Bangor Daily News · Bangor, Maine · 13 August 2008
CP-2008-007
Poet Darwish leaves controversial legacy
Author of Palestinian Declaration of Independence dies in Houston after heart surgery
Diaa Hadid, The Associated Press, Gaza City
Transcribed from the clipping
“GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — Mahmoud Darwish, a Palestinian cultural icon whose poetry eloquently told of his people’s experiences of exile, occupation and infighting, died Aug. 9 in Houston. He was 67… Darwish was born in the Palestinian village of Birweh near Haifa, which was destroyed in the 1948 Mideast war that led to Israel’s independence. He joined the Israeli Communist Party after high school and began writing poems for leftist newspapers… ‘When we think of Darwish … he is our heart, and our tongue,’ said Issam Makhoul, an Arab lawmaker and veteran member of the Israeli Communist Party.… ‘He started out as a poet of resistance and then he became a poet of conscience,’ said Palestinian lawmaker Hanan Ashrawi… In 2000, Israel’s education minister, Yossi Sarid, suggested including some of Darwish’s poems in the Israeli high school curriculum. But Prime Minister Ehud Barak overruled him, saying Israel was not ready yet for his ideas in the school system. In 1988, a Darwish poem, ‘Passing in Passing Words,’ was read by then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir inside Israel’s parliament as an example of the Palestinians’ unwillingness to live alongside Jews. The poem suggested that Darwish called for Jews to leave the region.”
Context added by this archive
The same Associated Press obituary the Star-Ledger ran three days earlier as “Mahmoud Darwish, voice of Palestine.” Here the headline is “controversial legacy.” This version also keeps a line the other cut: Issam Makhoul, a Palestinian member of the Israeli Knesset, saying he is our heart and our tongue.
Cite this item
"Poet Darwish leaves controversial legacy," Bangor Daily News, 13 August 2008. Covering Palestine archive, CP-2008-007. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-2008-007
Elsewhere in the archive
- Food, not bombsColumbia Daily Tribune · 16 January 2008 · the same year
- Palestinians mourn Israel’s anniversary as the ‘Nakba’The Day · 16 May 2008 · the same year
- Remembering the Nakba on Israel’s 60th anniversaryWisconsin State Journal · 16 May 2008 · the same year
This record is part of Covering Palestine, an archive of American and Anglophone newspaper clippings about Palestinians, 1812 to 2022. Researched and assembled by Maria Robles.
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