education minister, included Darwish’s poems in school curricula, where they remain to this day. That raised a hue and a cry at the time, too.

The Army Radio program “University on the Air” that was devoted to Darwish brought down the wrath of the new commissars of Israeli culture, the muzzlers of free expression: Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman and Culture and Sports Minister Miri Regev. The pair launched an unbridled and ignorant assault on Darwish and on Army Radio, which dared to present his poetry. Yesterday the head of Army Radio, Yaron Dekel, was even summoned to Lieberman’s office for a scolding. Lieberman told him that to devote a program to Darwish was like praising the literary quality of “Mein Kampf” on the air.

Darwish caused no damage to Israel. He merely expressed the heartfelt emotions of the Palestinians. Ignoring his words is ignoring words that impact the consciousness of Israel’s Arabs, 20 percent of this country’s population. And so the poem read on Army Radio, “Identity Card,” is certainly worthy of the title of “seminal Israeli text.” Accusing Darwish of incitement to terror is grotesque. Lieberman and Regev are the ones doing the main damage to Israel, when they turn it into a state that is unwilling to acknowledge the frame of mind of the people who live next to us, and turn Israel into a country that is interested only in artistic propaganda.