JERUSALEM - The conductor Daniel Barenboim, already a contentious figure among fellow Israelis for championing Palestinians' rights and the works of Hitler's favorite composer, has accepted honorary Palestinian citizenship.
Barenboim was given citizenship a year ago, but the move didn't become public until this weekend, when a Palestinian lawmaker mentioned it after Barenboim held a performance in the West Bank city of Ramallah.
The Argentinian-born conductor is the first Israeli to be granted citizenship by the Palestinian Authority. Lawmaker Mustafa Barghouti said he lobbied Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to make Barenboim a citizen.
Barenboim deserved a Palestinian passport, Barghouti said, because the conductor had shown "solidarity with Palestinians under the most difficult circumstances."
"It was a nice gesture," Barenboim said in a telephone interview from Berlin.
Some Israelis found Barenboim's symbolic acceptance of a Palestinian passport distasteful. One Israeli lawmaker even said his Israeli citizenship should be taken away. The passport and citizenship status are mostly symbolic, because Palestinians don't have a state.
"It's a disgrace to the state of Israel that a man like Barenboim holds Israeli citizenship, and it would be fitting for it to be revoked," Yakov Margi of the Shas party told the Maariv daily newspaper's Web site.
A spokeswoman for Israel's Interior Ministry said there was no legal basis for revoking Barenboim's citizenship.
The conductor is respected by many Palestinians for his vocal criticism of Israel and his years of work to build coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians through music. Along with the late Palestinian-American intellectual Edward Said, he formed the West-Eastern Diwan Workshop, which brings together young Israeli and Arab musicians.
Barenboim appears regularly in the Palestinian territories. In December, he called off a concert at a Gaza Strip church after Israeli authorities did not allow a Palestinian musician to enter.
Barenboim angered many Israelis by defying an unwritten ban in Israel on the works of Wagner, the anti-Semitic German composer who was beloved by Hitler.
