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Yet Darwish, 58, unwittingly, sits in the eye of a political storm that is threatening Israel's government.

The storm erupted last week when Israel's iconoclastic education minister, Yossi Sarid, decided to add works by Darwish to the Israeli high school curriculum. What was conceived as a politically correct move to make the national curriculum reflect Israel's multicultural reality has become a political liability for Prime Minister Ehud Barak.

Struggling to keep together an unwieldy coalition and under intense attack from the right, Barak has publicly disavowed his minister and declared that Israel is "not ready" for Darwish.

In Israel's parliament, Darwish has been the subject of heated debates for the past few days. Right-wing politicians have been busy poring over the poet's prolific work looking for fresh ammunition. Quoting a line from a 1987 poem in which Darwish says "it is time for you to be gone," many accuse the poet of wanting to evict Jews from Israel. The brouhaha has caught Darwish by surprise. He took no part in the decision to alter the Israeli literature curriculum and has watched events unfold from afar. "I'm not a scandalist -- I don't like scandals," he said. "I'm well-enough known in my field and I don't want to be an obstacle to Israeli unity."

The fact that Darwish was once a high-ranking member of the Palestine Liberation Organization and one of the most eloquent voices supporting the Palestinian cause does not help. Darwish was born in the Galilee, now part of Israel, and his native village was razed by the Israeli army in the 1948 war. He was forced to live in exile for 26 years after he joined the PLO.

But Darwish has distanced himself from politics over the years. He refuses to believe that his lyrical poems pose a serious threat to Israel, the most powerful country in the Middle East. "The storm makes me believe Barak is right," Darwish said with a wink. "Israel is not ready to listen to the culture of others. Israelis do not recognize Palestinians as cultural producers. They accept us as obstacles, as part of the landscape but nothing beyond that," he said.

Education can become a political battleground anywhere in the world, but the row over Darwish reflects Israel's particular sensitivities. According to Israeli historian Tom Segev, the controversy is "a combination of coalition politics and a battle in an ongoing cultural war that is raging in this country."

On one level, the controversy is a matter of political infighting between liberals and conservatives. Shas, a religious party and key player in Barak's coalition, is using the quarrel to settle accounts with Sarid, the liberal education minister. Sarid has steadfastly refused to give his deputy minister, a member of Shas, control over the ultra-Orthodox Jewish school system. Shas has therefore decided to join its voice to the chorus denouncing Sarid's choice of poetry and is expected to vote against the government in a vote of no-confidence next week.

Sarid, a tad provocative, has refused to back down for the sake of the coalition. Fanning the flames of the religious party's anger, Sarid told the Knesset that he had drafted the new literature curriculum on a Saturday -- a desecration of the Sabbath, the Jewish day of rest. Sarid was once the author of a poem that read "I will die in the wrong battle." Segev predicts, "That's what is likely to happen to him."

Next page | "They're against the principle, not the poem"