Mahmoud Darwish, who passed away yesterday, was not a modest person. One day I introduced him as the greatest living Palestinian poet and he corrected me "Arab poet", meaning not only that he was a poet of the whole Arab nation and language, but that he was in fact the greatest of all the Arab poets alive. And indeed he was. And not only a great Arab poet, but one of the greatest intellectuals of our time.

The best thing he did in his life was to leave his Homeland, for, in Israel, he was not and never would have been evaluated at his real value. At best, he was patronized by the little dwarfs who claim to be "Israeli intellectuals"; more often, he was called to order when his poetry was not politically correct in Zionist standards.

As an homage to Mahmoud Darwish, and as a pre-emptive reaction to the hypocritical reactions we will read in the Israeli media in the coming weeks, I would like to reproduce an article I wrote twenty years ago about Mahmoud Darwish and the Israeli left-intellectuals.