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Palestinians Turn Out to Lay Beloved Poet to Rest
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Darwish was born in the upper Galilee village of al-Birweh in 1941. When Israel was created in 1948, his family fled to Lebanon, later returning to Israel. He graduated high school in Israel and moved to the mixed Arab-Jewish city of Haifa.
Darwish spent most of his adult life abroad -- in Cairo, Tunis, Paris and Moscow -- before settling in Ramallah in 1995. He crafted the 1988 Declaration of Independence that was adopted by the Palestine Liberation Organization. In recent months, he had denounced factional fighting among Palestinians, especially between Hamas, which controls Gaza, and Abbas's Fatah, which dominates the West Bank.
In Ramallah on Wednesday, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was among dozens of dignitaries on hand to receive Darwish's body at the authority's headquarters.
"He was the master of the word and wisdom, the symbol who expressed our national feeling, our human condition, our declaration of independence," Abbas said.
Mohammed Batrawi, an author and a friend of Darwish's, said the poet had tried, through his verses, to give Palestinians wings to fly to a better reality.
"His poems were not the wings of a butterfly, but of a bee," he said. "Like a bee, the poems go to the flower to make honey. But he also knew how to sting when he was attacked. He wrote resistance poetry, but with a very human approach."
Special correspondent Samuel Sockol contributed to this report.
