Far-right Defense Minister Avidgor Liberman has been roundly criticized by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel and by Joint List and Hadash lawmakers for the recent comparison he made between the works of the Palestinian national poet Mahmoud Darwish with the “glorification of the literary marvels of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.”
Mahmoud Darwish (Photo: Al Ittihad)
“Up to now, we’ve known that the defense minister was racist, violent and hallucinatory,” said Joint List MK Ahmad Tibi (Ta’al). By summoning the manager of Army Radio, Yaron Dekel, to a meeting about the station’s broadcast of a program about Darwish, Liberman has shown himself to also be ignorant, Tibi said, but by comparing Darwish and Hitler, “it turns out that he is also a Holocaust denier.” The program in question about Darwish was broadcast on Tuesday, July 19, as part of a series on formative Israeli texts on the Army Radio station’s “University on the Air” program. Liberman’s office issued a statement saying that there is no intervention on the political level in the content of Army Radio’s broadcasts, but added: “The military station’s mission is to strengthen social solidarity and not to widen rifts, and certainly not to hurt public sensitivities.”
Joint List chairman MK Ayman Odeh (Hadash) said Darwish persistently combated Holocaust denial: “Only a hateful, evil person could make a comparison between the wonderful, humanity-loving poetry of Darwish and the works of Hitler,” adding that Darwish “will eternally remain a symbol of human love, wisdom and sensitivity, values that the defense minister isn’t even familiar with.” Odeh continued: “This is the reason that he [Liberman] raised the electoral threshold… and also [backed] the [recently passed] legislation to allow ‘ousting’ [of allegedly inimical MKs] – because he is afraid of our [Arab Palestinian] impact. We make up 20 percent of the population. If we become legitimate in the country, he will not remain defense minister and the right wing will no longer rule the country.”
The Association for Civil Rights in Israel called Liberman’s decision to summon the head of Army Radio, “serious and improper intervention on the political level in the contact of a media entity.” Acknowledging that the station belongs to the Israel Defense Forces, it said, however, that Army Radio is “a significant part of the free media in Israel.” It called the decision to broadcast the program about Darwish “entirely legitimate” and said Liberman’s summoning of the station’s manager did “serious harm to Army Radio’s independence.” Late Wednesday, Attorney General Avichai Mendelblit phoned Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman to remind him that he has no authority to intervene in Army Radio’s programming.
Darwish is widely considered the Palestinian national poet. He was a member of the Communist Party of Israel (CPI), a journalist for the party’s daily Arabic-language Al Ittihad newspaper and a frequent contributor to the CPI’s Al Jadid literature quarterly. He left Israel to join the Palestine Liberation Organization and died in Texas in 2008 to where he traveled for heart surgery. Poems by Darwish have long been an elective in advanced Israeli high school literature programs, though a former education minister, the late Yossi Sarid, once tried but failed to make the study of his work part of the compulsory curriculum.
