March 7, 2000


RAMALLAH JOURNAL
Poetry of Arab Pain: Are Israeli Students Ready?


By SUSAN SACHS
AMALLAH, West Bank, March 6 -- Mahmoud Darwish, the poet whose lyrical 
writings have long been a touchstone of Palestinian national passions, was 
banned from Israel and the occupied territories for nearly 30 years.

Now he finds himself watching -- still from afar, but with considerable 
bemusement -- as his poetry becomes a weapon in the hands of right-wing 
Israeli politicians who would like to bring down the Government.

       The New York Times
       From Ramallah, a poet follows the raucous politics of Jerusalem.
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"The Arabs are always accused of being a nation of poetry," Mr. Darwish 
said today in an interview in his sunny office in a Ramallah arts center. 
"But it's Israel that now is putting poetry in the eye of the storm."

The storm began brewing late last week, when Yossi Sarid, the iconoclastic 
education minister, announced that Mr. Darwish's poetry would be included 
in a new multicultural literature curriculum for Israeli high school 
students.

The outcry from hard-liners in the opposition was not long in coming.

Mr. Darwish is "anti-Zionist and an Israel-hater who calls for the 
destruction of the Zionist entity," complained one member of the right-wing 
Likud Party. His poetry, said a member of the even more conservative 
National Union Party, is racist. To impose it on Israeli students, said a 
member of the National Religious Party, is "a Bolshevik decision."

Prime Minister Ehud Barak weighed in, saying that Israel was not yet ready 
for Mr. Darwish's poetry to be taught in the schools.

Today, the question of whether Israel should have its children read 
Palestinian poetry was being argued on the radio, in the streets and in 
Parliament. Likud leaders said the threat from Mr. Darwish's words is so 
serious that they will call for a vote of no confidence in Mr. Barak.

"We cannot continue to grant legitimacy to the delegitimizing that is done 
to us," declared Yuval Steinitz, a Likud member of Parliament.

For Mr. Darwish, the dispute is like the rumbling of a distant 
thunderstorm. It is ominous, but there is nothing he can do about it. His 
poetry may have infiltrated Israel, but he cannot.

Although he was born in a village in the Galilee region in what is now 
Israel, and was educated in Israeli schools and studied Zionist poetry, he 
was barred from re-entering the country after he left in 1970. He lived in 
Cairo, Beirut and Paris, and served until 1993 as a member of the executive 
committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization.


Long after other P.L.O. figures were permitted to return home, the Israeli 
prohibition on Mr. Darwish remained. The ban was lifted only four years ago 
and then only to allow Mr. Darwish to live in the parts of the West Bank 
and Gaza Strip under Palestinian control.

The poet who once wrote that his homeland is a suitcase moved to the 
Palestinian city of Ramallah on the West Bank, about a 20-minute drive and 
a world away from Jerusalem. Except for one trip for a funeral, he was not 
allowed even to visit his aging mother in the Galilee.

But three months ago, to his surprise, he received a six-month pass to 
enter Israel -- a good-will gesture toward the Palestinian leadership, he 
believes, from Prime Minister Barak. The pass expires in May. Mr. Darwish 
fears that the uproar over the teaching of his poetry in Israeli high 
school classes could jeopardize a renewal.

"I feel embarrassed, really, by all this," he said. "The accusation is that 
I hate Jews. It's not comfortable that they show me as a devil and an enemy 
of Israel. I am not a lover of Israel, of course. I have no reason to be. 
But I don't hate Jews."

Now 58, Mr. Darwish has written poems that range from dreamy reflections on 
love to bitter longing for the Palestine that was lost when Israel was 
created in 1948. He writes of the pain of exile, a state he said he now 
realizes he may never leave.

"I became addicted to exile," he said. "My language is exile. The metaphor 
for Palestine is stronger than the Palestine of reality."

His preoccupations, however, are taken by Palestinians and Israelis alike 
for political statements.

One poem in particular, published in 1987 in Arabic and then translated 
into Hebrew, has long rankled many Israelis. Called "Those Who Pass Between 
Fleeting Words," it is a tirade against unnamed interlopers in what Mr. 
Darwish calls "our land."

It is time for you to be gone
Live wherever you like, but do not live among us
It is time for you to be gone
Die wherever you like, but do not die among us
For we have work to do in our land


Mr. Darwish has said that he did not mean, as some Israeli critics charged, 
that he wanted to evict the Jews from Israel. The poem, he said, was a call 
for Israel to leave the Palestinian territories it captured in the 1967 
Middle East War.

He now despairs of creating a climate for dialogue through his poetry.

"In Israel they start from the point of saying that you have to love them 
and then they may be ready to talk to you and know you," he said. "But love 
is a choice."

Like most political analysts in Israel, he also believes that the newest 
attacks on his poetry are just the pretext for another round of 
Barak-bashing by the country's fractious political parties. "I don't think 
the country with the strongest army in the Middle East is really afraid of 
a poem," Mr. Darwish said.

The role of accidental subversive is not one that he seeks or relishes, he 
said. He would prefer his life's work to be read for its literary rather 
than its political value.

"If they do teach my poetry, they should choose something nice and light, 
like my poem about my mother," Mr. Darwish added. "But they can't read me 
in an innocent way, seeing the beauty of the poetry and the aesthetic side 
of it."