Prepared by: Hadeel Wahdan
A DECISION BY the Israeli education minister to introduce Five works by the Palestinian national poet, Mahmoud Darwish, as optional reading in Israeli schools has incensed hawkish and religious lawmakers, who threatened Monday to try to bring down Prime Minister Ehud Barak's government over the verses.
Barak, apparently fearing another defeat in parliament after his coalition crumbled last week in a key vote on peace with Syria, said time "is not ripe" to teach Darwish, who as a PLO member was banned from entering Israel for 26 years.
The emotional dispute over a few lines of poetry illustrates how hard it still is for Israelis and Palestinians to put aside resentments accumulated in a century of conflict. It also signals that reconciliation between the two peoples will take many more years, even if a formal peace treaty is eventually signed.
Introducing Darwish into the curriculum is part of reforms begun by Israeli Education Minister Yossi Sarid. "It is very important to know one another. Ignorance is not the best recipe for good neighborliness," Sarid said.
The opposition Likud party accused Sarid of "legitimizing the negation of Zionism" and submitted a motion of no confidence in the government. The religious Shas faction, a member of Barak's coalition, hinted it might join Likud in next week's vote on the motion, which would embarrass, but not topple the Prime Minister.
Darwish said Monday the 6th of April; “the uproar shows how fearful many Israelis are of challenging long-held negative stereotypes about Palestinians”. "The first step of real peace is to know the other side, its culture and creativity," Darwish, said
Those who object to teaching Darwish poetry in Israeli schools "cannot digest that the other side has culture, creativity and intellect," Darwish said. "They consider this to be a dangerous recognition of the other side."
To many Israelis, Darwish, 57 years old, is synonymous with Palestinian nationalism, even though few have read his poetry. In an essay on the 50th anniversary of Israel's founding, Darwish wrote in 1998 that the Jewish State was founded on the "dual injustice" of dispossession and occupation. "Four hundred and eighteen living and thriving Palestinian villages were razed to the ground in 1948 by Zionist perpetrators of myth and crime," Darwish wrote.
Darwish was born in 1942 in the Arab village of Barweh near Akko in what is now Israel. His village was destroyed by Israeli troops in the 1948 Middle East war.
Following two years under house arrest, the poet went into exile in 1970 after he joined the PLO Executive Committee. An initial critic of Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking, Darwish quit the PLO after the first interim agreements were signed in
1993, though he no longer actively opposes them.
Banned from Israel for 26 years, Darwish returned from exile in 1996 and settled in the Palestinian-ruled town of Ramallah in the West Bank. He has published more than two dozen poetry and prose collections.
Darwish said Israelis
should not fear his poetry. Noting that as a high school student in Israel,
he was forced to read the works of Haim Bialik, the poetic voice of Zionism,
Darwish said Bialik "did not change me into a Zionist. He did not even
get me to like his poems."